Adam De Lucia, The Man Who Would Be King Review

by Icrom Bigrad

Adam De Lucia turns rhythmic architecture into collective motion on an album where fusion matters most when the musicians make it disappear.

There is a moment early in “Cycle One” when The Man Who Would Be King reveals what kind of record it will become. Strings establish a chamber-like environment, with cello supplying lower counterpoint and a distinctly twentieth-century classical hues. Then the rhythm section enters, and the floor shifts. Moving drums and buoyant bass turn the music toward fusion, while a blues-inflected guitar line brings another vocabulary into the frame. What initially sounded like one musical world becomes several as they begin to groove together.

That transformation gets to the heart of guitarist and composer Adam De Lucia’s eight-track album. The Man Who Would Be King draws from jazz improvisation, progressive-rock structures, electronics, keyboards, vocals, strings, blues language, and an expansive cast that includes Henry Hey, Tim Lefebvre, Cody McCorry, Jordan Perlson, Oz Noy, Donny McCaslin, Michael Ghegan, and others. The achievement isn’t simply putting those elements on the same record. It is finding a rhythmic architecture sturdy enough to let them coexist while leaving enough space for individual musicians to bring that architecture to life.

That makes sense given De Lucia’s composition-first approach. His creative process can begin with an internally heard musical idea before he determines whether it belongs as rhythm, bass line, melody, harmony, or instrumental color. Genre comes later, if it enters the equation at all. That helps explain why The Man Who Would Be King rarely seems interested in announcing what kind of music it is. The more interesting question is what each composition needs to become.

Across the album, the answer repeatedly involves rhythmic transformation. Grooves establish environments; changes of feel redirect the form; recurring pulses provide continuity as melodies, textures, and improvisational roles change around them.

“Cycle One” provides the first strong example. The opening strings eventually yield to a funky fusion pocket, and Oz Noy, who handles the electric guitar here, moves comfortably between quick, fluid groupings and emotionally weighted blues bends. Later, a pause creates space for an upbeat sixteenth-note feel around the bass feature, with bass and drums increasing the energy while keyboards add color. When the strings return, their more overtly classical sonority feels less like a reprise than the completion of a journey.

“Store On the Corner” has a hip backbeat with an ’80s-fusion accent that sits beneath a melodic two-part minor melody and bass figure. Saxophone and guitar bring the melody forward, sometimes together and elsewhere contrapuntally, yet both remain firmly inside the pocket created by bass and drums. Then De Lucia starts moving the scenery.

A new modal center opens space for the saxophone solo. Guitar assumes greater responsibility for the lower rhythmic drive. A relaxed interlude creates breathing room before the earlier material returns, eventually giving way to a compact, snaking contemporary-fusion figure shared by saxophone and guitar. The important thing isn’t how many changes occur but how naturally they register. Even when the feels switch, the pulse remains grounded.

That is one of De Lucia’s compositional instincts: complexity does not require sacrificing physical momentum.

“8 Out” approaches the idea from another direction. Rhythmic displacement is part of the track’s identity from the opening measures. Moving four-part chords establish a catchy recurring pattern, with the architecture of eights becoming material the musicians can work against and within. Eventually the figure assumes an almost montuno-like function as the drums build around it.

Once the pattern settles into the ear, attention shifts from deciphering the rhythmic design toward what the musicians do with it. Repetition becomes propulsion. De Lucia adds another dimension through guitar effects and pickup changes, altering the instrument’s color as the rhythmic argument develops. The result feels less like musicians solving an intricate compositional problem than musicians finding freedom inside one.

Another expression can be heard on “Carousel.” Middle Eastern-inflected modal colors establish an evocative melodic and harmonic environment, while juxtaposed rhythmic ideas keep changing the perspective. When the groove moves beneath the saxophone solo, guitar chords bring a reggae-meets-funk character into the pocket. The solo builds against that grounding before guitar and saxophone begin winding around one another in snaking phrases, with Jordan Perlson’s drums filling and commenting on the spaces they leave behind.

Then the music moves again. Another feel introduces fresh modal colors, while guitar and saxophone exchanges alternate with written tutti figures. The written material doesn’t shut down improvisational momentum; it redirects it. Roles become porous. Accompaniment becomes conversation.

That liveliness is particularly striking given the album’s history. The Man Who Would Be King was not simply captured as one ensemble playing through a conventional series of sessions. Its development stretched across years of recording, revision, re-recording, remote collaboration, and studio work. De Lucia is clearly comfortable treating the studio itself as part of the compositional process.

This is the work of a composer concerned with architecture, arrangement, production, and the realization of musical ideas. Yet its strongest moments are often those in which the listener becomes least conscious of that construction.

Bass answers drums. Guitar and saxophone separate from a written line and begin talking to one another. A blues bend roughens the edge of a precise phrase. A drum fill occupies the opening left by another musician. An intricate repeating figure becomes something to play with, not merely something to play correctly.

This is where De Lucia’s description of artistic creation as “the pursuit of my humanity” gains musical substance. The phrase doesn’t need to tell us what to hear; the performances have already made the case. The humanity of The Man Who Would Be King resides in response—in the friction between something imagined by a composer and what another musician does once that idea reaches their hands.

De Lucia has also expressed an interest in exploring collective improvisation and group dynamics more deeply through real-time interaction among musicians. That ambition is intriguing because The Man Who Would Be King already creates such a persuasive sensation of musicians occupying shared musical space despite the extended process through which the album was constructed.

De Lucia can surround a composition with strings, modal harmony, progressive structures, electric textures, rhythmic displacement, and formidable players. But those things alone don’t make the music live. The architecture provides the environment. The groove puts it in motion.

Then the musicians take over.