Bells On Sand (2022)/ Clayton, Gerald

Pianist and composer Gerald Clayton has delivered one of this year’s most gorgeous albums with Bells on Sand, an artful look at the vicissitudes of time, rendered with a lean cast performing solo, duo, or trio tracks. This goes in a completely different direction than Clayton’s Blue Note debut, Happening: Live at the Village Vanguard, covered on these pages, when he was swinging through a set of originals and standards with a formidable quintet. Here, joining the leader, are his dad, the near-legendary John Clayton on bass, a longtime friend and peer, drummer Justin Brown, his mentor, saxophonist Charles Lloyd, on just one track, and emerging vocalist MARO, who appears twice. Essentially, this is calm, dreamy music that one can easily get lost in that becomes increasingly spiritual as the evolves, symbolic even in terms of the accompanying musicians with his dad and Lloyd representing the elders, Brown the present, and MARO the future. (Glide magazine)|