John Carroll Kirby is a keyboardist, producer, and composer from Los Angeles. He has been working in the background for a very long time, and he’s contributed to projects from pop stars such as Solange, Harry Styles, and Blood Orange. His first solo album, Travel, came in 2017, but since signing with Stones Throw in 2020, he’s really been on a tear as a solo artist, with four full-length albums already under his belt. The most recent, Cryptozoo: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, came in August of last year. Now he’s back for his fifth album of this run, Dance Ancestral.

For this project, Kirby enlisted the help of Canadian producer Yu Su. Together, they sought about making an album that represented “the intuitive dance” that we do throughout our lives. In working with Yu Su, Kirby goes is a slightly more electronic and dance music direction, but he doesn’t go so far as to leave his home base of jazz fusion completely. The result is an album that definitely is groove orientated, but there’s also a lot of room for melodic exploration and improvisation. Where the music really comes together is the way that both the electronic music and the jazz fusion build in layers and movements. There are portions of the album where you might feel like you are just riding a groove or a certain loop, only to realize that there has been all of this subtle variance building in the background that will come to fruition and climax in some unexpected ways. It’s like how in life you might feel like you’re pushing a boulder up a hill, only to one day see all of your work pay off in some unexpected ways. If all of this wasn’t enough, we also get an appearance from Philly ambient artist Laraaji on the opening track, “Dawn of the New Day,” who helps give the album something of an opening prayer to set everything in motion.

Dance Ancestral is exactly the type of album you like to see from someone like John Carroll Kirby. It gives you plenty of what you already liked about his music, with keyboard-driven jazz fusion providing the backbone of the project, but then he pushes himself in a slightly different direction in working with Yu Su, expanding the sound just a little and keeping everything fresh.