Jazz
Earshift Music · 16 October 2026
“Seed of Thought” runs a minute thirty-eight, and the album starts with the piano trio on its own, in a hurry, before Stephen Byth’s tenor comes in over the top with a burnished tone. These are ten compositions of his own and his second record as a leader: the first was “Reparations”, of 1 February 2021, and in between he put out “Welcome, Melancholia” on 2 March 2022, a four-track EP of pieces by Coltrane, Ellington and Shorter. Byth is Australian and lives in New York.
The quartet is Yessaï Karapetian on piano and synthesizers, Simón Willson on upright bass and Angus Mason on drums, with Byth distributing tenor, clarinet, flute and bass clarinet track by track. “The Light in Everything” is where that shows most: it begins as airy balladry, with Byth layering his own winds, and ends in a mode that comes from Coltrane and McCoy Tyner without announcing it. The session is dated 27 October 2025, at Samurai Hotel in Astoria, Queens, with David Stoller engineering, and there was additional recording at 434 Studios in Brooklyn; Jeremy Loucas mixed and mastered.
Four tracks widen out to eight players: “Cutting Ties”, “Freedom (!/?)”, “Time is Now” and the title piece. In come Alexandra Ridout on trumpet, Alfredo Colón on alto, Caleb Smith on trombone and John Ellis on bass clarinet. On “Cutting Ties” the post-bop tilts towards film writing and the lines from Ridout and Ellis are not decoration; on “Time is Now”, Smith’s trombone solo is the most singable thing here; and on “Growth in Stasis”, Colón opens on alto before the four horns settle into counterpoint.
The four wide tracks, though, are written to one plan: the new horns carry the theme, each takes a solo, and at the end they fold back in with the quartet. It works the first time and by the fourth the route is known by heart, which leaves the octet doing colour rather than offering a real alternative to the quartet. The best of the album happens when Byth keeps three musicians: “Freedom (!/?)” risks a tango-ish cadenza that would not have fitted the larger format.
The record came out of an answer from Wayne Shorter. Byth asked him at a workshop how you turn poison into medicine through music, and Shorter told him the poison is the medicine. It closes with “Upon Reflection”, a minute thirty-one, and it comes out on Earshift Music.
Rating: 7.6/10
Text by Aina Torrents