Press
THE NEW YORK CITY JAZZ RECORDS - INTERVIEW
“Together with skillful artists across New York, he is stacking new levels to his playing. To paraphrase the old tune stuck in the young pianist’s head: can he fix a three-dimensional world of sound? Yes, he can.”
— Matty Bannond
DOWNBEAT REVIEW - REVEAL
“The pieces platform the capacious stylistic erudition, imaginative orchestrations, unorthodox phrasing, elegant voice leading, well-calibrated touch and cohesive narrative impulses that have elicited public encomia from an elite cohort of hard-to-impress, sonic science-oriented fellow practitioners. No matter how abstract the fow, they contain an inner logic and abiding melodic focus that will also keep “civilians” on track.”
— Ted Panken
ALL ABOUT JAZZ - ALBUM REVIEW
“A drop mic, double plus good treatise by three very ballsy players — pianist Micah Thomas, bassist Dean Torrey, and drummer Kayvon Gordon — Reveal wastes no time stating its case, taking centerstage, and holding that promised land's glories tight.”
new york times - best jazz albums of 2023
“Micah Thomas, an energetic and ambidextrous pianist known for his work in the saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins’s quartet, was bound to make a big statement of his own. Still, the pianist’s third LP arrives with characteristic modesty: an acoustic trio record on which he often turns up the action without raising the volume. Actually, when the rhythm section (Dean Torrey on bass and Kayvon Gordon on drums) escalates, Thomas seems most inclined to pull back.”
NEW YORK TIMES - the playlist
“On “Eros,” from Thomas’s new trio album, “Reveal,” the bassist Dean Torrey and the drummer Kayvon Gordon cooperate at cross-purposes, a six-beat flow emerging beneath a web of syncopation. Let the drums guide the rhythm of your body; then see how it changes when you let the bass. Then find Thomas within that combination, absorbing it all.”
Olivia Kinloch
New York Times
“Only occasionally — a few times in a generation, even — does a pianist come along who seems to have gobbled up and processed so much music, their style can make sense of both jazz’s history and its present in a single motion. Micah Thomas is one of those players. On Friday he released his debut album, “Tide,” recorded with his young trio-mates at a club gig in New York last year. On an album full of varicolored, gemlike originals, “Grounds” is the standout; it was nominally inspired by Gustav Mahler’s “Symphony No. 6,” but as with everything Thomas plays, it’s an overflow situation: Traces of Jason Moran, Albert Ayler, Cape jazz, J.S. Bach all tumble into the mix.”
Anna Yatskevich
In the Vanguard of Trio jazz with Micah Thomas by Adam Shatz | The New york Review of Books
“Recorded over two sets in a single night, Thomas’s album Tide is an exemplary work—not just of small-group improvisation but of what might be called small-room jazz. To hear it is to remember what it’s like to sit among a group of strangers, hearing an hour-long set impeccably designed for the dimensions of the room. It moves from track to track with a casually inventive, seemingly spontaneous sense of flow that feels both inevitable and surprising. It has the intimacy of conversation, as much with the audience as among its members. The music has worked its way into my mind so powerfully I’m no longer sure I wasn’t at Kitano’s that night.”
Anna Yatskevich
Micah Thomas Is A Jazz Pianist With A Lot Of Runway | NPR
“Pianist Micah Thomas is having the jazz equivalent of a standout rookie season. Just within the last several weeks, he finished his graduate studies at Juilliard and released a terrifically assured debut album called Tide.
It introduces an artist of superb technical facility, along with something even more striking — a deep understanding of the sprawling lineage of modern jazz piano and a youthful determination not to get caught retracing anybody's steps.”
Olivia Kinloch
FINANCIAL Times
“Micah Thomas recorded this live piano trio set in March last year in a New York basement club. Now packaged as Thomas’s debut CD, it delivers a risk-taking blend of tricky structures and free-flowing intimacy. His confident touch and mature grasp of form, unusual for someone still studying at Juilliard, confirm the young American as a coming force.
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Olivia Kinloch
the New Yorker
“Début albums are ambitious by design, but “Tide” introduces a twenty-two-year-old jazz pianist whose gifts, bolstered by considerable idiomatic breadth, are prodigious in the extreme. In a time marked by big existential questions for working musicians (Will the future of everything be live-streamed?), Micah Thomas, a Juilliard Jazz alum from Columbus, Ohio, makes a persuasive argument for the act of performing in a roomful of attentive listeners.
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Pavithran Thomas
The Message in the Tradition: micah Thomas Speaks | The Jazz Gallery
“The way for me to transition from mathematical to emotional is to internalize the math. So just practice the same thing over and over, and practice one little concept. Just pick one little concept—mathematical or theoretical, that I don’t quite hear naturally yet. And then I apply it to as many tunes as I can, apply it to all keys, modulate it—just spend weeks on it until it eventually becomes what I hear and I’m not thinking about it anymore.”
Olivia Kinloch
Rising Young Jazz Pianist Micah Thomas Debuts with 'Tide' | PopMatters
“While it seems unfair to reduce a young musician to his influences, Thomas checks another box with "Grounds", which sounds a good bit like Keith Jarrett in his gospel-country mode. A repeated riff keeps bringing the listener home, then spinning off into new flights of melody just on the head. Thomas' solo launches over a swinging four-to-the-floor by Torrey and Benford, but there are occasional suspensions of the flow that keep you guessing. The piano doesn't overplay on its solo, using a single-note line without almost any accompanying chords, right-hand clusters, or two-handed interplay for a long stretch. That results in terrific suspense because a player like Thomas, tasteful though he is, is not defined by his continual restraint. Soon enough, the dam breaks, but not into pure individual virtuosity but a busy conversation in which drums and piano joust, each sounding like several musicians at once.”