Anthony Wilson’s The Plan of Paris solo album – the 13th in a career that began in 1997 with his self-titled, Grammy-nominated debut – can be interpreted as a book of individual short stories with detailed, cinematic set pieces conceived as narratives. An intimate and fluid hybrid of jazz, folk and blues. Wilson relates these scenarios in an almost matter-of-fact conversational tone that draws the listener into them with an intimacy that recalls a master storyteller like Diana Krall, which is no mistake because Anthony has played guitar in her quartet since 2001, joining her for a series of shows at Paris’ Olympia Theater which turned into the following year’s Grammy-winning recording and concert film, Live in Paris. The introduction of Wilson’s vocals and lyrics follows the release of 2016’s Frogtown and 2019’s Songs and Photographs, where he first began incorporating them into his previously mostly instrumental music.
“I am quite interested in musical storytelling. I love the juxtaposition of instrumental music and songs with lyrics, even if it sometimes confuses people.”
Indeed the subjects on the new album range from the pleasures of pandemic TV binge-watching (“No Intro, No Recap”) and a real-life murder ballad torn from the headlines of an ‘80s newspaper (“A Postmaster’s Daughter”) to an uplifting tribute to the late John Lewis’ historic Selma, Alabama civil rights confrontation (“The Bridge”) and an homage to and meditation on the great artists we’ve recently lost, with a special nod to John Prine (“Dreams and Diamonds”). The sprawling title track is an epic tale of romantic intrigue and the search for an elusive missing person along the Seine, in which one’s mind reflects a grid layout depicting the City of Lights, a smoky film noir that touches on both Hitchcock’s obsessive Vertigo and Bertolucci’s fin de siecle Last Tango in Paris.
“It’s a mental sense of direction, the narrator knowing what he wants and how to go about getting it,” says Wilson about the connection between one’s inner thoughts and the physical world.
The stories reflect Wilson’s love of writers Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, Lucia Berlin, and Lydia Davis, who “compress entire narratives into small spaces,” along with auteur musician/songwriters such as Joni Mitchell, Randy Newman, Harry Nilsson, Leonard Cohen, Stephen Sondheim, Tom Petty, Shawn Colvin, Deb Talan, Mose Allison, and Prine, whose songs are rich in “action, detail and reflection.”
“For me, the lyrics and music ideally appear essentially at the same time,” says Wilson of his writing approach. “The most flowing way of doing it is free-associating while I’m at either the guitar or piano, revising and refining as I go.”
The Los Angeles-raised Wilson is biracial, son of legendary Mississippi delta-born jazz trumpeter and bandleader Gerald Wilson, but it was also his mother – with a record collection that included Bud Powell, Sonny Rollins and Charlie Parker, but also The Band, Erik Satie and Ravi Shankar – who informed the wide musical eclecticism reflected in The Plan of Paris. Wilson’s influences range from Duke Ellington, Gil Evans and jazz guitarists like Wes Montgomery and Larry Coryell (whom he saw as a teenager play live at L.A.’s legendary McCabe’s Guitar Shop) to Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Charley Patton, T-Bone Walker, and especially genre-bending bluesman Ry Cooder. Over the years, Wilson’s recorded with Paul McCartney, Barbra Streisand, Willie Nelson, Leon Russell, Mose Allison, Joe Henry, Gladys Knight, Bobby Hutcherson, and Charles Lloyd, among many others.
Recorded largely live in Los Angeles with Gerald Clayton on piano and keyboards, bassist David Piltch, Jay Bellerose on drums and percussion, co-producer Joe Harley, and engineer Pete Min, during 2020’s pandemic quarantine, The Plan of Paris reflects the isolation all of us experienced during those still-unprecedented times, with Wilson creating imaginary worlds inside his head. Conceived as a traditional vinyl album, the record is divided into two sides, with the second featuring a musical suite that begins with “The Bridge” and incorporates the delicate “Noontide,” prayerful “Already Won” and the elegiac “Pilgrim,” a tribute to civil rights struggles of the past 60 years and the resurgent Black Lives Matter movement.
“I wrote those four songs to be thematically linked, a complementary suite,” says Wilson. “The line ‘The battle is already won’ comes from Black church traditions. That beautiful idea of God or Jesus or a greater power having brought us not only just this far, but having actually already brought us all the way; the battle being fought right now is already won. That’s powerful. Ultimately it’s about the moral rightness of the struggle. Evoking that is very important to me, in terms of both my family history and ancestry, and everything that so many people are going through today.”
As someone with both African and American roots, Anthony Wilson is in a unique position to join those musical heritages, a joining he celebrates on The Plan of Paris, as it proves a genre-bending musical melting pot. “As I’m kind of non-binary when it comes to race,” he says, “I can look at things from a unique vantage point, seeing and acknowledging the boundaries, as well as the unlimited territories and vistas beyond them.”