Michael Jones: The Promise of Escape

There’s almost as much space as sound on this collection of three percussion works. This is especially true of the final piece, Scott Wollschleger’s trace-escape-horizon (2023-24), which Jones commissioned and is the composer’s first solo percussion piece. Over 36 minutes, Jones navigates the harmonics and gentle touches of Wollschleger’s conception, as if leading the listener through a sculpture exhibit. It’s a meditative experience. The other commission on the album, Pluto Bell’s A Moment Or Two (2021), has more drama, with bold statements made on a large drum in dialogue with a high-pitched metallic instrument, like a triangle, but still plenty of room for the sounds to breathe. Jones also gives his interpretation of Nicholas Deyoe’s Lullaby (2011), which Brian Archinal premiered. In Jones’s hands, it provides the perfect bridge between Bell and Wollschleger, with busier moments alternating with more spacious sections. The album is a wonderful introduction to Jones’s artistry and, as a huge Wollschleger fan, I’m grateful to him for inviting the composer to try something new.

— Jeremy Shatan, 4.18.2026

Timbre, Texture, and Sustain

Composers are continuing to create solo and ensemble percussion music built on the expressive possibilities of struck objects, rather than on the power and rhythm that characterize most percussion in both popular and classical music. “A Moment in Time” by Pluto Bell, the first track on the new album The Promise of Escape from percussionist Michael Jones, is a prime example.

“A Moment or Two”

A variety of pitched and metallic sounds from bells and bell plates, crotales, and the bars of a glockenspiel float above a gulf of solid space. Widely spaced strikes on a booming bass drum punctuate the depths of the emptiness. The placement of the different instruments in the listener’s ears creates a sense of surrounding space; the bleed of one tone’s decay into the attack of the next seems to smooth over the passage of time. And this is an album on which time becomes very malleable.

Around the sixth minute the bass drum drops out, and the bells establish a rhythm like that of a tolling clock. The sequence of tones feels like it could be carrying a message, but any contents remain mysterious. In the 10th minute a deep gong announces a third section. The bass drum returns briefly, the rhythm collapses, and the bells seem to withdraw into contemplation. We’re left with – I’m not sure what. And how much time has passed? It’s hard to estimate without looking.

“Lullaby”

The glockenspiel, this time in whole form, returns in “Lullaby” by Nicholas Deyoe. The piece begins with the instrument in conversation with drums, woodblock, and cymbals. Intermittently, this piece has more density and drive than Bell’s. But rather than defining a beat – that’s left to the woodblock, and only intermittently – the unpitched sounds of the drums carry the narrative, while the glockenspiel offers commentary. The sustain of the bass drum, the quiet rat-a-tat of the woodblock, and feedback-like whines from the cymbal add flavor and atmosphere.

Silence becomes an important element during the middle third of the 12-minute piece. High-pitched whines streak over the soundscape like comets, until a few angry drum strikes banish them into the ether. Noise and busyness announce the final section, building tension and further driving the narrative. But before any definitive statement can be made, the music withdraws into silences and gentle tinkling and tapping. One last trickle of a single note from the glockenspiel closes the door.

Escape

For Scott Wollschleger’s “trace – escape – horizon” Jones breaks out the vibraphone.

While traditionally struck with mallets, vibes are nowadays sometimes played via bowing to create humming, droning sounds (which sometimes sink uncomfortably close to pure sine waves). These tones depart from common expectations of percussion.

Wollschleger’s music reshapes time to an extreme. It demands patience and, given the right frame of mind, rewards it. That was true of his album-length work Lost Anthems (reviewed here), and it’s true, in a different way, of this more recent work. There, many short movements brought frequent changes. Here, for a solid 16 minutes – which is not even half the length of the whole piece – we hear only two tones a whole step apart, and in different registers, bowed and struck.

Fresh tones finally arrive, heralding a second part that develops into something like a 12-tone-(ish) extrapolation of the first. A scratchy timbre reminiscent of a harmonica is added – a new voice that contrasts with all that came before. Around 24 minutes in, an echoey vibrato effect makes itself known, then a dyad resembling a double-stop on a violin but which actually, I gather, comes from a pitch pipe. (Hey, that’s not percussion! Is that cheating?)

