Jazz
Jazz Music City · 9 October 2026
“Day Dreamer” opens with seven minutes and eleven seconds that hold nothing back, and what catches the ear is Ted Ludwig’s guitar, sitting in a place a quintet of this sort usually keeps for piano alone. Matt Endahl on piano, Kevin Beardsley on bass and Joshua Hunt on drums complete a band that recorded in two days, 18 and 19 May 2025 in Nashville, and “Eternal” came out on 9 October on Barber’s own label.
The surprise in the running order is “Peace, Be Still”, a minute and four seconds dropped into third place between “The Skipper” and “Eternal”, each of them just under seven. Barber is from Nashville and came up on gospel and soul, and that minute is where the upbringing shows; inside the album its job is a short breath before the title track. “Cabbage”, seven thirty-eight, is where the quintet stretches furthest, and “Mandela” closes the central stretch with six minutes and eighteen at exactly the intensity it already had.
The only place the pressure genuinely drops is the reading of “What’s Going On”: the calm is borrowed, and the two interludes it does have, the minute of “Peace, Be Still” and the closing “Cabbage (Reprise)” at one minute fifty-one, do precisely the same punctuating work, with the reprise returning to a theme heard just two tracks earlier without reading it any differently. “Six Words”, which Barber made with his band Everyday Magic, was two years and one month old.
Rating: 7.7/10
Text by Aina Torrents