Tom Varner, Joe Morris, Stephen Haynes, Kenny Warren, Josh Roseman – A New Planet (self-released, 2025)

By Dan Sorrells

Tom Varner has had a long career asserting the French horn as a jazz instrument, both as a pioneering hornist and an engaging composer. In recent years he’s leaned into small groups and more open forms, bringing the radical loosening of improvisation back into the chamber along with his horn. On A New Planet he convenes an unorthodox group, setting up a series of encounters in which steadfast guitarist Joe Morris ventures into the breathy and buzzing milieu of a brass quartet.

There’s a strong sense across these 16 tracks of five musicians arriving on an autumn day with shared sympathies, working toward a shared understanding through a process that’s easy to imagine as a genial dialogue. The quartet (Varner plus Haynes on cornet and flugelhorn, Warren on trumpet, and Roseman on trombone) softly converses in sounds that remind how near these instruments are to breath and voice. Murmurs and low whispers that barely set lips vibrating; friendly recountings in long, slurring lines; declamations of hope and melancholy that at times louden in enthusiasm. Morris’s instrument understandably sets him apart. His fleet runs are often the most direct and melodic statements, but he deploys subtle effects to soften his attack or even steps back altogether, one moment the focus of attention, the next receding into the group.

But the conversational metaphor extends only so far. Is that warm, low drone Roseman or Varner? Which thread of that rising whorl is Warren and which Haynes? The boundaries between individual voices slip, and as the fluid brass forms intermix, their density thickening and thinning, metaphors of environment and terrain begin to stir. In his notes on the session Varner portrays Morris’s guitar as “an observer interacting with a shifting new landscape, the landscape created by the brass,” an image conjured most vividly as Morris winds through the undulating uplands in “Have We Arrived?” Gleaming tracks like “A Reflective Rest” and “For the Many That We’ve Lost” edge towards the powerful harmonic luster one might expect with a brass ensemble, but the horns are concerned less with tonal harmony than with a harmony of timbre: viscous, gold, and glowing, a kindred meld of sound. Consonance here is not the agreement of notes but instead a quality of tone, and equally a quality of engagement.

The question posed with “Have We Arrived?” and the journeying image within it strongly resonate with Morris’s own thinking about free music and the “perpetual frontier.” Varner remarks upon how drastically the world seemed to change in the short time between entering the studio in October 2024 and releasing the music the following September. A darkness has set in and the wilderness sprawled out ahead evokes fear and not promise. But to arrive implies you’ve reached the place you intend to stop. The question holds uncertainty, but also an opening. The kind of music-making on A New Planet is a model—foolhardy and utopian, perhaps—of coming together in good faith to negotiate the uncertainty, to keep changing the frame, working the details out as you go until that opening appears and you step through into somewhere new.