Joe Block, There Is Always Hope Review

Joe Block’s There Is Always Hope: When Familiarity Becomes Musical Language

by Nolan DeBuke

There is a difference between knowing a composition and knowing how a particular group of musicians expresses it. The first can be communicated through notation, rehearsal, recordings, and explanation. The second takes time. Musicians learn where someone is likely to push a phrase, how a drummer responds when the energy rises, when a bassist will reinforce an accent rather than leave it open, and how much rhythmic information is necessary before everyone recognizes where the music is going.

Joe Block’s There Is Always Hope makes that distinction unusually audible. The pianist, composer, and arranger developed these pieces through years of performance and revision with musicians whose collective sound has served as a laboratory for his compositions since 2019. Rather than making the resulting performances more fixed, that familiarity seems to have created greater freedom inside them. The writing supplies a vocabulary; ensemble history turns it into conversation.

“The Opening” establishes both sides of that relationship. A sixteenth-note contemporary jazz groove develops around a pedal foundation and four-chord sequence. Bassist Samuel Harris and drummer Christian McGhee establish a firm pocket while Block’s piano figures evolve within it. When the horns enter, sustained dissonance and carefully shaped dynamics broaden the texture before a more rhythmically staccato melody begins moving the composition toward increasingly active ensemble writing.

There is plenty of written parts for the musicians to know. What becomes more interesting is what happens between those written landmarks.

A flowing tutti passage accumulates energy toward a broad climax, but the subsequent change of pace does not feel like someone has simply flipped a switch from one tempo marking to another. Repetition and an ostinato help the ensemble gradually settle into slower motion. During Block’s feature, cooler harmonic colors provide grounding before Harris enters and turns the passage into a duet. Another ostinato eventually begins rebuilding the tempo and energy until the ensemble reaches a climax that functions as much through accumulated sound as through harmonic cadence.

Those transitions reveal the band’s deeper vocabulary. Accents, dynamics, tempo, tone, ensemble color, energy, and even the question of who leads at a particular moment are handled with a subtlety that notation alone cannot completely prescribe. The musicians know the composition’s destinations, but they also appear to know one another’s ways of arriving at them.

That can be heard in how “The Opening” flows into “No Easy Way.” Block introduces a montuno-like piano figure whose rhythmic character feels connected to the preceding material even as the harmonic color changes. Piano and bass lock into a unison figure that gives McGhee room to place drum fills around them. The horns introduce an accumulating motif, rhythmic emphasis shifts, and call-and-response gestures begin distributing the material among the ensemble.

The extended performance provides room to hear the distinction between compositional development and ensemble development. Cadential figures establish destinations, but the musicians continually determine the intensity with which those destinations are approached. During the saxophone solo, a change of harmonic center and eventual return to a pedal point help construct the climax. Piano and saxophone become the strongest foreground voices while bass and drums rise to meet their energy.

The trumpet entrance changes the balance again. A new rhythmic accent creates space for another trajectory, while inner-line movement recalls material heard earlier. Particularly revealing is the rhythm section’s response as Noah Halpern’s trumpet phrases become more arcing and expressive. The accompaniment’s emotional and rhythmic weight changes with the soloist.

Eventually the opening piano figure returns. The effect is not simply recapitulation. Enough has happened that familiar material now carries the memory of the intervening performance.

This is one reason the album can create continuity across compositions without requiring every piece to behave identically. Across the tracks examined here, recurring rhythmic ideas, pedal relationships, inner movement, ostinatos, accents, and related harmonic colors become recognizable reference points. Familiarity gives the musicians a common understanding of how to move through them.

The title composition, “There Is Always Hope” demonstrates that language is when an instrumental voice changes. Morgan Guerin takes the tenor chair, bringing a warm middle-register presence that creates clearer contrast between reed and brass colors. The melodies alternate between lyrical and rhythmic behavior while the form continues to evolve through passages in which the boundary between written direction and ensemble decision becomes difficult and unnecessary to separate.

Block, Harris, and McGhee respond closely to changes in register and rhythmic accent. Trumpet, tenor, and piano move through improvisational space while maintaining the composition’s harmonic character. When material reminiscent of the album’s earlier thematic world returns, the connection reaches beyond the immediate performance. Familiar gestures survive, but the ensemble colors their accents and tone according to where the performance has now traveled.

That is what long familiarity with material can accomplish. It does not require musicians to reproduce yesterday’s solutions. It allows them to recognize the identity and direction of the material while changing how it behaves today.

“Ungrounded” provides Kurt Rosenwinkel introducing a different instrumental voice. His guitar brings clean pick attack, warm distortion, delay, and phrases that gradually climb toward the upper register. Counterpoint, inner-line movement, montuno-like gestures, rhythmic shifts, and a four-chord pattern keep the piece connected to the broader vocabulary heard across the session, while Rosenwinkel develops his solo through increasingly expansive upward motion.

The ensemble listens to that trajectory. As the guitar gains rhythmic and registral energy, the players follow without surrendering the composition’s underlying identity. During the final buildup, Rosenwinkel moves around the recurring harmonic climb while the band maintains enough structural information to make his freedom intelligible.

His presence also prevents an overly romantic explanation of the album’s chemistry. Years together matter, but familiarity alone is not the whole story. Jazz itself supplies a larger shared language. Rosenwinkel’s listening, rhythmic awareness, harmonic fluency, and recognition of ensemble signals allow his individual vocabulary to enter Block’s more specific one. Long-term collaborators may understand the smallest inflections of these compositions, but an attentive musician fluent in the broader language can still enter the conversation.

That frames the album because There Is Always Hope is Block’s first small-group recording centered on his own original compositions. The album therefore brings his identity as a composer into particularly close contact with his identity as a pianist and ensemble leader.

Block reinforced that relationship in the way he recorded it. The group performed at Smalls the week before entering the studio, and Block has explained that he was adamant about avoiding isolation booths and headphones. Instead, the musicians recorded together in one room in an effort to preserve the feeling of live performance. The interaction heard throughout the album supports that choice: small changes in accents, dynamics, energy, and phrasing continually pass information from one musician to another.

The better these musicians know the material, the less the material needs to tell them exactly what to do.

For listeners, the result is a contemporary jazz record with strong compositional architecture and compelling individual playing. There is another lesson underneath it. Ensemble communication does not occur apart from musical material. It occurs through it. A rhythmic cell, accent, cadence, register change, repeated figure, dynamic rise, or familiar harmonic movement can carry information when everyone understands what that information means.