New Album: Mauricio Morales, Seven Days

Los Angeles-Based Bassist/Composer Mauricio Morales Wrote the Compositions for Seven Days as Self-Driven Challenge in a Week!

Featuring Saxophonist Edmar Colón, Guitarist Horace Bray, Trombonist Ido Meshulam, Pianist Luca Mendoza and Drummer Jongkuk “JK” Kim.

On its own merits, the music on Seven Days, Mauricio Morales’ latest album, speaks with a strong, persuasive creative voice. The respected bassist-composer-bandleader’s fourth album presents seven distinctive compositions for sextet, with sophisticated shifts in mood and musical structure. The music teems with intelligence as well as infectious melodic qualities, with deft, lushly harmonized lines for the front line of trombone, saxophone and guitar.

In a mode of decidedly modern jazz which also manages to be easy on the ear and heart, the music also benefits from bold, integrated playing and soloing by his young allies from both the east and west coasts–connections made when the Mexican Morales lived and studied in Boston before settling in his current adopted hometown of Los Angeles.

But beyond the gleam and energy of Seven Days are working process elements adding to the dramatic and conceptual back story. Morales composed this body of work—the result of a self-driven challenge to write seven tunes in as many days–while literally stuck in his native Mexico due to a mysterious Visa renewal snafu. Channeling his sense of alienation into the cathartic process of crafting the varied moods and cohesive suite of pieces led to a live performance in Los Angeles, and following the urging of his bandmates to create a recorded version of the work resulted in the document that is Seven Days, the engaging and dynamic album document, recorded entirely live over two days in the studio.

It would be a mistake, however, to view the album as a characteristic Mauricio Morales album. Creative restlessness is one of his character traits. As he comments, Seven Days is “definitely a piece of work that is very close to me, in a way that’s different to the work that I’ve released before, because of how it came to be. I’m excited about everything that I’m working on, and I will probably forget about it the moment I release it,” he laughs. Not likely.

Morales has been a rising force as player and bandleader/project-leader for the past several years, but his formative musical life goes back to his picking up the electric bass at 13 years old and the upright bass six years later. With the noted artist Tere Lojero as his mother and a music aficionado father to guide his interests, Morales discovered a passion for writing and manifesting his own music. Working on the east coast scene after heading to Berklee School of Music in 2012, Morales migrated westward to Los Angeles in 2018.

Morales launched what has become a diverse discography with the sometimes fusion-tinged tracks of 2021’s Luna, followed by the improvisation-leaning trio album Eclipse in 2022 and The Endless Ride last year, in 2023. The pop resonances and qualities on that album, including vocals, is in marked contrast with the almost entirely acoustic sextet context of Seven Days.

Of the variety between projects, Morales explains, “I want to explore different areas of my artistry. My first record had a very youthful essence to it. I wanted to put everything within seven songs–my writing, my playing, and everything else. And then the second record was the complete opposite because it is completely stripped down.” With The Endless Ride, he explains, “I wanted to also experiment with all my influences of when I was younger, because when I started playing music, I wasn’t really listening to jazz at all.”

Clearly, from the evidence of Seven Days, Morales is by now deeply steeped in jazz, as player and composer, and expertly equipped to create his own new vision within the genre. In terms of influences on his writing, especially in discernible “jazz” mode, he points to such prominent artists as Aaron Parks, Brad Mehldau, Brian Blade and especially Pat Metheny. “Even though his music can be complex,” Morales says of Metheny’s music, “there’s something very accessible about it that I’ve always resonated with since before I played jazz.”

For the Seven Days project, Morales had bold and empathetic company in the band gathered to realize his vision—saxophonist Edmar Colón, guitarist Horace Bray, trombonist Ido Meshulam, pianist Luca Mendoza and dynamo drummer Jongkuk “JK” Kim. The seven tracks of Seven Days follow a diverse course of musical and emotional impressions, starting with the wary optimism of “Monday: Wishful Thinking,” with a prime example of Morales powers as soloist, and continuing with the restrained but driving force of “Tuesday: Under the Magic Tree.” The more balladic ambience of “Wednesday: The Wanderer” and “Thursday: Solitude” segues into the roiling energy of “Friday: A Ghostly Vision” (showcasing piano and guitar) and “Sunday: The Paradox” follows a bittersweet but forward-motion pulse, featuring tenor sax and trombone in the solo spotlight.

Morales explains that one key track–and catalyst moment–along his creative path in the conceptual phase of the project, came with “Saturday: A Self-made Prison.” “That is where it is the most clear that I was starting to lose it,” he says, in retrospect. “It felt like at this point everything I was coming up with was essentially the same song that I had written the previous days. I had so many overwhelming thoughts in my head that were restricting the creative flow. In the end I decided to write whatever ideas came up without thinking about it and it ended up sounding completely different to all the other songs. I figured I’d just put that sense of overload into music.” Let it be what it will.

“And then I did Sunday,” Morales says, “and I thought ‘I’m done–seven days in a week. That’s perfect. I’m not gonna touch it. That was a good exercise. Maybe I’ll do it again another time, but for now, I can’t write anymore.’”

Fortunately, it has seen the recorded light of day for all to hear, and Seven Days adds one more layer to Morales’ steadily evolving artistic identity and catalogue. “I want not only the record itself to be cohesive on its own,” he comments, “I want it to be cohesive as well with my previous work. There are connections within all of them.”

As a multi-tasking instrumentalist, composer, bandleader and general-purpose idea generator behind his projects, Morales views Seven Days and his albums in a highly personal way. He asserts that “a very specific moment in my life is printed in this music because it’s really, truly uncompromised. It is my voice in all of it, in wherever you see it.”

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