The Nathan Bowles Trio whips a buggy wagon onto interstellar highways, hammering rustic grooves into motorik repetition until they lift out of the past into the endless now. The trio first convened on Bowles’ 2018 album Plainly Mistaken pushing traditional instruments—banjo for Bowles, string bass for Casey Toll and drums for Rex McMurry—into sprawling psychedelic spaces. Are Possible is sparer but no less adventurous, paring back motifs to essence, locking them in for extended intervals, and allowing repetition to make them flower.
The opening “Dapple” distills a sprightly dance into its architectural elements, letting the play of banjo flourish amid resounding piano chords. McMurry’s drumming both grounds and elevates the agile interplay of stringed instruments; endless vistas reminiscent of his old band, CAVE, open out as he batters and thumps. “The Ternions,” an old-fashioned word for trio, by the way, opens out like a tarmac road stretching to the shimmery distance, its propulsion softened by flurries of lingering overtones. Toll’s bass gets a fuller hearing in “Our Air,” a cut that slants on low-toned plucking into a countrified form of jazz.
Still it’s in the two longer cuts that the trio makes its most indelible mark. “Gimme My Shit” builds in pointillist complexity, a hoedown shifting in and out of Reichian minimalism. “Aims” dips more freely into blues forms, letting the banjo and guitar carry a plaintive porch-lit melody. It gathers itself and swings out wide a minute or so in, a drone sluicing through pizzicato filigrees, a ritual beat carrying the tune forward. Indeed, the drums go knocking and walloping as the piece progresses, turning an inward-looking dreamscape into visceral, body-shifting triumph. All the elements come from pre-electric blues, but the end result is modern, almost futuristic.
The book of Matthew tells us that “With God, all things are possible,” and while I wouldn’t second guess the religious inclinations of any of these three musicians, there is an aura of immanence, of something more than banjo, bass and drums, that infuses these mystic tracks. Many things are possible, too, when you put together three such capable player and give them time and space to transcend themselves.
