Kaleidoscopic Visions by Tom Skinner

Album Notes by Piotr Orlov:

Popular sociology cliches notwithstanding, the middle years are a curious bridge to survey one’s life from. Especially for artists. The bank behind is a backlog of experience, for-better-or-worse perceptions of how the world works, unequal measures of laurels and regrets, plus a rolodex of dear ones (for the lucky) and lost ones (for all). The shore in front contains a shorter winding road (still loaded with possibilities if not quite as open-ended), informed by wisdom gained and failures seared, shadowed by mortality, responsibility and inevitability. Lots of water passes under this bridge of mid-life. For creative types—adept at listening to the tides, recognizing their flow as a circadian rhythm, reconciling the planet’s clock with their own—the view from this bridge has been known to inspire great art.

Upon the release of Kaleidoscopic Visions, the second album that Tom Skinner has made under his own name, the drummer-composer will be 45 years-old. Skinner is already in possession of an incredible career—two decades as a key member of London’s jazz community, including co-founding the mighty Sons of Kemet; in-demand collaborator to a who’s-who of famed electronic producers and noted rhythmalists; purveyor of his own left-of-center musical pursuits (see: Hello Skinny); and, most recently, a budding experimental-rock star (see: The Smile). Off-the-clock, Skinner is a life-long Londoner, husband and father, keeper of poly-generational sonic memories, a soulful creature attuned to old and new relationships.

The Kaleidoscopic Visions that form Skinner’s view from the bridge between his past and future take all these roles and details into account. Where on his bandleader debut, 2022’s star-studded quintet piece Voices of Bishara, Skinner used Abdul Wadud's 1978 solo cello masterpiece By Myself as inspiration for an album of post-session edits; Kaleidoscopic Visions leans into “more personal,” fully composed pieces, interpreted by his band’s improvised choices, a timeline of life reconciled in his creative subconscious.

Like classic LPs of yore, Kaleidoscopic Visions is composed of distinct but overlapping sonic strategies to narrate Skinner’s journey. On the entirely instrumental Side A, he orchestrates a gorgeous song-cycle, artfully illuminated by the live Bishara band—bassist Tom Herbert, cellist Kareem Dayes, plus Robert Stillman and Chelsea Carmichael on various woodwinds and reeds—plus the occasional electric guitar of Portishead’s Adrian Utley. Skinner says the floating often-backbeat-free music was composed by following his “instinct and intuition,” written mostly on guitar, an instrument that is secondary to him (“When I play it, I don’t really know what I’m doing”), but one he finds to be a “productive compositional tool.”

A meditative atmosphere encircles the dodecaphonic precision of his writing, refreshed by Stillman and Carmichael’s interwoven airy harmonies. Dayes’ cello and Herbert’s bass underpin the melodic figures, harkening somewhat to the “naturally flowing composites” sound of Bishara. Yet the music’s emotional intentions seem a world away from its predecessor, a product of listening less to outside inspiration, than to one’s internal insights. “Auster” is dedicated to the late novelist Paul Auster, whose words on life’s chance-based developments inform the album’s interpretive process (how, for instance, Stillman’s soprano saxophone illuminates a line Skinner wrote on the guitar). More poignant is “Margaret Anne,” a rhythmically taut piece honoring Skinner’s mother (very much alive), the former concert-piano prodigy Anne Shasby. She abandoned a promising career for her family, largely due to the misogyny of the classical music establishment’s glass ceiling. Yet according to Skinner, Anne also imparted upon him “the gift of music,” and claims her sensibilities, especially her ear for piano music, pervade his compositions. Lived experiences that shade this kaleidoscope’s palette.

The vocal features occupying Side B double-down on the album’s consideration of time, both literally and circumstantially. Most of all, “The Maxim,” Skinner’s collaboration with Meshell Ndegeocello. A dubby, spacious, nearly ten-minute incantation on human existence, addressing birth and death in one breath (“we are here, soon to return home”), the song frames blues-spiritual stanzas in an astral light, bringing the Grammy Award-winning singer-bassist’s (recently unstoppable) historical gaze to the album’s storyline. It also raises a full-circle moment for Skinner, whose album plays host to an artist he travelled to see at Glastonbury as a teenager in 1994, whom he’s now befriended and been playing with over the past year. (Imagine that feeling!) “I was asking quite a lot of her,” says Skinner of the long-distance back-and-forth that animated “The Maxim,” “and I feel what she’s done to that song is quite astounding.”

“Logue” is an abstract pastoral on which young South Carolina-based singer Contour (Khari Lucas) applies his heavenly tenor to a lush harmonic bed of winds, keys and strings, while Utley adds stunning distorted guitar work. The song feels like an ambient soul koan. Then comes the album’s denouement. Though younger than Skinner, keyboardist-vocalist-wordsmith Jonathan “Yaffra” Geyevu is also member of the London working-musicians community; and his perspective on the grind and often-self-inflicted dark side of living in the metropolis fuels the closing “See How They Run.” Delivered over a spare, minimalist track that Yaffra and Skinner constructed in the studio, the words sound like a resignation, “the time starts spinning back / this could be forever / could you check?”

It’s the kind of conscious wisecrack you might mutter quietly to dispel the self-reflection, walking off the bridge towards whatever happens next. A recognition of the moment’s resonance. Almost accidentally (but not really), Tom Skinner’s Kaleidoscopic Visions chronicles the importance of considering the view from the middle of one’s own life, taking stock alongside memories and family, heroes and friends new and old. Its beauty is not extreme but expert, outside of crisis but informed by it, a document of what the feelings, here and now, sound like.

International Anthem is a Chicago-born recording company that produces and promotes progressive media.

Founded in 2014, the IARC label has grown to embody a global community of like-minded artists, musicians, and cultural workers dedicated to craft as a means of discovering truth and celebrating humanity.

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