"Ritual"

There’s a ritualistic aspect to nearly every step in the process of making music. Most of us only witness the final, communal ritual - the performance in which we, as audience, play a vital role. But on his thrilling new album, Ritual, multi-instrumentalist Caleb Wheeler Curtis celebrates the myriad smaller rituals that lead to that ultimate moment of creation: the countless choices, the endless hours of practice, the wealth of experiences on and off the stage, the values shared by the musicians.

Ritual, released April 10, 2026 on Chill Tone Records, finds Curtis marshaling the benefits of that lifelong dedication into a singular vision that could only come from an artist that All About Jazz has called, “one of the more daring musicians in jazz today.”

A major aspect of that vision was achieved in assembling the mutable ensemble for the album, which expands Curtis’ palette beyond his previous explorations of trio and quartet formations while shapeshifting from track to track. Alongside the leader, who continues to focus on the stritch - the straight alto named by Rahsaan Roland Kirk, which Curtis has adopted as both an extension and reinvention of his distinctive saxophone voice - is a stellar band that includes tenor saxophonist and flutist Hery Paz, guitarist Emmanuel Michael, pianist Orrin Evans, bassist Vicente Archer and drummer Michael Sarin.

While Curtis has played with each of those musicians in various contexts, their diverse circles have in many cases never overlapped. “A big part of what makes a life in music worthwhile is the community building,” Curtis explains. “I love introducing people to each other when I know how much their values align. Jazz can be very segregated, artistically, racially and otherwise, as cultures and communities have separated - but musically we share so much. The benefit of traveling in so many different circles is that I’m uniquely able to cross-pollinate these communities.”

With Ritual, Curtis continues to explore the vistas opened by his previous album, The True Story of Bears and the Invention of the Battery. In taking up the stritch as his primary instrument, he occupies advantageous ground - the horn is close enough in sound to the traditional alto that it doesn’t feel wholly alien, yet different enough that it allows him to carve his own path forward. In doing so he picks up a raw and investigatory thread left unresolved in the wake of 1970s and ‘80s pioneers like Ornette Coleman and Arthur Blythe, with further investigation from Thomas Chapin and Tim Berne, as the Downtown and Young Lions movements diverged - at the same time weaving together representatives of both of those scenes along with a new generation represented by the rapidly rising Emmanuel Michael.