Tom Skinner - Kaleidoscopic Visions

Album Notes by Piotr Orlov: Popular sociology cliches notwithstanding, the middle years are a curious bridge to survey one’s life from. Especially for artists. The bank behind is a backlog of experience, for-better-or-worse perceptions of how the world works, unequal measures of laurels and regrets, plus a rolodex of dear ones (for the lucky) and lost ones (for all). The shore in front contains a shorter winding road (still loaded with possibilities if not quite as open-ended), informed by wisdom gained and failures seared, shadowed by mortality, responsibility and inevitability. Lots of water passes under this bridge of mid-life. For creative types—adept at listening to the tides, recognizing their flow as a circadian rhythm, reconciling the planet’s clock with their own—the view from this bridge has been known to inspire great art.

Upon the release of Kaleidoscopic Visions, the second album that Tom Skinner has made under his own name, the drummer-composer will be 45 years-old. Skinner is already in possession of an incredible career—two decades as a key member of London’s jazz community, including co-founding the mighty Sons of Kemet; in-demand collaborator to a who’s-who of famed electronic producers and noted rhythmalists; purveyor of his own left-of-center musical pursuits (see: Hello Skinny); and, most recently, a budding experimental-rock star (see: The Smile). Off-the-clock, Skinner is a life-long Londoner, husband and father, keeper of poly-generational sonic memories, a soulful creature attuned to old and new relationships.

The Kaleidoscopic Visions that form Skinner’s view from the bridge between his past and future take all these roles and details into account. Where on his bandleader debut, 2022’s star-studded quintet piece Voices of Bishara, Skinner used Abdul Wadud's 1978 solo cello masterpiece By Myself as inspiration for an album of post-session edits; Kaleidoscopic Visions leans into “more personal,” fully composed pieces, interpreted by his band’s improvised choices, a timeline of life reconciled in his creative subconscious.

Like classic albums of yore, Kaleidoscopic Visions is composed of distinct but overlapping sonic strategies to narrate Skinner’s journey. On the entirely instrumental Side A, he orchestrates a gorgeous song-cycle, artfully illuminated by the live Bishara band—bassist Tom Herbert, cellist Kareem Dayes, plus Robert Stillman and Chelsea Carmichael on various woodwinds and reeds—plus the occasional electric guitar of Portishead’s Adrian Utley. Skinner says the floating often-backbeat-free music was composed by following his “instinct and intuition,” written mostly on guitar, an instrument that is secondary to him (“When I play it, I don’t really know what I’m doing”), but one he finds to be a “productive compositional tool.”