All along, the music challenges what listeners typically expect from percussion instruments – although I have long believed that the vibraphone, like the piano, has a dual nature. Indeed the sustained atmospherics that can be produced by the mechanics of the vibraphone might qualify as a third nature, beyond tonal and percussive.

In any case, that quality contributes to the effect of “ambiguity and weightlessness” that Wollschleger says he was striving for. The piece climaxes with a new timbre: high reedy sustained tones that waft the listener into another realm, without breaking the hypnotic spell. A neat trick. Meanwhile the pitches on the struck keys begin to waver dreamily. A harsh strike wakes us up in the 30th minute, only to give way to hazy trills.

But high grating pitches, generated (I think) by bowing, introduce a new harshness in the last few minutes. A wake-up call: The piece is coming to an end. By the time a hollow, whitish-noisy hiss sneaks in for the final minute, we may wonder, where has the time gone? Has this piece really traversed 36 minutes? Yes. Yes it has. The promise of escape is fulfilled. Music is something to escape into, and then, sometimes, to escape from. Michael Jones, percussionist, is a good guide to both.

— Jon Sobel, 5.12.2026

Lullaby and lullaby-like music attracts quite a few contemporary composers, including some who create music for instruments not usually associated with restfulness. The guitar may have a clear ability to enhance relaxation, but one would not expect that to be the case for a percussion complement. But Nicholas Deyoe seeks to provide quietude through percussion in Lullaby (2011), an extended (12½ -minute) sonic exploration using drums, wood blocks, glockenspiel and cymbals. As performed by Michael Jones on a New Focus Recordings release, the work is suitably restrained and played with attention to some unusual elements in its scoring, notably the use of the drums to provide melodic material. The fact that the piece goes on and on contributes to its intentionally soporific nature, and like the guitar works played by Sean Shibe, Deyoe’s seems to be directed more at performers than at a general listening audience. Indeed, that is the case for all three solo-percussionist works that Jones plays: Deyoe’s is actually the shortest of them. Pluto Bell’s A Moment or Two (2021) runs nearly 14 minutes and explores pitched percussion of various types: bells, bowls, bars (of a glockenspiel) and more. It is a textural rather than melodic or harmonic work, inviting listeners to engage with subtle distinctions in sound production and sound quality – matters likely of considerable interest to Jones’ fellow percussionists if not necessarily to a broader set of listeners. But neither Bell’s piece nor Deyoe’s demands as much attention and involvement as Scott Wollschleger’s trace-escape-horizon (2023-2024), one of those avant-garde works whose composer seems to think the elimination of capital letters in the title is somehow meaningful. This is an exceptionally extended piece, lasting more than 36 minutes, yet like much minimalist music of the Philip Glass type, it is hypnotic by intent rather than exploratory of sonorities, melodies or harmonies. Everything Wollschleger does is handled with economy of sound and unwillingness to allow the instruments to produce extended passages of clear interrelatedness. Instead, there are sections devoted to trills, oscillations, pitch suspension, and, probably inevitably, white noise; the result is a generalized and perpetual feeling of stasis within a floating soundcloud. Percussion tends to be thought of as emphatic even when not particularly loud, but Wollschleger seems determined to go against type by requiring mostly gentle, soft, subtly intertwined sound production that takes Ligeti-style “interstellar” music several steps beyond, into a realm of perpetual evanescence. As delicate background material, trace-escape-horizon seems to have a function to fulfill, but it is as difficult for non-performers to listen to attentively as it would be for a performer to focus for its very extended duration on the miniscule modifications of aural quality that it demands throughout. Jones manages the tiny intricacies of the work, and the requirements of the other pieces on the disc, with unerring and unending skill, but to what non-performative end is unlikely to be clear to anybody encountering these pieces from a perspective other than that of a committed percussion player.

— Mark Estren, 5.14.2026

If you had told me I’d thoroughly enjoy a solo percussion album, I wouldn’t have believed you. The depth of instruments and the writing by the three composers with whom Jones has collaborated on this album, more than convinced me this was worth over an hour of my time.

The album opens with A Moment or Two by Pluto Bell. That’s followed by Lullaby by Nicholas Deyoe and the album closes with trace-escape-horizon by Scott Wollschleger. All three works are hypnotic and they don’t just offer the promise of escape, they provide it wholeheartedly.

There wasn’t a minute in listening to this album where I thought about anything else.

— Craig Byrd, 4.17.2026