Anthony Wilson's The Plan of Paris solo album - the 13th in a career that began in 1997 with his self-titled, Grammy-nominated debut - can be interpreted as a book of individual short stories with detailed, very specific cinematic set pieces conceived as narratives, an intimate, fluid hybrid of jazz, folk and blues.
His longtime main ensemble - Wilson on guitar and vocals accompanied by Blue Note recording artist Gerald Clayton on piano and keyboards, bassist David Piltchand Jay Bellerose on drums and percussion - helps bring the tales to life with these musical settings much as, say, Jonny Greenwood's score does in Power of the Dog.
Wilson relates these scenarios in an almost matter-of-fact conversational tone that draws the listener into them with an intimacy that recalls a master storyteller like Diana Krall, which is no mistake because Anthony has played guitar in her quartet since 2001, joining her for a series of shows at Paris' Olympia Theater which turned into the following year's Grammy-winning recording concert film, Live in Paris. The introduction of his vocals and lyrics follows the release of 2016's Frogtown, where he first began incorporating them into his previously instrumental, mostly jazz music.
"I am quite interested in musical story-telling," he says. "I love the juxtaposition of instrumental music and songs with lyrics, even though it confuses people sometimes."
Indeed the subjects on the new album range from the pleasures of pandemic TV binge-watching ("No Intro, No Recap") and a real-life murder ballad torn from the headlines of an '80s newspaper ("A Postmaster's Daughter") to an uplifting tribute to the late Congressman John Lewis' historic Memphis civil rights confrontation ("The Bridge") and an homage to and meditation on the great artists we've recently lost, with a special nod to John Prine ("Dreams and Diamonds"). The sprawling title track is an epic tale of romantic intrigue and an elusive missing person along the Seine, in which one's mind reflects a grid layout depicting the City of Lights, a smokey film noir that touches on both Hitchcock's obsessive Vertigo and Bernardo Bertolucci's fin de siècle Last Tango in Paris.
"It's a mental sense of direction, the narrator knowing what he wants and how to go about getting it," says Wilson about the connection between one's inner thoughts and the physical world.
The stories reflect Wilson's love of novelists like Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor and Lydia Davis, who "compress a whole narrative in a small space," along with auteur musician/ songwriters like Joni Mitchell, Randy Newman, Harry Nilsson, Leonard Cohen, Stephen Sondheim, Elvis Costello (whom he's gotten to know through Diana Krall) and Prine, featuring "action, detail and reflection."
The Los Angeles-raised Wilson is biracial, the son of legendary, Mississippi delta-born jazz trumpeter and bandleader Gerald Wilson, but it was his mom - with a record collection that included Bud Powell, Sonny Rollins and Charlie Parker, but also The Band, Erik Satie and Crosby, Stills & Nash - who informed the musical eclecticism reflected in The Plan of Paris. Wilson's influences range from Duke Ellington, Gil Evans and jazz guitarists like Wes Montgomery and Larry Coryell (whom he saw as a teenager play live at L.A.'s legendary McCabe's Guitar Shop) to traditional blues musicians Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Charley Patton, and T-Bone Walker, to genre-crossing hybrid bluesman Ry Cooder.
Over the years, Wilson's recorded with Paul McCartney, Barbra Streisand, Willie Nelson, Leon Russell, Charles Lloyd, Mose Allison, Bobby Hutcherson, Joe Henry, Gladys Knight, Randy Crawford, and Joe Sample, among many others.
Recorded largely live in Los Angeles with co-producer Joe Harley and engineer Pete Min during pandemic quarantine, The Plan of Paris reflects the isolation all of us experienced during those still-unprecedented times, with Wilson creating a world inside his head.
It's the kind of music we all need to hear right now.
Watch the lyric video for the album's title track here:
