Danny Grissett, Travelogue Review

by Stamish Malcuss

Danny Grissett’s Travelogue is an album with a refined sonic with touch, taste, and truth. In this latest entry into his discography, the Los Angeles-born pianist-composer turns the restless arc of the modern jazz musician’s life into a suite of resonant reflections. Anchored by Vicente Archer on bass and Bill Stewart on drums, the trio interprets Grissett’s musical narratives with a combination of alertness and interaction that invites deep listening.

At the heart of Travelogue is a question of “home,” not just its geography, but its emotional contours. Grissett, now based in Vienna after formative decades in New York, offers a sound world shaped by global traversal but rooted in the harmonic fluency and structural elegance of the post-bop continuum. One hears the fingerprints of Herbie Hancock, the soulful clarity of Mulgrew Miller, and the elegant propulsion of Cedar Walton. Their influence is all present, yet none impersonated. What emerges is Grissett’s singular dialect of crisp articulation, lucid phrasing, and harmonic storytelling of elegant poise.

The opening track, “The Long Way Home,” sets the emotional compass. Built on a reflective motif that seems to unfold with quiet urgency. Grissett’s voicings are open but weighted; each chord feels layered with the haze of post-bop intervals that arrive on target after moving intervallically. Archer’s bass is patient and conversational; Stewart’s drumming leans into space rather than persistent punctuation, allowing Grissett’s melodic logic to drive and shape the form.

“Wonder Wander” plays like a 21st-century extension of the jazz travelogue genre pioneered by Duke Ellington and extended by Wayne Shorter. There’s a looseness in the rhythm section here that is grounded in deep internal cohesion that can be felt, giving the confidence to let time become elastic. Grissett’s solo, rich with delayed resolutions and harmonic sidesteps, suggests a mind observing the expression of music with both curiosity and restraint.

The short interlude “Inbound” serves as a gentle descent, a compositional breath marked by crystalline textures. It’s followed by “The People in the City,” which lives in the emotional space of American and European jazz. Here, Grissett crafts a performance that sings lyrical yet grounded in creative rhythmic shape. The trio builds tension organically, expanding and contracting the phrases in a easy to follow manner. One hears the landing places and the personalities of the place the music is at, a tribute to the fabric that animates every city he’s known.

“Picture in Picture” is structurally inventive and harmonically inviting. Grissett uses metric displacement and phrase layering to imply nested frames, musical metaphors for how perception shifts with time. Archer and Stewart lock into a mantra-like groove, and the trio’s interplay here reaches intuitive destinations.

Two standards, Benny Golson’s “Whisper Not” and Van Heusen/Burke’s “Here’s That Rainy Day,” act as interpretive checkpoints. Grissett treats both with understated reverence, choosing economy over ornamentation. On the former, he leans into linear logic, developing motivic fragments with the clarity of a horn player. On the latter, his touch turns almost Bill Evans-like — not in style, but in emotional transparency.

Grissett’s own “The After Hours” finds the trio leaning into buoyant swing with a blues-inflected, atmospheric overtone. Stewart’s cymbals tracing shadows across the form and Archer’s bass staying true to time and form. “Spin Cycle” captures our musical imagination through looping figures and rhythmic layering. Grissett’s solo is particularly inspired with a controlled storm of melodic fragments, reshaped by harmonic directions that lead to destinations.

Throughout the album, the trio operates with an elasticity that is intuitive and is the result of trust, experience, and shared musical values. Stewart is at his most textural here, never overwhelming the canvas, always painting around the edges. Archer is foundational but never static, his counterpoint a study in melodic restraint.

Travelogue is an album of jazz craft that offers those of us who live in today’s jazz motion musical integrity paired with honesty of expression. Danny Grissett may be tracing the contours of cities and continents, but what he ultimately maps is something deeper. The evolving interior landscape of an artist who has found his voice, and is still listening.