Trio of Bloom

The members of Trio of Bloom are three of the most accomplished improvisers working in jazz or flitting around its experimental edges—drummer Marcus Gilmore, keyboardist Craig Taborn, and guitarist Nels Cline. A 2025 MacArthur fellow, Taborn is a hip-hop-loving metalhead who has played with Roscoe Mitchell, David Torn, and Tim Berne during the last three decades, in addition to leading a sterling set of his own projects. After long runs with Vijay Iyer and Steve Coleman, Gilmore has emerged in recent years as a remarkable and inquisitive bandleader, even as he’s risen to acclaim for his work with Sullivan Fortner. And though he may be best known these days for playing in Wilco for nearly a quarter-century, Nels Cline is a singular guitarist, his razor-wire tone and visceral relationship with his instrument’s body stretching from the erstwhile Banyan to his current Consentrik Quartet, from playing with The Geraldine Fibbers to collaborations alongside John Medeski and Billy Martin.

A few years back, impresario and producer David Breskin approached the three with an idea: Four decades earlier, he’d led the trio of Bill Frisell, Melvin Gibbs, and Ronald Shannon Jackson in a one-off endeavor called Power Tools, obscure but beloved by jazz cognoscenti. Would they be willing to try the same thing? Cline, Gilmore, and Taborn convened at Brooklyn’s The Bunker in November 2024, taking their collective name from a pun on a short-lived Jaco Pastorius supergroup. The sessions were elastic and open, moving among the tangled psych-funk of “Queen King,” the alien iridescence of “Bloomers,” and the endless outer-space expanse of “Bend It.” Taborn shifts often to synthesizers here, threading his sound to Cline’s and then pulling against it, while Gilmore builds structures just to remodel them. Working somewhere among free-improv punch and harsh noise, aggressive bop and jam-world joy, Trio of Bloom is a surprising band made from familiar pieces.