https://tmjq.bandcamp.com/album/eight-myths
8 Myths is the debut album from the Tucson Modern Jazz Quartet - a band shaped by the desert, late-night sessions, and a shared instinct to chase the unexpected. It’s modern jazz with rough edges and a curious spirit, built on groove, harmony, and the kind of listening that only comes from a shared musical communion of inventiveness and curiosity.
Recorded at St. Cecilia Studios in Tucson, the album is a collection of eight original tracks - each one a kind of myth. Some are ancient, some imagined, and some just felt in the room. There’s the folkloric swamp-funk of Sasquatch, the lo-fi dreamlike drift of A Goddess Technicolor, and the angular, third-stream tilt of Messiaen Around. Compositions by Keaton Wilson (keys/synth), Patrick Morris (bass), and Trey Bryant (saxophone) give shape to the band’s sound, grounded by Zach White’s inventive drumming.
It’s jazz, but not just jazz. It’s stories told through sound. Ghosts you think you’ve seen before. A mix of the familiar and the strange - sometimes heady, sometimes loose, always honest.
There’s an old belief: give someone shoes, and they’ll walk out of your life. Maybe it’s superstition. Maybe it’s just truth wearing old clothes. Mahabis plays with that myth - the quiet, bittersweet edge of giving something beautiful knowing it might be the last thing you give.
Built on a slow, soulful groove and a melody that leans gently into longing, the track nods to Cannonball Adderly and gospel-fusion - full of warmth, restraint, and space to feel something. There’s generosity in the playing - like giving someone a pair of shoes they’ll need for a road you won’t be on.
It’s not about regret. It’s about release.
Patrick here- I'm not one for sentimentality, and this tune is a perfect example of that. It began as an exercise playing against different clave patterns, and then a chord progression kind of fell into place, and then- what do you know?- this twelfth exercise was looking somewhat like a tune. Coincidentally, it can be interpreted as 12/8 meter. Pragmatism struck once more in the naming of this thing. If only we had 4 more tunes on this collection, it could have been the 12th track…
This one started in the field - and draws inspiration from being out there at night, soaked to the bone, chasing moths and dodging lightning bolts in the Tucson desert. The monsoon season hit hard that year. Real rain. Real thunder. The kind that made your bones hum and flooded the washes. This track was written in the middle of it, between storms, carne asada and nights in a sleeping bag, when everything smelled like creosote and gasoline.
Monsoon Loop rolls in just like that - humid, slow-building, never in a hurry. It’s a loop because that’s what the storms did: come back, again and again, until the desert turned green and alive and loud. You can hear that pulse in the bass and drums, the synths flickering like heat lightning, the sax moving through it all like someone walking home through the rain.
Now? Seasons like that feel like a half-forgotten story. Monsoons still come, sometimes - but not like they used to. Maybe someday they’ll be just another desert myth.
Olivier Messiaen wasn’t just a composer - he was the kind of mad genius and legend who heard birdsong in everything and turned it into music that made people uncomfortable.
Messiaen Around is a tribute to that kind of beautiful weirdness. Built on Messiaen’s third mode of limited transposition (the first three notes of three minor scales, minor thirds apart), it wrestles with the question: how do you make something so harmonically strange still feel like a tune you might hum while walking to your car? The answer here comes wrapped in a tumbao groove, Latin pulses just left of center, and a melody that floats between spooky and sweet - led by a raw, analog Moog and saxophone in close, eerie unison.