Harry Skoler - LYDIALIEBMAN.COM

Echoes
Release Date: May 1, 2026
Label: Red Brick Hill

Clarinet virtuoso Harry Skoler proudly announces the release of Echoes, a title referencing the musicians whose names title the nine compositions, each refracting in notes and tones Skoler’s memories of his initial encounters with Bill Evans, James Williams, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Marian McPartland, Teddy Wilson, Benny Goodman, Jimmy Giuffre, Lionel Hampton, and Miles Davis, between ages 14 and 30. Now 69, Skoler performs them with a highly interactive quartet comprising guitar grandmaster Bill Frisell and the unfailingly synchronous bass-drum tandem of Dezron Douglas and Johnathan Blake, who collectively inhabit the broad emotional palette evoked by Skoler’s structures and the unfiltered, finely calibrated shouts, squeaks, moans, and murmurs that flavor his improvisations, sharing his story and signifying upon it with deep empathy and creative inspiration.

Echoes, which brings Skoler’s leader discography to seven, has a dramatic back story. It dates to 2018, when he agreed to serve as interim Chair of the Berklee College of Music Woodwind Department after one-time Jazz Messengers/Tony Williams Quintet saxophonist Bill Pierce retired. Soon thereafter, Skoler suffered a catastrophic medical event, which he survived after his doctors, concerned that his heart might stop on the operating table from the effects of anesthesia, decoupled him from it.

“I woke up completely wide awake during the surgery, but my body was paralyzed, so I couldn’t open my eyes, I couldn’t move my body, and I was intubated, so I couldn’t use my diaphragm to breathe,” Skoler recalls. “I didn’t know what was going on. I couldn’t let them know I was awake. I thought it was some kind of hell. I was trapped like that. They said it was five minutes, but it seemed a lot longer. I kept saying to myself that I wanted to see the next day. Eventually they saved my life and put me in a coma, and I survived. But I ended up so traumatized that I went into a dark malaise, I didn’t want to play or listen to music. I wanted nothing to do with it, and it dramatically affected many things in my life.”

Relieved of supervisory duties when the eminent tenor saxophonist Walter Smith III assumed the position of Chair in the summer of 2019, Skoler began to assimilate a therapist’s suggestion “to hold the positive things and negative things at the same time.” Towards summer’s end, he recalls, “It hit me like a bolt of lightning that I wanted to record.” He wanted to move in a different direction from the four well-received albums he’d done between 1995 and 2009 on which he mirrored the classic Benny Goodman Quartet format with vibraphonist Ed Saindon, playing mid-20th century Songbook and Swing Era repertoire with a lyric, fluid approach that amalgamated the canonic styles of Goodman, Artie Shaw, Buddy DeFranco, Jimmy Hamilton and others without xeroxing them, and took into account deep influences gleaned from pianists and vocalists.

“I knew Walter’s work as a producer, and asked him to help me put it together,” Skoler continues. Smith recalls suggesting that Skoler consider “playing with younger musicians who would inspire him – they’d take whatever he wrote and make it current with how they play, and they’d draw eyes and ears to his projects.” After some brainstorming, they decided to address Charles Mingus’ upcoming 2022 centennial. For the album, titled Living in Sound, Smith pulled together Ambrose Akinmusire, Fabian Almazan, and Darcy James Argue to write well-proportioned rearrangements of canonic Mingusonia, performed with authority and a fresh spirit by a top-shelf quintet of Skoler, trumpeter Nicholas Payton, pianist Kenny Barron, bassist Christian McBride, drummer Johnathan Blake, plus singer Jazzmeia Horn and a string quartet.

“My life growing up was hell,” Skoler says. “When I listened to my first recording of Mingus, that might have been the first time I felt I really had a family. When I saw Mingus live in 1975, there was a presence I’d never seen before and haven’t seen since. I feel that Mingus was a victim of trauma; some basic structure of being profoundly connected to him that changed my life and still changes my life on a daily basis.”

At Smith’s suggestion, Skoler foregrounded himself more notably on their second project, Red Brick Hill, a 14-piece suite he’d composed after reflecting on the trauma that ensued from his family’s manipulative behavior during his teens after a close friend committed suicide, for which Smith assembled a core group of vibraphonist Joel Ross with Douglas and Blake, with guests Marquis Hill on trumpet, Christian Sands on piano, and Grégoire Maret on harmonica. At the studio, Skoler related the story to the younger musicians. “They were compassionate and very personal and intimate with their responses, and we played so that they all told it together spontaneously, through their eyes,” Skoler says. “I was stunned.”

In preparing for Echoes, Skoler, a Benny Goodman enthusiast after starting serious clarinet lessons at 13, recalled a story he’d written about sitting alongside Teddy Wilson’s piano the following year as Wilson played an engagement in the suboptimal environs of a noisy, tacky restaurant near Skoler’s home in the suburbs of Syracuse, New York. He applauded after every solo, earning several “thank yous” from the maestro.

“I realized how much that experience had formed the groundwork for my life in many ways,” Skoler says. “So I decided to write about other encounters with my heroes. Then I composed the raw material, which we scoped out in long, intense rehearsals with local players.”

They decided to bring in a guitar, Smith states, “to let the sound breathe,” and decided to invite Frisell, who agreed after listening to Red Brick Hill. “Harry’s strengths are things that are a bit more off the grid, a bit more open-ended, a bit leaning towards a freer side of playing,” Smith continues. “You can tell he knows all the history and has the ability to play traditionally, but now he’s more focused on things I notice when I listen to, say, Archie Shepp, and when I think about dynamics and changing the timbre of the sound. All those detailed things are present in Benny Goodman or Artie Shaw, but it’s more about the notes. Here it seems that no matter what the music is, he’s leaning in this other direction.”

“After Bill said that he was in, we wrote some letters back and forth, and when we met in the studio we hugged immediately and felt a strong personal connection,” Skoler says. “The music just gelled.” “Everyone played themselves, and everything worked,” Smith adds. “They’re all world-class musicians, but no egos. Everybody was cool about everything.”

“I connect with Walter on a lot of levels,” Skoler concludes. “He knows that I’ve been through a lot of different things, and he wants an atmosphere in the studio where it’s laughter, it’s acceptance, it’s love. It feels like I’ve known these players forever.”