When trumpeter/composer Terell Stafford brought his quartet to the Village Vanguard in July of 2020, the Victor Lewis composition Between Two Worlds took on a profound resonance.

It was easy to understand why from just one glance out into the audience – or lack thereof. This was the height of the pandemic, and the iconic room was empty save for four camera people broadcasting to an equally isolated livestream audience, his band mates hidden behind face masks.

“It really impacted me emotionally and spiritually,” the trumpeter recalls. “Driving into an empty city with no traffic to make music at a time when the world was shut down was mind blowing to me.”

That purgatorial summer is still fresh in all of our minds; months spent hovering between sickness and health, work and stasis, confinement and cautious freedom. The experience led Stafford to ponder the many ways that his life and career have necessitated juggling the demands of two different worlds at once.

Stafford’s stunning new album, Between Two Worlds, is his emotional and wide-ranging response, featuring an all-star band of longtime collaborators: saxophonist Tim Warfield, pianist Bruce Barth, bassist David Wong, drummer Johnathan Blake, and percussionist Alex Acuña.

Due out August 18th, 2023 via Le Coq Records, Between Two Worlds vividly depicts the many parallel lives Stafford has managed to balance. There’s the age-old dilemma of domestic versus professional life, for one. Stafford is a husband and father with a young daughter at home whose success translates into extended stints on the road.

As devastating as the pandemic was to him as an artist, it offered a welcome opportunity to reconnect with his loved ones on a profound level.

1. Between Two Worlds
2. Great Is Thy Faithfulness
3. Mi a Mia
4. Two Hearts As One
5. Room 208
6. Blood Count
7. Manaus at Dusk
8. You Taught My Heart To Sing
9. Wruth’s Blues

Opening on the vibrant Between Two Worlds and the rhythmically enchanting musical escape within Great Is Thy Faithfulness, Stafford and company next bring us the gently fervent Mi a Mia, the ornate gossamer of the aching ballad Two Hearts As One, and then comes the spirited Room 208.

One of my own personal favorites from this splendid new album is along next in the form of the languishing Blood Count and that is itself backed by the finger-snapping, foot-tapping Manaus at Dusk, the new recording rounding out with the sweepingly glamorous ballad You Taught My Heart To Sing, coming to a close on the enthusiastic Wruth’s Blues.

“I got to know my family,” Stafford says frankly. “I got two years to really get to know my daughter and to establish a real relationship. Before the pandemic working was just part of my DNA. I would just accept everything and make it work. Now I make sure that everything I say ‘yes’ to benefits my family in some way.”

Then there are the myriad ways in which Stafford’s career forces him to play dual roles: leader and sideman, musician and educator – and within the latter, as Chair of Instrumental Studies and Director of Jazz Studies at Temple University, it means splitting the difference between teacher and administrator.

The identities only multiply once you delve deeper into his musical life. Jazz and classical have been parallel disciplines since he picked up the trumpet, sometimes co-existing uneasily.

Zoom into the jazz realm alone, and he’s performed in a variety of styles. At the time he was putting the finishing touches on Between Two Worlds, Stafford had recently performed with bebop master Charles McPherson and recorded with Latin jazz bassist Carlos Henriquez – just one example of the stylistic shifts Stafford makes on a regular basis.

Between Two Worlds is the result of Stafford’s reexamination of these conundrums, and it speaks to his gifts as a leader that he’s able to reconcile so many of them in such spirited fashion. It helps that he’s joined by several musicians with whom he shares deep and longstanding relationships: Warfield is the Bird to his Diz, while Barth is a constant in Stafford’s bands and Wong shares the stage with him every Monday as part of the renowned Vanguard Jazz Orchestra.

All three are also faculty members at Temple. Blake is one of the first drummers that Stafford ever played with in Philly. Stafford refers to all of them, not lightly, as “family.”

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