This is the debut album by Otherlands Trio, recorded on January 23, 2025. Star Mountain arrived October 17, 2025 on Intakt Records. CD’s available here now.
liner notes from Star Mountain:
Minutes before the Otherlands Trio’s second-ever gig, in January 2025, Stephan Crump was understandably anxious.
It wasn’t the show, per se, that had him that way. It was, after all, at Bar Bayeux, the cozy Brooklyn space where the bassist, his longtime drumming counterpart Eric McPherson, and their new collaborator, alto saxophonist Darius Jones, had debuted just six months earlier. They liked the way the place sounded, the way its atmosphere felt. And, most importantly, they liked each other, especially how Jones instantly seemed to lock into and build upon the spontaneous worlds that McPherson and Crump created.
Trouble was, just after returning from an arduous European tour with another ensemble, McPherson had fallen asleep at home and wasn’t answering his phone. Crump and Jones reckoned they could handle the night themselves, that it would be a fine chance to finesse their own bond. The real trouble was that they had a full day booked at the Queens studio Samurai Hotel in less than a week. So much for that last little bit of preparation.
Turns out, there was no need to be nervous. After Crump, Jones, and McPherson set up their gear and got comfortable with their surroundings at Samurai, they dove straight into the work at hand, playing for several uninterrupted hours. Each time they would finish a piece, sometimes pushing toward the half-hour mark, they would stop, only for McPherson to set a different beat instantly, barely giving Crump and Jones time to chuckle or scratch their heads before they found their way into his firmament. They pulled up only long enough to have a snack, to replenish the energetic expenditure, then headed straight back into these spells.
When the trio went into Samurai that winter day, they didn’t yet have a name. But the results made it clear that they needed one, that they’d found a sound and relationship so remarkable that there would be many more gigs. They soon became, of course, Otherlands Trio.
Attentive eyes will certainly notice a nomenclatural kinship with a previous Crump-McPherson collaboration, Borderlands Trio. Between 2017 and 2024, that band, with Kris Davis on piano, made three much-lauded and deeply intuitive records. But when it came time to pause that project, McPherson and Crump agreed they wanted to continue their relationship, to find new ways to perpetuate and expand their shared power and poise. Impressed by Jones’ playing for years, Crump invited him to see what kind of connection they might all have, on the spot at that first July 2024 gig at Bayeux.
No one expected it to go quite as well as it did. Crump and McPherson love a groove and a melody, but they also love digging into a texture, letting some cherished sound frame an entire spontaneous composition. They instantly recognized that Jones liked that, too, that he was unabashed about sitting in a sonic spell for a while. If Borderlands Trio embodied the liminal, perhaps with Otherlands they could push further afield, to find new spaces and shapes they had not seen from that prior position.
The particular places Otherlands finds itself on Star Mountain are astounding, a product not only of chemistry between three players but also the pernicious political climate in which they worked. Crump’s song titles—like “Lateral Line,” as in the system fish use to detect the way water moves around them, or “Instared,” based on the phases of an insect’s larval growth—imply other ways of seeing, doing, and being. These tracks follow through on that promise to be “other,” with three people who are still learning to know one another sharing every feeling they can summon in 46 absolutely breathless minutes, without fear or hesitation or judgement.
Maybe you can hear the yearning in “Instared,” the self-doubt welling up through Jones’ horn and the twin support and space McPherson and Crump give him? And that is surely lust for life pulsing through “Diadromous,” with the trio conjuring some warped vision of Southern funk before letting it grind to a slow stop, the party over.
But there is nothing so vulnerable and valiant and, frankly, inspiring here as “Metamorpheme,” the 16-minute heroic opener that sounds like a gospel moan, a fight song, a full-bodied shout into an empty well, a fireside chat between friends who are sharing vexations about absolutely everything. At the climax, Jones finds a burst of melody he seems to love, dipping and diving through it on repeat as his new bandmates goad him on without a word, as if imploring him to strangle every last drop out of the glory he has found. And then, when he does, they all collapse, nothing left to give.
It’s hard, though, not to picture McPherson in that very moment, dropping immediately into another beat, yet another invitation to share rage and joy, joy and rage, coiled together until they do the work of shaping a world as real, open, and honest as the one shared on Star Mountain.
Grayson Haver Currin
Bar-K Ranch, Colorado
August 2025
OTHerlands Trio
ERIC MCPHERSON · drums
DARIUS JONES · alto saxophone
STEPHAN CRUMP · acoustic bass
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