Joel Ross, Gospel Music Review

Joel Ross Aligns the Collective on Gospel Music: Where Rhythm Becomes Shared Language

By Nolan DeBuke

In Gospel Music (Blue Note), vibraphonist and composer Joel Ross isn’t chasing gospel as a soundbite, a harmony trick, or a Sunday-morning costume change. He’s chasing feel. Deep feel. The kind that lives in the body of heritage before it ever hits the lens of today’s music. This record moves like a shared steady internal current that never breaks, even as the surface shifts from modal hypnosis to swing to modern jazz groove architecture.

That’s the key to understanding the project as a whole. Gospel Music is a rhythm album in disguise. A concept record powered not by sermons or scripture, but by time-feel, pocket, and collective agreement.

Ross’s band plays together, as they lock into an underlying motion. Tempos change, grooves flip, meters stretch, but the engine stays steady. You hear it in the way the eighth notes sit. You feel it in how the groove relates to the pulse. There’s a shared internal compass guiding every track, and once you catch it, the whole album snaps into focus.

If this album feels spiritual, and it does, it’s not because of overt gospel harmony or choir-ready cadences. The spirit lives in the rhythm lineage of church rhythm, blues time, and R&B pocket. Modern jazz phrasing. It’s all in there, filtered through a contemporary lens that understands where the feel comes from without reenacting it.

This is gospel by transmission, not imitation. The band brings church into the room the same way jazz always has: through spirit, community, and groove that carries meaning. When a figure cycles long enough to hypnotize you. When a pulse refuses to rush or sag. When everybody agrees exactly where the pocket lives, not just where it lands. That’s the shout. That’s the testimony.

An ensemble that breathes together, plays together. One of the most impressive things about Gospel Music is how dialed in the ensemble feels across the entire record. This is a band that’s locked into a common center while still leaving room to bend, stretch, and breathe. The core ensemble is alto saxophonist Josh Johnson, tenor saxophonist Maria Grand, pianist Jeremy Corren, bassist Kanoa Mendenhall, and drummer Jeremy Dutton.

Take the opener, “Wisdom Is Eternal (For Barry Harris).” Ross sets the tone immediately: modal, repetitive, quietly hypnotic. The vibraphone announces a theme of rhythmic current. His improvisation grows organically out of the groove, blurring the line between written material and spontaneous motion. The feel is contemporary with hip-hop-adjacent hues from Dutton, but the discipline underneath it is old-school serious.

“Trinity (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit)” shifts the surface feel as it is bass-led, Latin-tinged, and harmonically layered in a new way. However, the internal logic doesn’t change. Ross’s solo here is all about rhythm, locking horns with the bass and drums, leaning into the pocket rather than floating above it. This band knows where the power lives, and they stay there.

Even when the album leans into swing, like on “Hostile,” the philosophy holds. The track opens stripped down with vibes and drums conversing before the full band enters, bringing darker harmonic weight and forward momentum. Ascending melodic cells build suspense, and when the solos hit, they ride the groove instead of breaking it open. Ross’s articulation stays clean and aggressive, right at the front edge of the beat, while the drums drive the whole thing like a tuned engine.

On “Nevertheless,” the rhythmic sophistication gets deeper. Middle Eastern tonal colors, metric modulation, complex rhythmic layers,  and still, it swings. Ross solos first, active and restless, but grounded. Complexity never becomes abstraction. The feel never gets sacrificed at the altar of cleverness.

Leadership without spotlight is another spiritual asset. By the end of Gospel Music, it’s obvious that Ross’s leadership isn’t about dominating the frame. It’s about setting conditions.

He leads through concept, aligning the players around a shared energy, and then getting out of the way. Rhythm comes first. Interaction comes second. Notes follow. The vibraphone is central, sure, but not because it’s featured the most. It’s because Ross uses it as a clarifying instrument, sharpening the ensemble’s sense of time and motion through his compositions and playing.

This is leadership by listening. By trust. By asking the band to commit to a common rhythmic truth and letting everything else grow from there. That approach gives the album its cohesion. Seventeen tracks, over seventy-eight minutes, and the record never feels scattered. Everything develops in layers of texture on texture, groove on groove, and with solos woven into the fabric instead of pasted on top.

Gospel Music doesn’t preach. It moves. It understands gospel not as a style to quote, but as a cultural force carried forward through rhythm, feel, and collective intention. It honors lineage without reenactment. It values pocket over polish, connection over display. And it presents Joel Ross as a vibraphonist, composer, and a leader who knows how to align a band around something deeper than notes on a page.