Blues In Blueprint

With Blues in Blueprint, bassist and composer Clovis Nicolas delivers his fifth album for Sunnyside Records and one of his most focused artistic statements to date. Framed by the subtitle "12 Variations on the Blues," the album explores the blues not as a fixed form, but as a living blueprint-flexible, expansive, and deeply woven into the DNA of jazz.For this project, Nicolas set himself a clear challenge: to record an entire program of blues and blues-related repertoire while drawing from a wide range of jazz eras, grooves, and formal approaches. The result is a cohesive yet adventurous journey, revealing the blues as both a historical foundation and an endlessly renewable source of expression.To bring this vision to life, Nicolas assembled an exceptional trio featuring Larry Goldings, heard here in a rare and welcome appearance on acoustic piano, and the masterful Carl Allen on drums. Recorded in New York and engineered by the legendary James Farber, the trio plays with deep rapport, elegance, and rhythmic authority throughout.The repertoire spans an unusually broad terrain. Traditional material such as "Old Stack O'Lee Blues," famously associated with Sidney Bechet, sits alongside modern classics by Duke Ellington, Ornette Coleman, Carla Bley, and Wes Montgomery, as well as a 19th-century hymn to close the album. Each selection reveals a different structural or emotional facet of the blues, from stop-time lyricism and bebop sophistication to free interplay and gospel-tinged introspection.Nicolas's original compositions are central to the album's identity. Pieces like "Hutch," "The Bass Speaks," and "Groovy Globy" reimagine blues forms through unconventional structures, contrapuntal writing, and fresh harmonic language, highlighting Nicolas's distinctive voice as both composer and bassist. His warm, vocal tone and melodic approach-particularly evident on "Abide with Me"-anchor the trio with quiet authority and emotional depth.Highlights abound: Goldings' lyrical imagination and harmonic elegance, Allen's refined swing and coloristic mastery (especially on brushes), and the trio's collective ease across styles-from R&B-inflected grooves on "Lawns" to open, free-form dialogue on Ornette Coleman's "Ramblin'," one of the album's most striking moments of spontaneous interaction.Blues in Blueprint is ultimately a meditation on continuity and reinvention. Rooted firmly in tradition yet forward-looking in spirit, the album presents the blues as a timeless framework-one that continues to inspire new shapes, new voices, and new stories. With Goldings and Allen at his side, Clovis Nicolas offers a blues album that is at once respectful, personal, and unmistakably contemporary.