Criss Cross Jazz 1428 CD

Gregory Groover Jr.

Old Knew



Old Knew is Gregory Groover, Jr’s follow-up to his 2024 Criss Cross debut, Lovabye (Criss 1419), on which – in the exalted company of Joel Ross, Aaron Parks, Vicente Archer and Marcus Gilmore – he projected his soulful, reflective tenor saxophone voice throughout an 11-track recital of, as Groover puts it, original “love songs and songs of people I love.”

On Old Knew, Groover, 32, addresses similarly inspired repertoire from a different angle, eliciting collective kineticism and creative spirit from a pan-generational A-list quintet, comprising Joel Ross, the nonpareil 30-year-old vibraphonist; Paul Cornish, the 20-something pianist; and the glorious drummer Kendrick Scott and bass provocateur Harish Raghavan, both 40-something. The first three are Blue Note label-mates of Groover’s producer, the eminent saxophonist Walter Smith, III, once the leader’s hero, now his fellow faculty member at Berklee College of Music, where Groover serves as Assistant Chair of the Ensemble Department and, for much of the 2024-25 academic year, Interim Director of Danilo Perez’s Global Jazz Institute.

“I’m proud of Lovabye because there’s a cohesive theme, which I set out to do,” Groover said in late July, a few days after returning to the U.S. from a fortnight in Perugia, where Berklee stages clinics during the Umbria Summer Jazz Festival. “There’s also a theme on this new record Old Knew, but I wanted the energy to feel different, less about the written composition and the mood, and more about the interaction and my playing.” Towards that aspiration, Groover wrote or arranged another 11 pieces tailored to the idiosyncratic tonal personalities of his bandmates, who color and characterize the music.