Victor Gould

Originally from Los Angeles, pianist Victor Gould attended Berklee College of Music as the inaugural recipient of the Herbie Hancock Presidential Scholarship. He’d continue his musical education in New Orleans, receiving a master’s from the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz Performance at Loyola University and finishing as a semi-finalist in the Monk Institute’s star-making International Piano Competition in 2006. In 2011, Gould moved to New York City with big ambition but an old-school pragmatist’s patient approach. “Start as a sideman and prove yourself,” is how he described his early-career creed to Downbeat in 2019. Deliberate and discerning about with whom to collaborate, Gould quickly did prove himself—as indispensable, to a small but incredibly influential swath of jazz nobility. Early gigs and recording dates came with bands led by former Jazz Messengers like drummer Ralph Peterson, trumpeter Wallace Roney, and saxophonist Donald Harrison. And in the last few years, Gould has toured extensively with vocalist Jazzmeia Horn and trumpeter Jeremy Pelt, recording two Grammy-nominated albums with Horn—2018’s A Social Call and 2020’s Love and Liberation— and three critically acclaimed sides with Pelt—Jeremy Pelt The Artist (2019), Noir en Rouge (2018) and Make Noise! (2017). Pelt returned the favor on Gould’s third and most recent album as a leader, 2019’s Thoughts Become Things, an ensemble album of complex arrangements for horns, multiple percussionists, and strings that nevertheless manages to foreground Gould’s virtuosity as a piano player. Gould keeps his friends close and favored side musicians closer. Saxophonist Godwin Louis, one of Gould’s closest friends, has appeared on all three Gould-led albums, while Pelt, violinist Yoojin Park, and flutist Anne Drummond appear on both Thoughts and 2016’s Clockwork, which was voted that year’s best debut album by NPR Music’s Jazz Critics Poll. Gould, whose father was a flutist, told Downbeat shortly after Thoughts’ release that he grew up listening to his dad’s James Moody, Frank Hess, and Yusef Lateef records, so it’s no mystery as to why he frequently includes parts for flute in his compositions. “Anything else would just be trying to imitate the flute,” he said. A percussionist alongside a standard drum kit has become another Gould trademark; he loves to meld conventional swing with African-accented time signatures, styles he believes share ancestral DNA. The aptly named “Inheritance,” off Thoughts and Things, is perhaps the consummate illustration of this. Essential to making the contents of his mind’s ear manifest on tunes like this are rhythm section members Rodney Green (drums), Ismell Wignall (percussion), and Vicente Archer (bass), all of whom carry the distinction of having been working members of Jeremy Pelt-led ensembles. In fact, Archer was the original bassist for a band co-founded by Pelt and saxophonist Wayne Escoffery, the Black Art Jazz Collective (BAJC). And, not coincidentally, Gould is the new pianist in BAJC’s recently re-worked rhythm section. (All these intersecting paths and shared parts between bands are not coincidence; Gould and Pelt’s other longtime sidemen are like the majestic moons that orbit Pelt’s Jupiter, a true study of symbiosis in jazz.) BAJC’s latest, 2020’s Ascension, is the most recent example of Gould’s prodigiousness not just as a player but as a composer. Sharing writing duties with Pelt, Escoffery, and trombonist James Burton III, Gould penned two of the most memorable tunes on the album, “Ascension” (the title track) and “Iron Man,” an anthemic tribute to late pianist Harold Mabern. -Matt Silver

Photo Credit: Screenshot courtesy of WRTI