The notion that a new recording began with a surprise hug might sound like the premise of a rom-com pitch deck or a Modern Love headline, but in the case of the Nate Yingling Trio’s Welcome To Lunaryth, it’s all true.
The recording, to be released Friday and celebrated by a show at the BOP STOP, is a milestone in the collaboration between keyboard whiz Yingling and engineer (and BOP STOP Swiss Army knife) Darren Thompson that began with that hug.
“Somebody introduced me to Darren, and I was really nervous, and I hugged him for no reason,” Yingling said on a joint video call with Thompson. “It’s something that everybody loves to give me flack for.”
Thompson countered, “Nate came up and introduced himself. But he did that by just giving me a hug after the gig without saying anything, which was totally cool, I think the world needs more of that.
The two Western Pennsylvania natives became fast friends and collaborators, so when the time came to choose an engineer for Welcome To Lunaryth, the choice was easy. So was the choice of music.
Yingling had been playing a lot of straightahead jazz standards gigs, but his sweet spot was the early fusion music of bands such as Return to Forever and Mahavishnu Orchestra.
“I sat down and I started writing a lot of different fusion ideas in the winter of last year and wanted to try them out with some people,” Yingling said. “So I hit up my friend, Darren Frate and my friend Chris Walker and brought them some ideas, and we kind of jammed on them one day. And that was kind of the conception of the group.”
The music honors its ancestors with aerobatic synth solos arcing over deep, punchy grooves. First-generation fusionauts will recognize the era’s signature sounds from the looping mini-Moog lines to the crunchy chords of the Hohner D-6 Clavinet and the phase-shifted Rhodes piano, most emulated through the magic of virtual studio technology or a plugin.
But the throwback inspiration for Welcome to Lunaryth extends beyond the musical, and it too has a Youngstown connection, through Grant Skelton, a/k/a Scooped doodles.
“I met my friend, Grant Skelton, who does all of our visual art, and naturally hit it off with him very easily, because he caught the vibe of the fantasy element, the world-building element,” Yingling said. “We both share an affinity for a lot of those ‘80s fantasy movies, like ‘The Neverending Story’ and ‘The Dark Crystal.’ Part of that is what I’m trying to capture in this music as well. So Grant and I both sharing an affinity for these movies in this time period and this nostalgia work together to create these characters in this universe, Lunaryth, which is where all of these characters exist.”
The Lunaryth universe, musically speaking, was built from what was originally a collection of singles. “When I initially started delving into this with Darren and the players that I’m working with, I wasn’t exactly sure what this project was,” Yingling said. “Originally, this was music that I was gonna put out under my own name, and then I started working with the visual artist and it turned into a band and a thing.”
That “thing” can be heard on all major streaming platforms and is available for sale on Bandcamp. But fusion music is a performative art that is best experienced live.
Nate Yingling Trio, Friday, August 14, 7:30 p.m., BOP STOP, 2920 Detroit Rd., Cleveland. Tickets $25, available here.
Welcome to Lunaryth is available from Bandcamp at this link.
For the most complete listing of jazz and jazz-adjacent events., look to Jim Szabo’s essential, weekly Northeast Ohio jazz calendar.
