Guitarist Eli Winter’s ace new Trick of the Light album sees him in full band leader mode. We met up to discuss the project in finer detail.
Eli Winter’s new Trick of the Light album is a cracker, a set of energy, creativity and focus. Although full of nuances and moods, it plays like a record that has been considered from the word go, which somewhat contradicts the actual creative process. “The music happened more organically and over time than the question suggests,” he tells me. “But I do get it, because it seems like such a pronounced step in a different direction from the last record. There’s more jazz elements there and a harder edge, but it progressed organically from playing shows with my trio, Sam Wagster on pedal steel and Tyler Damon on drums.”
Both A Trick of the Light and Eli Winter show a progression from Eli as a musician in that on both albums, he is surrounded by a band, whereas on his first two releases, he was solo for the most part. “The self-titled record came about because Cory Rayborn at Three Lobed asked if I would make a band record,” he explains. “That kind of set the wheels in motion, and then the music for this record came together over the best part of two years, so it’s more a continuation of an existing process than a conscious decision to be markedly different from past [albums]. But there were aspects that were different,” he continues. “This record required a lot more editing on my part after recording sessions, but I was finding out what it wanted as I went along, rather than having a set idea and then working to realise it.”
The recording sessions for the new album were split into two, with the first session happening to be side A and the second side B. The opening song, Arabian Nightingale, is an epic, seventeen-minute-long piece of ebb and flow, with Eli’s playing energetic and forthright. “I’ve been questioning the wisdom of starting the record with a seventeen-minute song that I didn’t write,” he smiles. “But it felt too long in any other place, and I think it set the tone in a way that felt good. That first recording session, in January 2023, I was playing guitar in a really tentative way and struggling not to… I was really holding back in a strange way that I hadn’t anticipated. On the LP, I don’t think I’m playing in a tentative way at all, but I’m saying this because I think there’s a correlation between my playing feeling more up front on this record and me reminding myself that it’s okay, as cliché as that might sound.”
Another key song on the album is Ida Lupino, a version of Carla Bley’s gorgeous jazz number that was painstakingly put together. “Tyler is a really deep listener of a lot of music and he suggested we play it as a trio,” Eli says. “I’d never heard it before, but I listened to the version on Paul Bley’s 1965 album Closer and fell in love with it. It was in November 2023 and it was a difficult time and that song helped me through in one piece. I tried to teach it to myself on piano and play it like the Paul Bley trio, with solos and things, but once we started to rehearse it it fitted perfectly.”
Although the track on the album is from the studio, a very different recording nearly replaced it. “There was a version from our show at Big Ears festival last year that I became enamoured with,” Eli tells me. “For a long time I thought that would be the one that made it onto the record, even though the fidelity wasn’t the same. But Tyler encouraged me to try to see what would happen in the studio and we did ten or eleven takes of that song; what you hear on the record is actually edited from four of those takes, so it’s quite Frankenstein. I think I’m using two or three different tunings between those takes too…”
It feels like there is a lot of freedom of expression throughout the new album; genres are broached, but it seems that Eli is less concerned with these parameters. “I think whispers of genres and idioms do come in, because that’s difficult to avoid,” he says, after a pause. “It wasn’t a question of consciously incorporating genres into the music, or consciously reacting against certain genres either. It was more figuring out what the music wanted. The goal of the music and any musical decision within it is always in service of emotion. Aesthetics, including genres or their signposts, are just a means to an end. I have been more interested in and inspired by music that gets called jazz since working on the self-titled record, but I’m not necessarily intending the results to be jazz, even if I’m sometimes working within that context.”
Genres aside, what comes through on record is musicianship and confidence; the shifts in genre and mood seem to just enhance that feeling. “There are past albums where parts of the process were more out of my control,” Eli says. “So there were compromises in mixing that I otherwise may have wanted to avoid. In these sessions, even given the stress I was feeling, the music happened a lot more easily. So, the confidence does feel hard won, but I do think it’s also there.”
A Trick of the Light (May 2nd, 2025) Three Lobed Recordings
Dates
May 31st: Chicago, IL @ The Hideout – Eli Winter Album Release with Feller and Zander Raymond