by Adorjan Horvát
Traditionally jazz guitarists occupy a defined place within an ensemble. They state melodies, supply harmony, accompany soloists, or step forward as improvisers. On Ode to the Possible, Tom Lippincott’s eight-string guitar routinely performs combinations of those functions at once. The result is an album whose most distinctive quality is found in the way a single instrument reshapes the sonic world around it.
Throughout these nineteen tracks, Lippincott expands the traditional responsibilities of the jazz guitar. The instrument functions like a small ensemble unto itself. Melody, harmony, counterpoint, texture, and electronic coloration frequently coexist within the same musical gesture. The achievement is created by integration. Rather than drawing attention to the instrument’s expanded range, Lippincott uses that range to create a musical environment in which conventional divisions between instrumental roles become increasingly difficult to locate.
The quartet surrounding Lippincott is David Fernandez’s tenor and soprano saxophones, Marty Quinn’s bass, and Lucas Apostoleris’ drums operate within a landscape largely defined by the guitar’s evolving register, voicing choices, and textural breadth. Because the instrument often occupies harmonic, melodic, and counterpoint-adjacent territory. The ensemble and guitar build patterns of color, density, and motion.
The album’s electronic vocabulary further extends that environment. Ambient introductions, atmospheric interludes, delay treatments, synth-like coloration, and sustained textures expand the guitar’s voice beyond its acoustic identity. The result is a record that rewards architectural listening. Rather than following themes alone, the ear is drawn toward moving voicings, shifting registral relationships, cycles of density and release, and the subtle ways harmonic motion generates momentum in and around the guitar. One begins to hear the guitar not simply as a source of melodies, but as the mechanism through which the music continually flows.
On “Bell Tower,” the performance begins within a contemporary post-bop framework gradually expanding into something more layered and difficult to categorize. Throughout the piece, Lippincott repeatedly collapses the distinction between accompaniment and orchestration. Large, octave-spanning voicings appear between melodic statements, while sustained harmonies continue beneath the melody line doubled with Fernandez’s saxophone. The guitar sounds like a chordal instrument behaving like an orchestrator of the arrangement.
As the piece develops from swing into straighter rhythmic terrain, the guitar’s role expands further. Clean sustained tones gradually give way to a sharper edge and eventually to synth-inflected coloration that broadens the instrument’s expressive reach. These sounds serve the larger design of the composition, enlarging the guitar’s ability to shape direction, tension, and release. The melody remains flowing and surprisingly accessible in contour, while much of the music’s sophistication unfolds beneath it. As elsewhere on the album, Lippincott allows the listener to encounter clarity first and complexity second.
Fernandez proves particularly effective within this environment matching the guitar’s density. Whether navigating angular intervallic lines in “Bell Tower” or the lyrical soprano textures of “Zakir,” he melodically reveals pathways through the harmonic landscapes. His tenor possesses a warm timbre with just enough bite to remain present within the guitar’s broad registral field, while his soprano frequently reinforces the music’s more atmospheric dimensions. Rather than functioning as an opposing voice, he often feels like an extension of the music’s internal design.
“Bell Tower” introduces the album’s possibilities. “Exit Strategy” serves as its clearest statement of purpose. More than any other piece on the album, it reveals how Lippincott thinks as a composer. The composition functions as the record’s central achievement, demonstrating how harmony itself can emerge from movement within the guitar rather than from conventional accompaniment. From its opening moments, broad eight-string voicings establish an environment shaped less by chord changes than by evolving relationships between voices.
What makes the piece so compelling is the composition’s periods of activity expanding through moving lines, inner-voice motion, and shifting bass movement before releasing into more open spaces. The guitar’s Rhodes-like vibrato coloration contributes to this sensation, creating a subtle swirling quality within the harmony itself. Chords behave as structures whose internal voices continually reshape while maintaining their identity.
Inner lines move beneath sustained upper tones. Harmonic colors emerge and dissolve. Contrapuntal motion creates the sensation that the music is unfolding from within rather than being directed from above. Even the improvisational passages seem less concerned with departure than with revelation, exposing additional dimensions of a structure already in motion. By the time distorted tones give way to delay-rich textures and synth coloration, timbre has become an active compositional force alongside harmony and rhythm.
The listener will encounter clear melodic surfaces while much of the music’s sophistication is in the underlying framework. The melodies of “An Inhabitant of Carcosa,” “Sisters and Brothers,” and “Zakir” are immediately approachable, yet beneath them lies a network of intervallic voicings, upper-structure colors, and evolving harmonic relationships that reward repeated listening without demanding it.
“An Inhabitant of Carcosa” demonstrates this with its lyrical melodic language sitting comfortably above harmonies that are considerably more adventurous than they initially appear. Lippincott’s improvisation develops through rhythmic motives and wide intervallic shapes rather than displays of technical excess. Even when the music leans toward fusion-oriented sonics, the emphasis remains on development rather than spectacle. The improvisation feels embedded within the composition itself rather than layered on top of it.
The album’s electronics deserve consideration. Too often electronic elements in contemporary jazz function as production choices layered onto otherwise acoustic performances. Here they operate as extensions of instrumental language. Delay, distortion, ambient sustain, synth coloration, and electronic textures are not decorative additions but active contributors to the music’s identity.
“Zakir” offers an example. Wordless vocals from Camila Meza merge with synth-guitar textures to create an atmosphere shaped as much by timbre as by melody. The soprano saxophone enters naturally into that environment, extending rather than disrupting its mood. Long melodic lines unfold across modal colors, while the composition develops less through short motivic repetition than through evolving texture and dynamic shaping.
Elsewhere, electronics create entirely different climates. “Lynchian” pushes the guitar toward futuristic, angular territory, its increasingly computer-like textures interacting with altered harmonic colors and groove-based development. The ambient abstractions of “Preface/Overture 25” and “Epilogue” frame the album with spacious electronic environments that feel less like introductions and conclusions than extensions of the same musical language. Throughout the record, electronics expand compositional space rather than merely altering tone.
“Sisters and Brothers” reveals a layered harmonic design, one can hear the physical reality of the instrument itself. The subtle sound of the pick moving across the strings, the resonance of sustained chords, the grain of touch beneath the harmony. For a record so interested in expansion, these moments of physical presence prove surprisingly important. The complexity remains present, but it never feels imposed.
Likewise, “Rational Peace” demonstrates Lippincott’s language with rolling acoustic-guitar figures, spacious harmonic movement, and atmospheric sustain reveal that the sophistication of the music does not depend upon density. If anything, these quieter moments make the larger design easier to appreciate.
What ultimately emerges from this expanded instrumental language is a broader reflection on musical identity. Throughout Ode to the Possible, melody becomes harmony. Harmony becomes texture. Texture becomes atmosphere. Improvisation becomes structure. Electronics become instrumental voice. The eight-string guitar simply makes that fluidity audible.
Ode to the Possible, melody, harmony, texture, atmosphere, and improvisation as neighboring rooms within the same house. The listener is continually invited to move between them, discovering new relationships with each return. The guitar becomes the coherence through overlap. The title feels earned not because the music argues for possibility, but because it demonstrates what can happen when familiar musical roles are allowed to become something from a different angle. That’s the short of it!
