Gritz King's "Morning Music" Sizzles

At first, the track is stunningly calm. Synth-drenched, echoey vocals ooze out, unhurried. The voices lap and layer, almost cooing. Synth undulates from somewhere deep inside. Then a single voice breaks through, muscled and strained with melancholy.

A beat drops. Keyboard picks up. The sax chases its tail. Vocals soar over it, smooth and yet cacophonous. Thoughts/Running through my head, someone croons.

“Still Running” lays the groundwork for Morning Music, a quarantine-era EP that dropped earlier this month from musician and actor Stephen Gritz King. In just under 20 minutes, King delivers six tracks that are full of heart, tenderness, humor, experiment and pre-covid nostalgia. In the process, he manages to make an album that sounds like a breakup, a makeup, and a conceptual gem all at once.

The EP is now available for streaming and download on Soundcloud, Apple Music, Amazon Music and Spotify. The artist will also be performing as part of At Home in New Haven, a virtual stage for the city's artists, on May 7. Registration and more information is available here.

From the beginning, Morning Music is bathed in jazz, with nods to funk, techno and and R&B. “Still Running” sets the tone: sax, keys, and percussion dance hypnotically around each other, then make way for King to come in on vocals. There are long, jammy stretches for his saxophone to do its thing on a backdrop that makes a listener want to get up and move, slowly and with their neck and shoulders leading the way. 

It’s an indication, if anything, that the artist is just getting started. King, who studied jazz performance at Western Connecticut State University is well-versed in both sax and keyboard, and this EP shows off both. Tracks don’t cycle into each other so much as melt: “Love in Quarantimes” lets King coasts over the beginning with an echoey, unsettling kind of PSA (“Quarantine! Quarantine! Stay in the house! Quarantine! Love has to wait!”) that is somehow funny, grim, and affecting all at once.

His saxophone takes over, warm and well-adjusted in this strange new world. A beat falls into step. Keys, soaked in synth, follow in no particular hurry. It’s like King is channeling Drexciya and The Other People Place, but slower and jammer, as if his 2018 “Still Getting Ready” has always needed a pandemic-era sequel.

This is music designed to wait out the end of days and come back from it stronger. “The Movies” channels nostalgia for something New Haveners didn’t know they would miss until mid-March. “Everyday” makes one want to slow down and feel themselves move alongside another warm body, until they think about the potential health risks and complications therein (fair warning: this is an album for everyone everywhere, but some tracks might make it hard to maintain physical distancing).

It’s also a kind of conceptual document. “Morning Show Sauce,” which features musician and producer Kyle Jamal, feels old and new at the same time, with a crackly, muffled radio intro and dizzy sax (regulars of The State House may find themselves aching for its monthly jam) that lets Jamal take it away about a minute in.

There’s a sense of delight there: a listener can close their eyes and see the buzz and hum of a seasoned DJ-turned-host at the mic, and then a musician who drops verses that one wants to listen to a second, third, and fourth time.

So too with “Black Art,” on which King ends the EP. A beat drops, and everything falls into place: the musician’s sax breaks through, a Coltrane-meets-Parliament-meets-Wondaland circa 2010 kind of sound that is sleek and lush, like a bolt of blue silk rolled out just to see what it looks like.

In this world, alien-like synth does much more of the talking than clean-cut piano. A chorus of voices lifts, sending listeners back to the beginning of the album. It feels like the right finale and still leaves the listener hungry for more.

In this sense, Morning Music is an aural snapshot of an artist, his work, and his city in a moment when nothing else quite makes sense. Tracks are economical but sprawling—nothing runs over four minutes, but many of them feel much longer. There’s enough nuance to make it a work that is best listened to on repeat. Love may have to wait, but this EP cannot.