Devin Gray’s Melt All the Guns

Devin Gray’s Melt All the Guns: “Melt All the Guns II”

(FR, US)

Devin Gray maintains a cross-continental existence as a musician, splitting his time between New York and Berlin. In both communities he’s worked with countless heavyweights – including saxophonists Bill McHenry and Tony Malaby, trumpeter Russ Johnson and bassist Michael Formanek among many others – leaving his love for collaboration front and centre. In the last couple of years, however, Gray has devoted much of his energy to his excellent solo project Most Definitely, a rigorous statement built upon years of research, but he’s never stopped working with other players. 

He’s revived an excellent trio project that emerged in 2019, with trumpeter Ralph Alessi and pianist Angelica Sanchez. The music on its EP “Melt All the Guns” – a wordless protest against the ubiquity of deadly firearms in the United States – moves between an almost martial yet elastic tension to nakedly lyric, especially on Gray’s closing piece “Protect Our Environment”, a demand that goes well beyond ecological preservation. The absence of a bassist in the group frees up the harmonic possibilities, which brings out the most extroverted eloquence in Alessi. In this concert, Gray and Alessi reconvene alongside the exciting young French pianist Myslaure Augustin, a recent student of the trumpeter.