SIMON MOULLIER
In his music, Simon Moullier makes an enticing proposition: what if the language of horn players — from John Coltrane to Charlie Parker to Clifford Brown — could be transmuted for the vibraphone? “If I could, I think I would have chosen a horn,” he says. “I chose the vibraphone because I was a percussionist, and it was a more immediate way for me to get to what I was hearing.”
Moullier began developing this rapprochement when he picked up the vibraphone as a teenager. “I’ve always wanted to erase the vibraphone,” he says. “In a way, transcend the instrument and make it sound like something else.”
His previous album, 2023’s Isla, features pianist Lex Korten, bassist Alexander Claffy, and drummer Jongkuk Kim — an album of original music in a lush, acoustic sound world. Therein, Moullier nailed this dictum. And now, in a far more stripped-down format, he’s penned another chapter in his evolving story — by way of a spare yet enveloping fourth album, Inception.
On this energetic program of self-arranged standards, Moullier accompanied by bassist Luca Alemanno and returning drummer Jongkuk Kim. (Kim was Moullier’s classmate at Berklee College of Music in Boston; Moullier and Alemanno attended the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz, now called the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz; he’s known Kim since 2012 and Alemanno since 2016.)
With a GRAMMY under his belt for his arrangement of a tune on Terri Lyne Carrington’s New Standards, Vol. 1, Inception is Moullier’s second trio record, following 2021’s Countdown — and as such, a conceptual line can be drawn directly between the two offerings.
“That was the first time we put out a record with the trio, and it was the concept of playing standards, mostly,” Moullier says of Countdown. “We definitely wanted to do a second one at some point — to keep the adventure going with the trio, and finding that organic feeling while playing standards.”
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