April 11, 2025
By Evan Haga
Ones & Twos, the new Blue Note album from pianist and composer Gerald Clayton, is a project of rare ingenuity comprising many layers, all of them fascinating. And while the music is engaging on a purely visceral level, to truly appreciate the imagination at play throughout the album takes a bit of unpacking.
Clayton’s new album is a collection of deftly written, groove-minded, forward-looking original music performed by some of the finest improvising musicians of their generation. The lineup includes Clayton on piano, Rhodes, organ, synths and vocals; Joel Ross on vibraphone; Elena Pinderhughes on flute; Marquis Hill on trumpet; and Kendrick Scott on drums. Kassa Overall, the jazz and hip-hop alchemist, contributes his stealthily transformative brand of post-production as well as percussion. His additions, including found sounds and sound processing, are both fleeting and essential to the atmosphere and aesthetic of the music. You can’t help but feel their presence, even when they’re so immersively placed as to be nearly impossible to pick out.
As these deeply communicative performances attest, Clayton tapped musicians with whom he shares both extensive experience and profound mutual respect. “With these particular cats, it’s all love,” says the pianist. “I’m a fan of all of them, and I’ve been developing relationships with all of them musically for years,” he adds, before going on to detail his recent duo collaborations with Pinderhughes. “Her sound,” he says, “it just sort of hugs you.”
Ones & Twos succeeds as a compelling listen with no context required. Tracks like “Angels Speak” work with aspects of post-bop, chamber music, neo-soul, the ’60s avant-garde and hooky, R&B-leaning ’70s fusion, but do it so seamlessly that the music all but steamrolls the notion of genre. “Cinnamon Sugar” filters a Latin tinge through leading-edge jazz musicianship and a temperament that is at once kinetic, dynamic and serene; somehow, much of Ones & Twos is simultaneously action-packed and dreamlike, or soothing. But then there’s “More Always,” featuring Clayton’s writing for a compact all-star choir; atop a marching rhythm, the voices reach cathartic, emotionally rousing heights.
“Ones & Twos is an experiment—an idea inspired by the art of turntablism,” says Clayton, elucidating the larger idea at play on this remarkably original project. “I set out to create a record where the A side can be played simultaneously with the B side—a nod to that moment in the club when the DJ transitions from one song to the next, when you hear two separate pieces at the same time.”
When overlaid, the tracks transform into pieces that are both firmly rooted in the originals yet strikingly new, creating music that is funky, stirring, perplexing, and beautiful, sometimes all at once. The combined tracks will be unveiled later this year as a culmination of the project.
Think of the process at work when a great DJ or producer cratedigs to find complementary tracks or musical components. On their own they operate brilliantly, but when fused, they take on enthralling new meaning. In the case of Ones & Twos, the results are both more than the sum of their parts and not — since the core tracks also reward focused listening in the way a great jazz record does. In composition and performance, Clayton’s process required thoughtful decision-making — about the harmonic relationships between notes and chords, about the connections between divergent meters and rhythms. It was also crucial that the soloists varied throughout the core tracks so that the combined performances could highlight the gamut of talent in the band.
In one sense, Clayton’s album is a purely musical exploration. “In some way, it really is just a curiosity,” he explains. “As in, can I do that? Can I make a G-major song over here fit with a B-minor song over there?” Ones & Twos also makes a salient point about jazz generations, with the fact that Clayton and his collaborators are young enough to have grown up as students of both jazz and hip-hop while experiencing the peak of neo-soul in real time. “Our heroes — like Roy Hargrove, D’Angelo, the Roots and Erykah Badu — were showing us that Hey, there is a way to express this hip-hop-rooted language with the instruments we’re playing in ‘jazz-band’ classes,” he says.
Ultimately, Ones & Twos underscores the continuities between various strains of great Black music on richly personal terms, without succumbing to clichés. “Very early on in my life, it made sense to me that all of this music comes from the same source: It’s all downstream from the blues,” Clayton says. “That’s the way I still think about it.”
But like any genuinely compelling work of art, Ones & Twos functions as a metaphor with bigger philosophical and existential implications as well. To say it more directly, musical elements — and their ability to fit together, or not — become analogues for human interaction, whether in love, politics, culture and race or simply sharing public space in our day to day. “The project asks questions,” Clayton says. “Is it possible for two melodies to exist at the same time? Will they inevitably become a melody and a counter melody, with one deferring to the other? Or can two really separate, strong melodies exist and even succeed together?
“Perhaps that’s a healthy thing for people to consider: how to tolerate the friction and the awkwardness, and understand that this is part of what it means to blend two things together,” he continues. “And if people do that, then maybe that’s a step toward us all figuring out how to live together more peacefully. This music is a kind of prompt, and ruminating on these ideas has been really rewarding.” Some of Clayton’s favorite moments, he explains, are those where the struggle to achieve harmony is palpable. “What I especially like about this project is that there are times when the result is messy, cluttered, even ugly,” he says.
Interestingly, Ones & Twos was both a rush of inspiration and a lifetime in the making. The overarching concept, Clayton says, “worked itself out in one sleepless night.” But the real roots extend back to high school, when the pianist bought two turntables, a mixer and “a box of ’90s hip-hop records” off a classmate. Growing up, he became engaged with various pillars of hip-hop culture, from breakdancing to practicing graffiti wildstyles in his notebooks, and DJ’d a couple parties in college at the University of Southern California. “Early on, I realized that wasn’t the gig for me,” he says with a laugh, “because everybody else is having fun while you have to sit behind the turntables and work.”
Clayton would go on to become one of the most respected pianists and composers in jazz, with six GRAMMY nominations to his credit. He’s built renown as a bandleader; through work with artists including Charles Lloyd, Roy Hargrove, Ambrose Akinmusire, Bill Frisell, and John Scofield; and with momentous collective groups like Out Of/Into, which recently made its Blue Note debut.
Ones & Twos is perhaps the most ambitious and visionary project Clayton has ever undertaken, as well as the continuation of a deeply rooted purpose he’s honored throughout his career. “If I do want to get romantic about the music, the goal of anything I do, my North Star, is the intent to create a more peaceful earth.”
