Gretchen Parlato, The Wise Ones Review

by Jeff Becker

Gretchen Parlato can make quiet singing carry considerable musical allure. Her tone can be intimate, her dynamics restrained, and her phrasing relaxed enough to suggest that a melody is simply settling into its surroundings. With The Wise Ones, that ease conceals considerable structural activity. Parlato’s rhythmic sophistication is not limited to where she places a lyric against the beat. It reaches into the construction of the music itself. Voice generates pulse, participates in harmony, becomes counterpoint, interacts with percussion, and at times assumes responsibilities normally distributed across several instruments.

Released by Edition Records, The Wise Ones reunites Parlato with longtime collaborators including Robert Glasper, Gerald Clayton, Mark Guiliana, and Alan Hampton while bringing musicians such as Meshell Ndegeocello, Amber Navran, and Becca Stevens into different parts of the album. Its songs also span different periods of Parlato’s writing. That history gives the album context, but its continuity comes from something more immediate: Parlato’s ability to make rhythm, vocal color, and ensemble interaction part of the same language.

“Never Come Down” makes the rhythmic dimension explicit. Written musically by Parlato and Guiliana, the song establishes a syncopated environment in which a relatively economical, minor-pentatonic-based melody can continually change shape. Parlato builds phrases from compact rhythmic cells, repeating them with variations and shifting where they begin against the underlying pulse. The melody consequently does not merely sit on the groove. Its placement becomes one of the groove’s active components.

Guiliana’s drums and percussion maintain an animated sixteenth-note flow, while Parlato moves between reinforcing that activity and creating friction against it. Changes in the modal center provide harmonic motion without displacing rhythm as the principal source of development. Vocal harmonies introduce another pattern; the center shifts and returns; later a vamp provides room for spoken voice to float above the layered rhythmic field.

Meshell Ndegeocello’s voice and bass deepen that foundation, while Hampton contributes voice, guitar, piano, and bass and Jacob Mann adds synthesizers. The resulting texture crosses jazz and R&B while drawing on a broader rhythmic vocabulary. What holds those elements together is the relationship between repetition and variation. Parlato can repeat a melodic cell enough to make it part of the rhythmic environment, then alter its entrance or articulation enough to prevent the repetition from becoming static.

The title track expands that conception from rhythmic phrasing into orchestration. “The Wise Ones” was written by Parlato with Amber Navran, whose voice, woodwinds, and synthesizers join Robert Glasper’s piano, Hampton’s bass, Guiliana’s drums and percussion, and Mann’s synthesizers. Woodwinds establish a repeating figure before two harmonic shapes begin oscillating beneath changing patterns of accent and legato articulation. Glasper’s entrance adds contemporary jazz harmony whose voice leading moves fluidly through the form.

Parlato responds with a soulful R&B inflection, but her relaxed tone should not be mistaken for rhythmic passivity. She plays with the time while moving between connected legato notes, giving the melody elasticity without obscuring its shape. Around her, bass activity increases, background voices appear, and keyboards add further layers.

A harmonic lift creates room for Glasper’s piano feature. His chordal figures contain melodic responses of their own, continuing the conversational quality before Parlato returns higher in register and with greater intensity. More grit enters her sound. Vocal parts begin operating contrapuntally as keyboards and synthesizers thicken the instrumental field. Lyrics intermingle with wordless responses until the distinction between lead voice and surrounding texture becomes increasingly fluid.

That idea reaches its clearest expression in “Mad World.” The Roland Orzabal song is arranged by Parlato and Becca Stevens, with Stevens contributing voice and kora alongside Hampton and Guiliana. Rather than treating the familiar melody as the arrangement’s sole center of gravity, Parlato and Stevens first construct an environment for it.

Vocal percussion establishes an active eighth-note pulse. When the main melody enters, the lead pulls against that activity, creating an immediate distinction between voice as rhythmic foundation and voice as melodic expression. Chords gradually enter, followed by additional vocal textures that form sustained harmonic pads. Several musical responsibilities are already being carried by different manifestations of the voice.

The middle of the arrangement intensifies that push and pull. Percussive vocal sounds mingle with melodic ones as Parlato moves upward in register. Vibrato becomes more pronounced as the lyric’s emotion enter. These are not isolated demonstrations of technique. Register, timbre, rhythmic activity, and textual expression rise together toward the musical climax.

Then the voices multiply further. Canon-like entries produce a bed of interlocking lines strong enough to generate their own groove. Percussive sounds supply pulse, sustained parts establish harmony, overlapping lines create counterpoint, and the lead remains free to shape the song’s emotional trajectory above them. Stevens’s voice and kora add another timbral dimension to a texture in which instrumental and vocal responsibilities increasingly overlap.

The final repetitions of “Mad World” bring modal and tonal motion into contact, giving the familiar phrase a harmonic destination earned by the accumulating layers. Parlato’s interpretation is an arrangement that keeps it a recognizable song, but with new dimensions. It reconstructs the musical environment around the melody until the composition operates according to the rhythmic and textural principles heard elsewhere on the album.

Across these performances, Parlato demonstrates that intensity need not be synonymous with volume. She can increase expressive weight by moving upward in register, adding vibrato or grit, shifting a phrase against the beat, thickening vocal harmony, or allowing another instrumental layer to alter the context around her. Restraint becomes a source of contrast rather than an absence of energy.

That helps explain why The Wise Ones can accommodate musicians with such recognizable individual languages without becoming a sequence of guest appearances. Glasper’s harmonic vocabulary, Guiliana’s rhythmic imagination, Ndegeocello’s grounding presence, Navran’s expanded colors, and Stevens’s voice and kora enter musical settings that give those characteristics specific purposes. Parlato does not have to dominate those environments to remain their center.

Parlato’s subtlety has never meant musical smallness. Here, the details of her singing expand outward until they become principles of arrangement. On The Wise Ones, Parlato does not merely sing inside the arrangement. Increasingly, the voice is where the arrangement begins.