Around You Is A Forest Thomas Morgan

• 1 Around You Is A Forest 05:06
• 2 Eddies 06:48
• 3 Dream Sequence 06:02
• 4 Through The Trees 16:07
• 5 In The Dark 04:47
• 6 Assembly Of All Beings 09:08
• 7 Rising From The West 11:00
• 8 Murmuration 08:36
• 9 Here 05:29
• Total Runtime 01:13:03

Info for Around You Is A Forest

For more than two decades, bassist Thomas Morgan has been a quiet but vital presence in contemporary jazz. Known for his lyrical sound, grounding intuition, and deep responsiveness, Morgan has played alongside masters such as Paul Motian, Bill Frisell, Jakob Bro, Steve Coleman, John Abercrombie, Masabumi Kikuchi, Craig Taborn, and Joey Baron. Morgan has become a trusted bedrock for multiple generations of improvisers for the rare sensitivity he brings to every setting. Until now, he has never stepped forward with a project under his own name.

His debut album, Around You Is a Forest (Loveland Music), reveals a dimension of Morgan’s artistry long hidden from public view: his lifelong engagement with computers, programming, and hacker culture. The record is built around WOODS, a virtual string instrument Morgan designed in SuperCollider, an open-source software environment for real-time audio synthesis and algorithmic composition. WOODS evokes the sound of plucked and struck string instruments — West African lute-harps, Asian zithers, the Hungarian cimbalom, marimbas — while operating according to generative code that Morgan shaped into a living, evolving instrument.

Each track features a duet between WOODS and one of today’s most inventive musicians: Dan Weiss (tabla), Craig Taborn (keyboards, field recordings), Gerald Cleaver (drums), Henry Threadgill (flutes), Ambrose Akinmusire (trumpet), Bill Frisell (guitars), Immanuel Wilkins (alto saxophone), and Gary Snyder (voice).

Morgan’s early experiences with programming began in childhood in Hayward, California. His father, a computer science professor, introduced him to games like Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? and Myst — and then taught him how to “look under the hood.” “When I asked him, he showed me how to edit a SimCity file in hexadecimal to increase city funds,” Morgan recalls. “Understanding how things were actually working opened up another world altogether.”

By high school, he was writing code and experimenting with Unix systems. He was drawn to the flexibility of open-source environments and the curiosity-driven ethos of the free software movement. At the same time, he was falling in love with jazz, captivated by the playing of Ray Brown and the community of improvisers who embraced freedom, structure, and listening. The two worlds never felt far apart. “Jazz musicians are music hackers,” he says. “Both are about curiosity, about discovering something in the moment and applying it immediately.”

While Morgan doesn’t typically identify as a programmer, he describes occasional deep dives into creative coding — episodes of sustained exploration that mirror his approach to music. “Most of the time what I do is tinkering,” he says. “But sometimes, like with this project, I’ll disappear into it for weeks or months.

Although Morgan chose the path of a professional bassist, his explorations in programming continued quietly for years. At Manhattan School of Music, he was already writing a custom MIDI assembler. In 2012, he discovered Overtone (a Lisp-based interface for SuperCollider), which reignited his interest in algorithmic music. By 2014, he was composing with these tools during residency — and eventually built WOODS, first out of curiosity, then as a central instrument in a growing body of work.

He recorded initial WOODS tracks in 2016 in his apartment, imagining future collaborations, but the project was set aside as his performance career intensified. Only during the forced stillness of the pandemic did he return to it with renewed focus.

That process was supported by a grant which gave Morgan the time and resources to complete the project. He invited producer David Breskin — known for his visionary work with Bill Frisell, Kris Davis, and Nels Cline — to help shape the album. Breskin encouraged Morgan to structure the music as a series of duets, and helped match WOODS pieces with specific collaborators. Throughout the recording and editing, he served as both advisor and provocateur, helping Morgan refine his vision.

