John Carroll Kirby is a veteran pianist/producer/arranger who had a long career behind the scenes, working with everyone from Solange to Norah Jones to Harry Styles to Steve Lacey, just to name a few. In 2017, he began focusing on his own solo career with the release of his album, Travel. In 2020, he signed with Stones Throw, and since the release of his first album with them, Conflict, he’s been working at a prolific pace. Last year, he gave us Dance Ancestral. This year, we already got Eddie Chacon’s excellent album, Sundown, which Kirby produced and played keyboards on. Now he’s back with another solo album, Blowout.

Since Kirby began putting out solo albums, it’s been hard to pin him down to just one thing. Sure, you can paint in broad strokes and call it jazz, but depending on which project you’re listening to, the style of jazz and the other genres it might be in conversation with vary. On Blowout, there is a certain amount of smooth R&B to his jazz, which feels familiar if you spent time with Sundown. In a lot of ways, this is Kirby’s bread and butter, and it is infectious and inviting to listen to. It’s the kind of music you can just close your eyes and listen to and just float away in your mind. However, Kirby then finds room on the album to delve into some keyboard-driven funk, where the fuzz and the grit come through in a way they haven’t in projects past. It’s exciting on its own, but it is doubly exciting to know that there are new gears for Kirby to try after all of this time. If that wasn’t enough, the album closes by revisiting three earlier tracks on the album, but now presenting dub versions of them. On many other albums, this might feel forced, but Kirby doesn’t just dive into something like dub without doing his homework first and figuring out how to do it in a way that fits his own style. It doesn’t just sound like he’s switching gears and acting like a musical tourist. What we get in practice are three tracks that sound like distinctly new versions of these songs we already heard on the album that use dub techniques in that reinvention, but don’t lean too heavily on the stereotypical rhythms and instrumentation we associate with dub, which allows listeners to appreciate these new versions of these songs at face value.

John Carroll Kirby is a long established musician, and even as someone who got a late start on his solo career, he’s already dropped a significant discography on us. To now hit us with an album like Blowout, which showcases new and exciting directions for his music to go, just shows us what a consummate musician he is, and that he is still pushing himself to grow and challenge what everyone has come to expect out of him.