Ritual, out April 10, 2026 via Chill Tone Records, features a community-bridging band with pianist Orrin Evans, saxophonist/flautist Hery Paz, guitarist Emmanuel Michael, bassist Vicente Archer and drummer Michael Sarin
“What marks Curtis out is a resolutely personal sax sound, reflecting Coltrane, Ornette, and some of the tonal tremors of Albert Ayler – but within a composer’s conception flexible enough to embrace both free-collective ensemble invention and subtle structure.” – John Fordham, Jazzwise
“Heatmap radiates with brilliance, highlighting the very act of playing music and the intangible but irreplaceable energy that doing so creates.” – Kira Grunenberg, DownBeat
There’s a ritualistic aspect to nearly every step in the process of making music. Most of us only witness the final, communal ritual – the performance in which we, as audience, play a vital role. But on his thrilling new album, Ritual, multi-instrumentalist Caleb Wheeler Curtis celebrates the myriad smaller rituals that lead to that ultimate moment of creation: the countless choices, the endless hours of practice, the wealth of experiences on and off the stage, the values shared by the musicians.
A major aspect of that vision was achieved in assembling the mutable ensemble for the album, which expands Curtis’ palette beyond his previous explorations of trio and quartet formations while shape-shifting from track to track. Alongside the leader, who continues to focus on the stritch – the straight alto named by Rahsaan Roland Kirk, which Curtis has adopted as both an extension and reinvention of his distinctive saxophone voice – is a stellar band that includes tenor saxophonist and flutist Hery Paz, guitarist Emmanuel Michael, pianist Orrin Evans, bassist Vicente Archer and drummer Michael Sarin.
While Curtis has played with each of those musicians in various contexts, their diverse circles have in many cases never overlapped. “A big part of what makes a life in music worthwhile is the community building,” Curtis explains. “I love introducing people to each other when I know how much their values align. Jazz can be very segregated, artistically, racially and otherwise, as cultures and communities have separated – but musically we share so much. The benefit of traveling in so many different circles is that I’m uniquely able to cross-pollinate these communities.”
photo by Vivianne Zhou
With Ritual, Curtis continues to explore the vistas opened by his previous album, The True Story of Bears and the Invention of the Battery. In taking up the stritch as his primary instrument, he occupies advantageous ground – the horn is close enough in sound to the traditional alto that it doesn’t feel wholly alien, yet different enough that it allows him to carve his own path forward. In doing so he picks up a raw and investigatory thread left unresolved in the wake of 1970s and ‘80s pioneers like Ornette Coleman and Arthur Blythe, with further investigation from Thomas Chapin and Tim Berne, as the Downtown and Young Lions movements diverged – at the same time weaving together representatives of both of those scenes along with a new generation represented by the rapidly rising Emmanuel Michael.
“Fantasmas” serves as an incantatory opening to the ritual of the album itself, featuring the core quartet of Curtis, Michael, Archer and Sarin. The piece is a searching call to the ancestors, whether in a spiritual sense or as an acknowledgment of the tradition that all of these musicians have explored and are determined to advance. The tension inherent in “Bleakout,” which adds Paz’s tenor to the mix, comes from the circumstances of its composition – written while stranded by a blackout in Madrid, Spain that threatened to derail Curtis’ European tour just as it was getting underway.
The mood becomes more placid on “Florence,” which marks Evans’ first appearance on the album and is named for a “lake within a lake” on Lake Michigan’s South Manitou Island where Curtis and his family would take summer camping trips during his childhood. The full sextet remains for the urgent “Black Box Extraction,” a taut piece carved out of a larger composition that Curtis couldn’t quite make work. It was producer Julian Shore’s suggestion to do away with the excess – akin to the old joke about making the whole plane out of the indestructible black box.
Curtis and Evans pair off for the brief, tender duet “You Can’t Just Keep the Music” – a captivating reflection of the longstanding camaraderie between these two acclaimed, explorative artists. Paz switches to the flute for “Pond” and “Tenastic,” the blend between flute, piano and guitar being one of the inspiring factors behind Curtis’ concept for the album. The sound is lush and mysterious on “Pond,” wiry and propulsive on “Tenastic.” Curtis’ wistful soprano melds with Sarin’s rustling brushwork and the faint sound of Michael’s fingers on strings to bring a hushed optimism to “The End of Power.” He then layers sopranino and trumpet for the numinous title track.
“The ritual of music making is centered on the communal experience,” Curtis says. “But all of the people involved in music are engaged in a ritual of practice – the practice of committing yourself to this every day, producing your sound, imagining and writing the music, and then giving yourself up to it and accepting what happens in the moment.”
photo by Vivianne Zhou
Caleb Wheeler Curtis
Saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist Caleb Wheeler Curtis is a musician known for his “intensely focused and inventive” style, which draws from a wide range of influences including progressive bop and post-Coltrane/Ornette free improvisation. Based in Brooklyn, NY, his work spans a wide range of projects, each offering a distinctive and direct approach to creating and performing music. Curtis’ most recent release, The True Story of Bears and the Invention of the Battery (2024, Imani), showcases the breadth of his musical ideas. Across both discs, Caleb plays stritch (a straight alto saxophone), sopranino saxophone, trumpet, and tenor saxophone. The first disc features his trio with Sean Conly on bass and Michael Sarin on drums, while the second disc presents interpretations of lesser-known compositions by Thelonious Monk with Eric Revis on bass and Justin Faulkner on drums. As a collaborator, Curtis is a founding member of the collaborative trio Ember and the ensemble Walking Distance, is featured on three GRAMMY-nominated albums by the Captain Black Big Band, and has recorded with Orrin Evans, Jason Moran, Max Light, Josh Lawrence and the Swiss pianist Laurent Nicoud, among others.
Caleb Wheeler Curtis – Ritual
Chill Tone – CT007 – Recorded October 13, 2025
Release date April 10, 2026
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