Gerry Gibbs Honors his Father’s Compositions

1975 photograph of Terry Gibbs playing vibraphone at the Village Jazz Lounge in Walt Disney World (photograph by Laura Kolb, from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license)

Tomorrow Whaling City Sound will release the thirteenth album of jazz led by percussionist Gerry Gibbs. This is a two-CD set entitled Songs From My Father. As usual, Amazon.com is taking pre-orders for those who cannot wait.

To avoid any unnecessary confusion, it is probably worth noting that this album has nothing to do with the Horace Silver classic, “Song for My Father.” However, Gibbs’ own father, Terry, who is now 96 years old, was a major jazz vibraphonist closely involved with bebop and the genres that followed, including the works in Silver’s book. “Gibbs-the-son,” on the other hand is probably best known for leading the Thrasher Dream Trio, whose membership goes through four iterations over the course of the nineteen tracks on this new album. Both players and instruments change across those iterations as follows:

1. Chick Corea on acoustic piano and Minimoog; Ron Carter on acoustic bass
2. Kenny Barron on acoustic piano; Buster Williams on acoustic bass
3. Patrice Rushen on acoustic piano; Larry Goldings on a Hammond B-3 organ
4. Geoff Keezer on acoustic piano; Christian McBride on acoustic bass

On the final track of the first CD, all of these musicians play as an extended group, joined by “Gibbs-the-father” on vibraphone.

Another historical context is that this album features the last recorded performances of Chick Corea, who died this past February 9. Furthermore, the second CD concludes with the one piece not written by “Gibbs-the-father.” The title is “Tango for Terry;” and Corea composed it in 2020 to honor the elder Gibbs. He also arranged the “Waltz For My Children” track and partnered with “Gibbs-the-son” in arranging “Sweet Young Song Of Love.”

All this makes for a historical document of some highly personal performances. I must confess that this was my “first contact” with any of the Gibbs compositions and, for that matter, any of the incarnations of the Thrasher Dream Trio. Nevertheless, it did not take me long to latch on to the inventiveness of each of the nineteen tracks in this collection. This is definitely music that deserves attentive listening, and I expect to be revisiting all of those tracks in the interest of further honing my own attentive skills.