The album’s title comes from both a classic text adventure game (Adventure) and a metaphor for artistic community. “A forest is a place where nutrients and information are shared through root systems,” Morgan says. “In that sense, the musicians on this album are some of the trees that teach and nourish me.”

The metaphor also captures the nature of WOODS itself. Its sonic palette is cohesive, like the repeating forms of bark and leaves, yet within that texture lies constant variation: shifting rhythmic emphases, subtle changes in timbre, and evolving harmonies. Against this backdrop, Morgan’s collaborators bring their own voices into the environment, improvising in dialogue with a living ecosystem.

The album’s artwork deepens this concept. Created in collaboration with Tal R, a leading visual artist in Denmark, the visuals reflect the interconnected spirit of the music. The word “ASSEMBLY,” rendered in a mechanistic, all-caps lettering, evokes both assembly-language coding and the intricate structure of a digital instrument. Meanwhile, the mirrored trees on the cover — some of which resemble jet planes — echo the forest metaphor and invoke the layered elegance of Monk or Motian. “There’s a childlike sophistication to the design,” Morgan notes. “And the use of color is unified, with accents — just like WOODS.”

For an artist known for his subtlety and self-effacement, Around You is a strikingly personal statement. It brings to light a creative life long lived in parallel to Morgan’s role as a bassist. The album also marks a new chapter in Morgan’s ongoing collaborative relationship with Jakob Bro, whose label, Loveland Music, is releasing the album on CD, vinyl, download and streaming formats. Their shared musical language, developed over numerous recordings and tours, deepens their artistic intertwining.

Morgan sees the album not as a departure from his identity as a bassist, but as an expansion of it. Around You Is a Forest affirms that code and sound, structure and spontaneity, can coexist — and that improvisation, whether in music or programming, remains one of the most powerful tools for discovery we have.

“Morgan is an in-demand American jazz bassist but, for his debut as a leader, he plays WOODS a virtual instrument he designed using SuperCollider software which emulates pan-global string instruments. Morgan calls upon an impressive line-up including trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire, drummer Gerald Cleaver, and Henry Threadgill on flutes, for a series of duets and it works like a charm. With Bill Frisell, he approximates a donso ngoni while the guitarist weaves acoustic webs smeared with electric swells. A meeting with 95 year old Beat poet and Zen prophet Gary Snyder matches suitably koto-like cascades with rich and unhurried spoken meditations. "Why are we here?, asks Snyder. To make and appreciate art like this, of course.” (WIRE Magazine)

"Still absorbing its many layers, I have no doubt Around You is a Forest is the work of a visionary—distinct, immersive, and profoundly original. Each piece feels self-contained yet essential to the whole. Traditionalists may balk, but this may well be the year’s most imaginative and best debut." (Jazztrail)

Thomas Morgan, double bass
Dan Weiss, tabla
Craig Taborn, Farfisa organ, Fender Rhodes, synthesizers, field recordings
Gerald Cleaver, drums
Henry Threadgill, flute, bass flute
Ambrose Akinmusire, trumpet
Bill Frisell, acoustic and electric guitars
Immanuel Wilkins, alto saxophone
Gary Snyder, vocals

Produced by David Breskin, Thomas Morgan and Jakob Bro

Thomas Morgan
is a double bass player with a unique approach to the instrument and an exceptional musical understanding. He has recorded and toured all over the world as a member of Paul Motian’s bands, the John Abercrombie Quartet, the Dave Binney Quartet, Steve Coleman and Five Elements, and the Tomasz Stanko New York Quartet, among many others. It is Thomas Morgan’s extraordinary way of being in the moment in music and putting his own signature on it that has made him one of the most in demand jazz bassists on the international scene. He has played on more than seventy recordings and is currently touring with the Craig Taborn Trio, Jakob Bro, the Jim Black Trio, the Dan Weiss Trio, the Scott DuBois Quartet, and others.

This album contains no booklet.