Ballister + Luke Stewart - Clocking the Wheel

For this live recording from Brooklyn’s Roulette on their 2025 US Tour, Ballister is joined by the ubiquitous and inexhaustible bassist Luke Stewart. There are very few musicians, let alone bass players, who have the stamina to keep up with Ballister – one of the fieriest units of their era.  Most folks would get plowed under by the energetic and telepathic rapport the trio has spent years developing.  But Stewart doesn’t flinch.

From the start he’s deep in the mix, hacking his way through the dense foliage the trio likes to explore, and forming an instantly cohesive unit with Nilssen-Love that launches the higher voices of cello and saxophone upwards into the stratosphere.  His propulsive energy is a tightly wound rubber band – elastic, pliable, flexible, but always maintaining enough tensile strength to bounce off like a trampoline. This was no surprise to the trio.  Their first encounter with Stewart happened at the legendary Washington DC home for creative music Rhizome on their last US tour in 2022.  That gig blew the roof off the community-oriented and artist-centric organization that Stewart helped to found, a space that’s been ground zero for the DC scene for more than a decade.  When they came back to the US in 2025, there was no doubt they needed to recreate that cyclone.  Thankfully, their concert at Roulette provided the opportunity.