Randy Napoleon, Waking Dream Review

Randy Napoleon, Waking Dream: The Music of Gregg Hill and Randy Napoleon

by Ferell Aubre

On Waking Dream: The Music of Gregg Hill and Randy Napoleon, five distinct guitar voices form the front line of a jazz ensemble built from the compositions of Gregg Hill and Randy Napoleon. Their writing presents the guitars as a fluid collective against the steady foundation of a classic rhythm section, with the five voices moving between melody, harmony, counterpoint, and shimmering chordal color. Within that framework, the album becomes an exploration of collaborative language where composition, arrangement, and improvisation intersect.

Bringing that concept to life requires an ensemble capable of precision and flexibility. Napoleon joins fellow guitarists Luke Sittard, Chris Minami, Jocelyn Gould, and Ben Turner, while pianist Rick Roe, bassist Rodney Whitaker, and drummer Quincy Davis provide the rhythmic and harmonic foundation. Together, they form a band where the guitars operate in textures from solo chord melodies to interlocking tutti sections. The guitar players shift between lead lines, inner harmonies, and rhythmic textures in a manner that recalls the coordinated movement of a small horn section. In this sense, Napoleon’s arrangements of all the compositions distribute the musical material across the five guitars like a five-horn ensemble.

Writing effectively for five guitars presents a unique compositional challenge. With each instrument occupying a similar sonic range, the risk of harmonic density is always present. Hill and Napoleon’s writing avoids that congestion by carefully distributing musical roles across the musical setting, allowing individual guitars to occupy distinct registers while the rhythm section provides clarity and forward motion. Hill’s compositions provide unique structural clarity that makes the five-guitar format effective, favoring interesting harmonic movement and clearly defined melodic lines that interact with expanding contrapuntal textures.

The ensemble’s design becomes especially clear on the album’s title track, “Waking Dream” (Gregg Hill). The guitars enter not as a wall of sound but as a layered conversation, with stacked harmonic structures and counterpoint lines moving logically across the five players rather than settling into block chords. As the arrangement unfolds, those roles shift subtly, with melodic fragments passing between players while the remaining guitars fill the harmonic space with gently voiced chords. Beneath the front line, Whitaker’s bass anchors the harmony with warm, resonant lines while Roe and Davis shape the rhythmic flow with understated precision. The result feels less like a traditional guitar feature and more like a chamber ensemble in motion, each voice contributing to a constantly evolving texture.

Throughout the album, the rhythm section plays an essential stabilizing role. Whitaker’s bass provides a clear harmonic center, Roe’s piano alternately reinforces and reframes the guitar voicings, and Davis brings a light yet propulsive rhythmic touch that allows the layered textures to breathe. Against that foundation, the guitars are free to move fluidly through the arrangements, sometimes acting as a unified section, other times dissolving into smaller conversational groupings. The album’s opening track, “Super Moon” (Randy Napoleon), sets that balance immediately, with Napoleon’s composition introducing the ensemble through gently layered guitar voicings that gradually expand into a fuller rhythmic conversation.

That sense of unity reflects another defining element of the project, as several of the guitarists featured on Waking Dream are former students of Napoleon. The guitar chemistry is building on a musical dialogue that began in mentorship and now unfolds through the ensemble’s collaborative interplay. What once took shape in lessons and rehearsal rooms now continues on the bandstand.

That shared background lends the guitar section a natural cohesion. The players move easily between lead lines, harmonic support, and textural color, knowing one another’s phrasing in tutti section and flowing with ease with common musical vocabulary during improvisational features. Regardless of the role, the guitars respond to one another with a kind of attentive listening that reinforces the album’s collaborative spirit.

Within Hill and Napoleon’s compositions, this cohesive relationship becomes part of the music’s fabric. The Successive compositional setting offered by the two composers plays like chapters in an unfolding conversation. The layered writing gives many examples of the colors and active interaction possible between five guitarists. Across the album, the guitars overlap in fluid counterpoint, as heard in “Two Thoughts” (Randy Napoleon), where Napoleon’s composition moves between paired guitar voices before expanding into fuller ensemble punctuation.

In “Jo Jo Jo” (Gregg Hill), the five guitars capture Hill’s composition of shifting textures that creatively move from chord-supported melodies to multi-voice counterpoints. Lines weave around one another, briefly converging before separating again, creating moments where the boundary between accompaniment and solo dissolves entirely. These passages capture the spirit of the project most clearly: an ensemble shaped by composition and playing together.

Waking Dream: The Music of Gregg Hill and Randy Napoleon ultimately brings the jazz catalog an unusual guitar project of thoughtful compositions brought to life by an ensemble identity of guitar textures. Through Hill and Napoleon’s writing for five distinct guitar voices, grounded by a responsive rhythm section, the music creates a setting where composition, arrangement, and improvisation reinforce one another.