Stephan Crump

We prefer to control our rivers—to dam them for power, to wall them with levees, to funnel them into canals or aqueducts to supply farm or city, to reroute them entirely to keep cities in good standing. It’s true for all bodies of water, really, from the ways we drain wetlands for housing or wall off the ocean for much the same. But most rivers of our world have been here much longer than our species; in extreme cases, they’ve run through the same channels for 2,000 times longer than we have walked the planet, fostering and feeding ecosystems for actual epochs. Water knows how to handle itself. Our dominion, though, has ruined or at least damaged its patterns, whether depleting groundwater, increasing pollution in waterways, or depriving adjacent land of the minerals that might make it fertile. We prefer to control our waters, and they, in turn, suffer in our hands.

All this has been on the mind of vaunted bassist and composer Stephan Crump for decades. He grew up near the banks of the Mississippi in Memphis, playing on, around, or in our Great (and wounded) River as a child. Other transformative experiences with other bodies of water followed: the Puget Sound off the coast of Washington, the wild Missinaibi beneath the Hudson Bay, the Onyar in Spain, the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, where he has lived for 30 years. He long contemplated a musical project that would honor those relationships with water, that would allow him to consider both his personal and our societal connections to that lifeforce.

His poignant and immersive Slow Water does exactly that. A continuous 67-minute piece rendered by a stellar sextet of new music and jazz ringers, Slow Water uses science, natural philosophy, and empathy to imagine the secret life that water leads, from its creatures and chemistry to its sense of near-magical motion. Crump’s work with Mary Halvorson, Tyshawn Sorey, Ingrid Laubrock, Vijay Iyer, and Borderlands Trio long ago confirmed his place at the vanguard of modern jazz. But the wondrous Slow Water, a piece that will lead you to reconsider your relationship with something that surrounds you, puts him in league with John Luther Adams, Wadada Leo Smith, and Ashley Fure, fellow composers who have given sound to the endangered glory of the natural gifts around us.