Corey King: Change the Wind, close to the mic

Change the Wind is loud the way a small room is loud. Sparse arrangements and close miking keep Corey King's voice forward of everything else while the instrumentation expands and contracts around it. Nine tracks, one method, held for the whole record without a single flinch toward a bigger gesture.

King won a 2021 GRAMMY for his work with Esperanza Spalding, and his career runs through collaborations with Milton Nascimento, Gil Scott-Heron, Bonobo and Iggy Pop. Jazz, soul and experimental songwriting: the resume crosses all of it, and his records have always been played rather than announced. Change the Wind is his most direct and personal statement to date. Direct here means unarmoured, not louder.

It was written across a stretch that swung between pandemic isolation and constant international touring, and much of it was recorded in informal rooms rather than studios. King wrote, produced and performed it himself. Dan Millice mastered it, Juanfe Rehm did the pre-master, and Western Vinyl has it out on July 24 in digital, a limited 12 inch black vinyl and a limited CD in a gatefold cardboard wallet. The guests are few and heavy: Spalding on upright bass for Worms, Takuya Kuroda's trumpet on Spyder and Off the Embankment, Morgan Guerin on Did We See That Coming, and a drum chair that passes between Eric Doob, Urian Hackney and Adam Jackson.

What you hear is broken-beat rhythm under jazz harmony that never shows off, brass layered instead of blasted, and a voice that slides between hush and force without announcing the switch. The close miking does the rest: breath, room, the small mechanics of a hand on a bass. The record alternates between intimate and large-scale, though the large-scale moments come from arrangement, not volume.

R.M.K. opens with nothing to hide behind. Distant Ray puts Eric Doob's drums in the room and little else. Spyder is where Kuroda's trumpet arrives, the first time the album lets brass talk. Worms, the longest cut at 4:53, brings Spalding's upright bass and Urian Hackney's drums, and it is the record's centre of gravity: stillness and movement sharing one tempo.

Side B keeps the temperature. The Damndest, Off the Embankment, Did We See That Coming and the closing Annapurna stay small and close, with Kuroda returning on Off the Embankment and Morgan Guerin stepping in for Did We See That Coming. The subject throughout is motion and attachment: stability hunted while moving, devotion and fear and resilience, protecting your energy, choosing connection over distance, the relationship with his daughter.

This is for the listener who plays records at conversation volume and then stops talking. It sits at the jazz-trained end of soul, nearer a singer-songwriter album with a rhythm section than the neo soul tag suggests, and it will land hardest with anyone who came to King through the Spalding work or the sideman credits. If you came for a chorus, this record does not have one to give you.

What does not work is the consistency. Nine tracks of restraint, and the only structural surprise is the drum chair changing hands on Ill-Will to Goodwill, where Adam Jackson takes over. One new drummer, then back to the method. By Annapurna you may want the band to lean in once and refuse to get out of the way. It never does, and that is the discipline and the cost.

Four out of five. The playing is exact throughout and the writing is as personal as anything King has put his name to, but the range stays narrow by choice, and choice is still a limit. Play it in the afternoon and again at midnight. The second pass is the one that lands.

The tracklist

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