Chris Potter, Alive With Ghosts Today Review

Chris Potter’s Alive With Ghosts Today: The Shape of Collective Motion

by Nolan DeBuke

Chris Potter’s Alive With Ghosts Today unfolds as a jazz record that mixes chamber ensemble lines with fully engaged contemporary small group agility. Potter surrounds his tenor and soprano saxophones with an unusually orchestral group of Bill Frisell on guitar, Sara Caswell on violin, Rane Moore on clarinet, Zekkereya El-magharbel on trombone, Burniss Travis on bass, and Nate Smith on drums. The ensemble behaves as a traditional front-line-and-rhythm-section roles with American classical overtones. Rubato chorales open into groove-centered sections, independent lines continue threading underneath the melodies, and solos grow from the same rhythmic material already circulating through the ensemble. Written passages and improvised phrases keep arriving with the same rhythmic shape and momentum.

The opening “Alive With Ghosts Today 1” introduces that coloration of chamber jazz. Frisell’s lightly effected guitar voicings hang in space while Caswell’s violin and Potter’s saxophone move through a slow rubato melody. The ballad introduction plays with pulse. Smith answers with cymbal swells, and Travis keeps the harmony grounded with long, supportive tones underneath the shifting upper voices. As clarinet, strings, and guitar begin circling around Potter’s line, the ensemble gradually creates overlapping movement and harmonic tension and release passages.

“Osawatomie Brown” moves the album onto contemporary jazz rhythmic ground. Travis introduces the groove with a short repeating figure before Smith locks into a straight-eighth feel with a deep backbeat and constant sixteenth-note motion. Potter spreads the melody across the ensemble: El-magharbel’s trombone moves through the groove with counterpoint and hits. Moore’s clarinet comes from the lower register with dark winding lines. Frisell colors the harmony with rotary effects, delay, and chord fragments that support and answer the horns. The melody stays simple and riff-based, the arrangement keeps shifting internally through rhythmic augmentation, call-and-response figures, and overlapping ensemble movement.

Potter’s solo on the track grows directly out of that rhythmic framework of the composition. He begins low on the horn with warm, resonant phrases spaced clearly against the groove before expanding the rhythm and pushing upward into repeated upper-register passages. His lines build to cries filled with blues inflection and overtone grit. Smith tracks and catches Potter’s accents and phrase endings for added impact. The ensemble gradually layers backgrounds around Potter as strings swell, clarinet lines connect the harmony, and brass figures answer from the side of the texture. When Potter lands on the sustained altissimo note that closes his solo, the ensemble transitions into a beautifully written interlude.

That sense of continuous development shapes the album’s overall path. “The Heavens In Scarlet” moves from slow-moving chorale writing into a syncopated funk groove without losing the inner motion of the ensemble. Caswell’s strings slide through suspensions while Potter stretches polyrhythmic phrases across the beat, leaning on accents to keep the groove audible between the two rhythms. Frisell approaches the space differently. Where Potter builds momentum through rhythmic density and articulation, Frisell lets chord voicings ring outward, using delay trails, bent notes, and broken chord figures to connect to the pulse.

“Sister Annie” carries direct groove playing. Travis and Smith settle into a contemporary jazz funk pulse while Potter’s melodies move with motifs that repeatedly turn at slightly different rhythmic angles. The ensemble backgrounds never flatten into pads. Clarinet, trombone, strings, and guitar keep peeling away from the main groove in separate moving lines. The lines sometimes converging into harmonic tutti figures, sometimes drifting outward into layered counterpoint around the soloists. Potter’s solo climbs through the horn in rhythmic sequences that keep changing shape through articulation as legato phrases suddenly shift by accented staccato attacks before moving into a bop-inspired figure. The ensemble opens outward into a layered soli section where every voice remains distinct inside the larger texture thanks to Potter’s strong writing skills.

On “This Earth Would Have No Charms For Me,” Frisell’s clean pick attack and broken chord patterns keep the ballad quietly moving underneath the melody. Caswell enters with sustained violin tones that widen at the top through light vibrato before stretching into lyrical ascending phrases of her own. The harmony itself stays relatively plainspoken; much of the color comes from how the ensemble layers around it. Strings swell in and out behind Potter’s melody, clarinet lines weave through the middle register, and Smith shifts from cymbal color to soft rhythmic punctuations that gently redirect the phrasing underneath the soloists.

“Into Africa” is an example of Potter’s compositional approach. The track grows from a single rhythmic cell first introduced during Potter’s opening cadenza-like phrases. Once Smith, Travis, and Frisell establish the groove, that figure keeps reappearing in different forms across the ensemble. With clarinet restatements, staccato tutti ensemble punches, layered rhythmic counterpoint figures, call and responses. Potter’s solo lines also carry the energy and shape of the composition’s theme. Smith’s drum feature remains tied to the composition’s core material. Smith moves across cymbals, toms, and snare with remarkable dynamic control, making each attack audible, making the rhythmic thread easy to follow.

Later in the suite, “Mine Eyes” briefly loosens its grip on pulse altogether. Trombone, guitar, and saxophone drift through freer ensemble motion before the chorale writing slowly gathers the groove back underneath the band. Potter’s chorale style writing is excellent throughout the album. By the time “Alive With Ghosts Today 2” returns to the rubato atmosphere of the opening track, the ensemble subtly restating themes, remembering them from a greater distance.

What gives Alive With Ghosts Today its coherence is the way the ensemble keeps generating forward motion from inside Potter’s writing. Chorale sections continue shifting internally even at slower tempos. Groove passages stay harmonically active beneath the pulse. Background figures underneath solos keep nudging the improvisers toward new directions rather than simply supporting them. Potter’s writing is sophisticated, especially in the classical-influenced sections. The music never loses momentum or melodic interest, and the pull of groove and pulse through the layered orchestration. Blues phrasing, folk-like melodic shapes, gospel-inflected cadences, and Smith’s constantly shifting cymbal textures keep the suite physically grounded even at its densest moments.

Alive With Ghosts Today is Potter bringing a new sound to his catalog. The use of layered classical-hued sections and small jazz group writing with outstanding improvisational performances carries the album forward. Counterpoint, rhythmic motive, improvisation, and orchestration all keep feeding the same larger current of motion. Potter has assembling an exceptional ensemble and created a musical environment for everyone to contribute to the balance and momentum of the album’s appeal.