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Ghost Canyon

Title - Alone
Artist - Wayne Escoffery

For those unaware, in the summer of 2023, saxophonist and composer Wayne Escoffery found himself alone in a way that he’d never quite experienced before. He was away from home, on sabbatical in Europe with a month to himself between tours.

A long-term relationship had just ended, and he was confronted with the loss of friendships that he’d once valued. Worst of all, he’d suffered a broken finger that left him unable to play the saxophone for the first time since he’d picked up the horn in high school.

“Normally, my coping mechanism would be the saxophone,” Escoffery laments. “But even that wasn’t available to me for about nine weeks, so I just had to be alone in my thoughts.”

He made good use of this alone time, conceptualizing the music that makes up his striking and singular new album, Alone. What emerged from that solitude was an extended mood piece, an album unique in Escoffery’s typically wide-ranging catalogue for its sustained atmosphere of stark melancholy and searching introspection.

Due out August 30th, 2024, via Smoke Sessions Records, the music is breathtakingly interpreted by an all-star quartet featuring iconic bassist Ron Carter, drummer Carl Allen, and pianist Gerald Clayton.

1. Moments With You
2. Alone
3. Rapture
4. The Ice Queen
5. The Shadow Of Your Smile
6. Blues For D.P.
7. Stella For Starlight
8. Since I Fell For You

This wonderful recording opens on an aching yearn within Moments With You and then we get the more playful title track Alone and that is followed by the pleasing Rapture and the endearing The Ice Queen.

Along next is the sombre-toned The Shadow Of Your Smile which is itself backed by the more enigmatic hipsway that drives Blues For D.P., the album rounding out on the languishing Stella For Starlight, closing on the intensely sentimental Since I Fell For You.

Of the two bonus tracks (available on CD and digital releases only), “Stella by Starlight” is a recollection of a more tender kind, lingering on an entrancing vision from the past, dimming yet still vibrant. Closing the album, Buddy Johnson’s “Since I Fell for You” pares the band down to the duo of Escoffery and Clayton, painting the tune in austere hues of last-call sorrow.

Alone was conceived during a time of isolation, heartbreak, regret, and reflection, but the experience of the album is far richer even than that. In the end, “I was forced to reflect on life and what was most important to me,” Escoffery concludes. “The concept of this album grew out of that reflection.”

www.wayneescoffery.com

www.smokesessionsrecords.com





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