Eli Winter – A Trick of the Light
In a little under a decade’s time, guitarist Eli Winter has expanded his parameters from solo acoustic performances of hypnotically graceful open-tuned pieces to more collaborative full-band arrangements that blur the lines between folk, rock and jazz. His 2022 self-titled album delivered some of the most lushly crafted music of his career—featuring contributions from the likes of Ryley Walker, David Grubbs and jaimie branch—arriving like a verdant landscape coming into full bloom. Yet on “Cracking the Jaw,” a standout moment from Winter’s new album A Trick of the Light, that landscape is treated to a dramatic and stormy set of sounds, a torrent of distorted guitar, wild soloing and ever-intensifying drum work from Tyler Damon. Winter has described the song as both “the closest thing I have to a pop song” and “a car about to crash,” and somehow both are true, the artist trading more pristine beauty for immediate yet abrasive thrills.
That electricity and intensity courses through the whole of A Trick of the Light, an album in which Eli Winter leads a rotating ensemble of players through a set of turbulent jazz-Americana while surrendering to feeling itself. Though informed in part by grief, particularly the loss of friend and collaborator branch in 2022, A Trick of the Light is not necessarily “about anything,” Winter said in a statement on social media (and certainly not “American primitivist guitar,” he adds), but rather a set of music “in service of emotion.” Though often traveling a great distance from the stark beauty of his earlier recordings, A Trick of the Light is breathtaking in both ambition and execution, a wild swing of an album that doesn’t so much follow a muse as home in on a resonant frequency.
In point of fact, its first swing is certainly its wildest, a nearly 17-minute interpretation of “Arabian Nightingale,” which originally made up the final three and a half minutes of Don Cherry’s 1982 “Mutron” suite. In Winter’s hands it’s dustier and grittier, more like Crazy Horse releasing an album on ECM than Robbie Basho on Windham Hill. Its psychedelic fuzz-jazz is rife with wondrous details: Gerrit Hatcher’s wandering saxophone leads, the buzz of Andrew Scott Young’s upright bass, or Sam Wagster’s pedal steel, providing bright glimmers like stars against a the complex hues of a nebula. Comprising four-fifths of the album’s first side, “Arabian Nightingale” is worth the price of admission alone.
Though the other five tracks on A Trick of the Light do so on a more compact scale, they nonetheless maintain a similar sense of dramatic beauty and cosmic wonder. Where “Cracking the Jaw” adopts a darker and heavier approach, the elegiac “For a Fallen Rocket” is a more sweetly somber acoustic piece, with gorgeous gusts of pedal steel sweeping across Winter’s finger-picked progressions. He and his collaborators once again draw inspiration from jazz on “Ida Lupino,” a Carla Bley composition that presents one of the prettier tracks here, romantic in its gorgeous Western surf aesthetic, but with a gradual rise toward urgency and ecstasy. The title track follows, almost as a coda to “Ida”‘s climax, Luke Sutherland’s piercing violin leads scraping against guitar, drums and two basses—one of them played by Mike Watt—in a captivating escalation that evokes The Dirty Three at their most powerfully charged.
The album’s final track, “Black Iris on a Burning Quilt,” provides a heroic and triumphant bookend to a path of turmoil, grief, rediscovery and joy—though not always in that order. Like “Cracking the Jaw,” it’s a moment that more closely resembles a pop song than much of Winter’s other music. Yet it, too, escalates and intensifies, guided by melody and riding off into the sunset on a glorious high. It’s a well earned moment of cinematic glory on an album in which Winter often prefers to pursue the road less traveled, achieving a moment of clarity after a powerful journey of the soul.
Label: Three Lobed
Year: 2025
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Eli Winter : A Trick of the Light
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