The open-minded, in-demand bassist Thomas Morgan takes an unforeseen and ambitious path in his highly conceptual debut as a leader, Around You is a Forest. At once intimate and spellbinding, the album features one solo performance and eight duets with a distinguished lineup of guests. What makes this project so remarkable is Morgan’s invention of WOODS—a programmed virtual string instrument that fuses characteristics of West African lute-harps, Asian zithers, cimbalom, and marimba. He pioneers this technique with sophistication and restraint, providing exotic yet organic foundations that inspire his collaborators to become co-narrators in sound.

The title track opens the album with Morgan alone, offering a breathtaking bass meditation that leads us into a vividly imagined forest. His resonant tone paints an enchanted landscape from which one has no desire to return. “Eddies”, featuring drummer Dan Weiss on tabla, is a rhythmic delight evoking Afrobeat and electronic music; its circular motion mirrors the flow of water around rocks in a stream.

“Dream Sequence”, with keyboardist Craig Taborn, unfolds like an experimental film score, layered in eerie dual-synth polyphony. “In the Dark” welcomes composer Henry Threadgill into a noir-ish soundscape of restless mystery, his flute and bass flute intertwining with Morgan’s textures. The 16-minute “Through the Trees”, with the resourceful drummer Gerald Cleaver adding color and vibration behind the drum kit, explores shifting loops and hazy atmospherics, building from enigmatic reverie to thunderous intensity. On “Murmuration”, saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins floats in and out of focus through eight layered lines above a ngoni-like texture. This is the closest to jazz you can get—even if sometimes it sounds like an off-beat chorale of sorts.

Among the album’s highlights are “Assembly of Beings” and “Rising From the West”. The former, featuring trumpet master Ambrose Akinmusire, enchants with beautifully intoned notes, terse staccatos, and poignant outbursts over a drone-inflected steel-string zither tapestry. The latter, a luminous collaboration with guitarist Bill Frisell, takes us to another dimension within its spacious atmosphere. Melodious guitar fillings are discreetly shaken by electric distortion at some point, in a genuine communion between New York-based musicians who grew up in the West Coast. The album closes gracefully with “Here”, a poetic coda featuring Gary Snyder reciting his own verse in a calm, transfixing voice.

Still absorbing its many layers, I have no doubt Around You is a Forest is the work of a visionary—distinct, immersive, and profoundly original. Each piece feels self-contained yet essential to the whole. Traditionalists may balk, but this may well be the year’s most imaginative and best debut.

A fixture of New York City’s jazz and free improv circles for over 25 years, Thomas Morgan is an upright bass player and composer by trade, but a hacker at heart. He stated as such in a guest essay published on the Substack newsletter Transitional Technology, contextualizing his debut album Around You Is A Forest, likening jazz to a kind of “musical hacking”; same principle, different medium: “Whatever is shared, discovered, or invented has the potential to be applied in the very same moment or soon after,” he said. This album’s feedback loop is driven not by the traditional jazz bass playing Morgan is known for, but rather WOODS: a self-made virtual string instrument that produces sounds that are melodically lean, yet texturally tantalizing; West African lute-harp, Central/Eastern European cimbalom, zither, and marimba re-scrambled into proto-ambient ASMR. Each composition courses with the punkish, giddy energy of the jazz hackathon, and more importantly, the spontaneous creative breakthrough. Hearing Morgan deploy his strange machine, featuring a stacked guest roster that includes Bill Frisell, Ambrose Akinmusire, Henry Threadgill, Gerald Cleaver, and others, runs amok, updating and evolving the algorithm as the mood dictates—it’s a glorious mind-melt.

Thomas Morgan is an in-demand American jazz bassist but, for his debut as a leader, he plays WOODS a virtual instrument he designed using SuperCollider software which emulates pan-global string instruments. Morgan calls upon an impressive line-up including trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire, drummer Gerald Cleaver, and Henry Threadgill on flutes, for a series of duets and it works like a charm. With Bill Frisell, he approximates a donso ngoni while the guitarist weaves acoustic webs smeared with electric swells. A meeting with 95 year old Beat poet and Zen prophet Gary Snyder matches suitably koto-like cascades with rich and unhurried spoken meditations. "Why are we here?, asks Snyder. To make and appreciate art like this, of course.