Bells On Sand Gerald Clayton

• 1Water's Edge06:39
• 2Elegia01:17
• 3Damunt de tu Només les Flors03:50
• 4My Ideal 103:39
• 5That Roy02:16
• 6Rip03:09
• 7Just A Dream05:29
• 8My Ideal 205:25
• 9Peace Invocation08:00
• 10There Is Music Where You're Going My Friends03:19
• Total Runtime43:03

Info for Bells On Sand

Six-time GRAMMY nominated artist Gerald Clayton returns with Bells On Sand, his ravishing second album for Blue Note Records. Recorded at Sam First in Los Angeles and Santa Barbara Sound Design, the album features eleven tracks of fresh orchestration and original music with contributions from mentor Charles Lloyd on saxophone, father John Clayton on bass, longtime friend and peer Justin Brown on drums, and new collaborator MARO on vocals. Together, they explore the impact and abstraction of time.

“Each musician on the record represents a different aspect of the axis of time and its shifting sands,” says the acclaimed pianist-composer. “My father and Charles Lloyd, who has been a mentor figure to me, reflect new permutations of my past, and the lineage of elders who have shaped my development; Justin Brown, being my contemporary and musical brother, represents my present; and MARO represents the future—she is part of the next generation, and points to a brand new collaboration.”

Unadorned intimacy shapes the music. Clayton’s desire to share more of himself with listeners and fellow artists wields heady influence over his musical choices and his thoughtful curation of the entire album. But most striking is his ability to create quiet chambers for all four artists to be themselves. Bells On Sand opens in pensive resonance with “Water’s Edge.” The slow-peeling composition first spotlights Clayton’s relationship with John’s arco, tapered and doleful, before Brown transforms the duo into a trio. Each original tune, as well as Whiting and Chase’s “My Ideal,” honors Clayton’s journey through solitude in 2020. Both takes of “My Ideal”—two of three solo gestures—capture entirely different emotional arcs, bending in and out of time, equal in their honesty. For Clayton, their presence on the recording feels integral.

“By the water, I experienced subtle environmental shifts,” he says. “Songs I would sing, play or write were but an expression of a particular shape in the sand at that moment. Any meaning behind what I created came from viewing that creation over a temporal landscape. A song felt a certain way on a certain day, and the next day would feel and function completely differently.”

For the past decade, music from Catalan composer Federico Mompou has possessed Clayton, in listening and practice. Beauty and precision of those tenderly unfolding melodies would follow the bicoastal artist from his shared apartment in Harlem to his airy one bedroom in West LA. Despite his spending so much time with the material, Bells On Sand documents Clayton’s first recording of Mompou’s music, offering lush, understated interpretations of “Elegia,” “Damunt de tu Només les Flors” and “Paisajes II. El Lago.”

“Mompou’s music is laid out so masterfully, so economical in the spread of his voicings, that it feels a bit unnecessary to add anything original to it,” says Clayton. “My attempts at composing melodies over his harmonies, for instance, felt underwhelming. I’d inevitably return to what he’d written.” Though his treatment of Mompou’s works is true to the composer’s intention, Clayton sought textural orchestration outside their traditional context: electric piano, vibraphone, arco bass, drums and percussion. Coming from a maternal family of bell makers, Mompou becomes a grounding symbol for Bells On Sand, but the title also signals something less explicit yet entirely universal.

“I like thinking of the bell as the human voice,” says Clayton, “the song within us as well as the message—the feeling, the emotion—behind this song that we sing. Sand references the ever-changing landscape, the shifting nature of the ground we stand on. We ring our bells and sing our songs while the sands underneath us move. We’re always in flux, shaped by nature’s elements: sun and moon, water and wind.”

Similar textures appear on “That Roy” and “Rip,” duo pieces between Clayton and Brown. He composed the former in tribute to the recently departed Roy Hargrove—an unparalleled mentor and friend from Clayton’s early years in New York—aligning with themes of loss and gratitude; the latter serves, in part, as a vessel for Brown’s sensitive and near meditative development. “The melody is just this shape swimming around, stuck in one place,” says Clayton. “It never really breaks free. Justin understood the truth and tension of that concept—I didn’t really have to give him any direction. He just gets it.”

One pearl Clayton drops before young pianists is “Don’t sing what you play, play what you sing.” Vocalizing informs his method for approaching composed melodies and improvising new ones. The lyricism listeners have come to cherish in his music takes frank form on “Just a Dream.” With almost whispered tenderness, MARO delivers Clayton’s song—music and lyrics—about love and parenthood.

Bells On Sand culminates in sprawling duo with Lloyd on “Invocation for Peace.” The younger Blue Note artist has been a relative fixture on the elder’s tour schedule since 2013. Together, they’ve developed deep empathy and intuition for each other’s musical tendencies and spontaneous turns. Ending on a note of divinity and soul-searched resolve, Jeff Clayton’s “There is Music Where You’re Going My Friends” is a hymn to love and hope, recorded in memory of his beloved uncle.

