With his first album, jazz pianist and composer Sean Mason wanted to make a statement about his upbringing in North Carolina and a milieu that’s still widely misrepresented and misunderstood. His acclaimed 2023 debut release as a leader, The Southern Suite, didn’t just introduce a generational piano talent. It evoked a way of life suffused with generosity and soul, while forging his quintet into a capaciously inventive ensemble with an approach that’s both state-of-the-art and rooted in jazz’s multilayered traditions.
While much of The Southern Suite was written during his busy New York tenure, Mason started developing the concept around 2016, while studying at UNC Greensboro and leading a trio. After heading north to enroll at The Juilliard School about two years later, the trio was the group with which he first gained attention during a wee-hours weekly residency at Smalls in Greenwich Village. Under the eyes of elder players dropping by to scope out the rising star, he continued to hone and refine The Southern Suite until the pandemic shuttered the scene. But the compositional seeds had taken root, guided by Mason’s encompassing aesthetic.
Rejecting dualistic frameworks like modernism/traditionalism, street/elite culture, or intellect/emotion, Mason created the music from a both/and perspective, “something that’s missing in jazz,” he says. “It’s being true to who I am. Southern culture goes beyond opposites. The South that I was raised in accepted me for who I was with all the contradictions. That’s the music I wanted to make, warm, accessible and singable, yet intellectual and philosophical.”
When the scene started to open up again in 2021, Mason landed a quartet residency at the Roxy Hotel in Tribeca. The gig quickly became a proving ground for him to check out a wide roster of players. Booked for a two-week tour in June of 2022, Mason opted to assemble a quintet from the musicians he’d tried out at the Roxy. Deciding on trumpeter Tony Glausi, tenor saxophonist Chris Lewis, bassist Felix Moseholm and drummer Domo Branch, he sent the players the music via voice messages, singing each tune for them to learn by ear.
At the first rehearsal the band launched into “Sean’s Theme,” and “it gelled in the first two minutes, and we knew this was something special,” Mason recalls. “I thought, we have to get this on tape.” Conferring with Wynton Marsalis and Gabrielle Armand, who managed Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Blue Engine Records, Mason lined up a recording date a few weeks after the tour. He’d recruited these players specifically to interpret The Southern Suite, and the music took further definition in the creative crucible of the quintet.
“I didn’t want a band of people who sounded the same and have the same lineage,” Mason explains. “I wanted a group of different kinds of people with different backgrounds, beliefs, and experiences. Like jazz, the quintet is a melting pot, and embracing those differences is the essence of Southern hospitality. There’s a seat at the table for everybody.”
The demands of the music wove the divergent personalities and perspectives into a dazzlingly cohesive ensemble, and the friction-generated momentum is evident on the opening track, “Final Voyage.” Mason wrote the tune on tour before the recording session to fill a specific hole in the group’s repertoire. “We were missing a medium-up swing thing,” he says. “I heard the melody and wanted to see where that line took me.”
Lithe and serpentine, it’s a complex form that repurposes the chord changes to Herbie Hancock’s “Maiden Voyage” when the band starts to blow. The theme gives way to an impromptu passage and a powerhouse Glausi solo that places a generational marker. Mason wrote “Kid” during his undergrad days inspired by Joey Calderazzo’s blistering “The Mighty Sword.” After a steeplechase head suggesting the triadic folk-feel of Ornette Coleman, Mason takes charge with a romping two-fisted solo as the band cycles through the melody again and again,
He composed the soulful “Lavender” during the pandemic and first developed the piece with his trio. Expanded for the quintet, the tune gives each player his own melodic line, which intertwine in counterpoint. With no solos, the piece seems to beg for a lyric describing an idyllic spring day. From a bucolic frolic, the quintet starts to rollick with the D flat blues “SilkyM,” an epic stomp that generates show-stopping momentum. Lewis’s solo takes a sanctified turn as the rhythm section churns, creating a tidal surge that feels like it could roll on for days.
At almost 11 minutes the album’s longest track is “One United,” a piece that came to Mason during a period when he was frequently employed in Broadway productions.
But it wasn’t until a few months later, on the initial two-week quintet tour, that he revisited the tune, expanded it, and taught it to the band before a show. They played it that night much as they recorded it a few weeks later, “and it turned into our hit song,” Mason says. “I wanted it to feel like a standard, a familiar piece that’s inviting to play.”
Dedicated to his grandmother, an early and devoted champion of Mason’s piano studies, “Lullaby” is a complete statement with no solos. The beatific melody repeats over and over, subtly slowing throughout, with Branch’s supple brush work providing gentle propulsion. Singable in a very different way, “Closure” weds gospel harmonies to a cycle of unpredictable meters. It’s a 21st century jazz statement that gallops into a polyphonic Crescent City horn passage and lands on a dime.
The album closes where the band began, with “Sean’s Theme,” another piece conceived as a statement for the band “with no blowing,” Mason says. He introduces the jaunty, insouciantly swinging melody and the horns follow his lead. It’s a joyful Ellingtonian exit that leaves you wanting more, and like every track on the album, the band earns the ending rather than relying on a fade out. The high-stepping groove “had us all dancing in the studio listening to the play back,” Mason says.
By the end of The Southern Suite, Mason has arrived not only as a major jazz pianist and composer, but as a bandleader who has transformed his ensemble itself into a supremely expressive instrument. The ocean of influences he absorbed are reconstituted into his own heady brew, and each piece has its own particular emotional narrative that collapses surface distinctions. It’s a version of the South that’s too often ignored and undervalued.
Old stereotypes too often cast the South as a region defined by the legacy of its worst history. Mason doesn’t shy away from those shadows, but in its welcoming cadences and ingratiating grooves his music embodies Southern culture at its best. His quintet has set a table laden with a delectable feast. Let all who are hungry for sonic and spiritual sustenance take a seat.
