Vida Nueva – Isamu McGregor

The album also detours north for a pair of two-piano duets with McGregor’s mentor, Jean Michel Pilc, recorded at the French-born pianist’s office at McGill University. The disparate pieces of the album are woven together with the help of a four-part improvised and post produced suite, “The Fates,” which features contributions from Andrew Nemr (tap dance), Brian Donohoe (keyboard and tenor sax), Carey Clayton (electric guitar and synth bass), Engin Gunaydin (drums), Jordan Scannella (fretless electric bass), Justin Goldner (baritone guitar), and Panagiotis Andreou (electric and synth bass). Fate has been much on McGregor’s mind over the years that Vida Nueva developed. Perhaps the most transformative event that any life can experience is parenthood, and McGregor and his 1 wife have welcomed two new lives into the world in recent years. The entire family was then uprooted by the Eaton Fire, one of the eight devastating wildfires that swept through Southern California in January 2025. Throw into the mix the global pandemic that disrupted everyone’s lives beginning in early 2020, and the album’s themes of uncertainty and evolution seem inevitable. Throughout all of this, the music that became Vida Nueva was simmering in the background. More than five years in the making, the album’s stylistic and emotional diversity exemplify its lengthy gestation period, though the careful crafting and structuring of the wide-ranging material make for a cohesive narrative for the album as a whole. The first of the two duets with Pilc, “183 W. 10th,” almost whispers the album into being, slowly accumulating from a gentle pulse to crystalline shimmers and dense clusters before dissolving again. The improvised piece, named for the address of Smalls Jazz Club in New York where McGregor first encountered Pilc’s playing (“my brain melted,” he recalls), is bookended by the frenetic “555 Sherbrooke,” the address of Pilc’s Montreal office where this most recent communion was recorded.