“I hope these reflections encourage people to step back and recognize that our testaments—songs, stories, intentions—lay atop an ever-shifting landscape,” says Clayton. “To look at things from this zoomed-out perspective might allow for a union between past, present, and future. It might allow us to embrace the totality of our life experience. That we may consider the lessons from our past when living the present moment in a way that serves the future.”

Gerald Clayton, piano, organ (on track 5) Fender Rhodes (on track 5), vibraphone (on tracks 5, 6)
John Clayton, bass (on tracks 1, 2, 3)
Justin Brown, drums (on tracks 1, 3, 5, 6)
MARO, vocals (on tracks 3, 7)
Charles Lloyd, saxophone (on track 9)

Gerald Clayton
Over the course of eight years, with three albums as a leader, several studio projects as a sideman, and countless worldwide performances, pianist and composer Gerald Clayton has established himself as a leading figure in the up-and-coming generation of jazz artists who are fluent in the range of styles that make up today´s jazz lexicon. Hailed by The New York Times for his "huge, authoritative presence," Clayton is well on his way toward etching his own enduring mark in the long and rich tradition of jazz. Never has this been more apparent than in Life Forum, his latest recording on Concord Jazz and his most ambitious project to date.

Born in the Netherlands in 1984 and raised in Southern California, Clayton took his first piano lessons before age seven with the full support and encouragement of his father, the acclaimed jazz bassist, composer and bandleader, John Clayton. Music was a central part of his life from as long as he can remember and it became a lifetime commitment very early on:

"I was in the third grade, and there was a talent show where I played a boogie-woogie piece that my dad had written for me," he recalls. "It was the first time that I played for an audience where I felt that people were really moved by something that I had just played. I remember thinking, ´Yep, this is what I´ll be doing for the rest of my life.´"

Clayton attended the L.A. County High School for the Arts and then enrolled at the USC Thornton School of Music. In the midst of his third year at USC, he temporarily relocated to New York to study at the Manhattan School of Music. "I knew I was eventually going to move to New York," he says, "so I thought it would be a good idea to experience the city for a year as a student." After returning to L.A. for a year and a half to finish his degree, he moved back to New York permanently.

In 2006, Gerald received the second place prize in the prestigious Thelonius Monk Institute of Jazz Piano Competition. Around that time, he was introduced to trumpeter Roy Hargrove when they were both featured artists at a performance of the Henry Mancini Orchestra. "We were backstage during one of the rehearsals, and we started playing some duets," recalls Clayton. "After that I would see him from time to time in New York, and he would say, ´Great that you´re in New York now. I´ll call you.´ That was how things started."

The association resulted in three years of extensive touring with Hargrove between 2006 and 2009, and appearances on Hargrove´s recordings, Earfood (2008) and Emergence (2009). Gerald also appeared on recordings by several other artists, such as Diana Krall, Ambrose Akinmusire, Kendrick Scott, Melissa Morgan, Terell Stafford & Dick Oatts, and more recently Michael Rodriguez, Dayna Stephens, Terri Lyne Carrington, and the Clayton Brothers Quintet, led by his father and his uncle, saxophonist Jeff Clayton. Gerald continues to perform regularly with the Clayton Brothers.

In 2009, he released Two Shade, his debut album as a leader, with bassist Joe Sanders and drummer Justin Brown. Sanders and Brown have remained with him for his two subsequent records. It was from this recording that Gerald received a 2010 Grammy nomination in the category of ´Best Improvised Jazz Solo´ for his rendition of Cole Porter´s "All of You."

In 2011, Gerald received a second Grammy nomination, this time for ´Best Jazz Instrumental Composition´, for his piece "Battle Circle" featured on the Clayton Brothers recording, The New Song and Dance.

The same year, Clayton released his second album, Bond: The Paris Sessions. While the expectations may have been high in the aftermath of the acclaimed debut album, Clayton recalls the album coming together organically and with a minimum of stress. "You hear people talk about the curse of the sophomore album, but recording that album – and the whole process leading up to it – was very natural for us as a trio. We´d been touring a great deal at the time and spending a lot of time together, so going into the studio and catching that vibe was completely natural." Bond received a Grammy nomination, Gerald´s third, in 2012 for ´Best Jazz Instrumental Album´.

Life Forum, set for release in April 2013, "might be the most ambitious album yet," states Clayton. "Conceptualizing the music for a group of eight musicians was a new experience for me, and it required more preparation than I was accustomed to. With the addition of lyrics to three of the tunes, as well as some other post-production work, this project has been a departure from my previous two. I´m doing more writing now than I´ve ever done before, and working with Ben Wendel, who produced the record, was very helpful. I really admire his playing and his writing. He and I got together prior to the sessions to talk about the music and map out what I needed to do to get it recorded. In that sense, it was more demanding than the previous records."

This album contains no booklet.