Zacc Harris Group

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Nate Ryan

Zacc Harris and guitar.

Zacc Harris

media release: Zacc Harris’s acclaimed 2021 release, Small Wonders, was made up of songs composed over nearly a decade and evoked a photo album, lovingly curated and focused on the joys and challenges of parenthood. The Minneapolis-based guitarist’s new album Chasing Shadows, due from Shifting Paradigm Records on November 15, 2024, was written over an idyllic five-day retreat in western Wisconsin. It’s more like a single image, precise but mysterious, capturing what photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson called “the decisive moment.” The adventurous and unified album showcases a symbiotic quintet in which Harris is joined by tenor saxophonist Brandon Wozniak, pianist Bryan Nichols, bassist Chris Bates, and drummer Pete James Johnson. 

Long a leading light of Minnesota’s jazz scene—in 2017, City Pages named him Twin Cities Best Jazz Artist—Harris’s national reputation grew with the release of Small Wonders. In a four-star review in Downbeat, Bill Milkowski praised the album’s “intricate heads and chops-busting unisons,” and the magazine later included the album in its Best Albums of the Year list. In All About Jazz, Mike Jurkovic likewise named it among the year’s best. Harris has also won fans and praise as a co-leader of the long-running Atlantis Quartet and he steers American Reverie, a trio centered on interpretations of folk, country, and pop songs. Other projects include Grain Trio, an organ trio led by drummer JT Bates, and Boundaries, a free-improvisation collaboration with trumpeter Jake Baldwin and drummer Pete Hennig.   

Chasing Shadows was recorded in March of this year but started to take shape in the summer of 2022. One of Harris’s students offered the guitarist access to a lakeside cabin outside the propitiously named Luck, Wisconsin. Between nature walks and breaks to brew coffee, Harris composed all but two of the album’s eight songs. He started with a set of simple melodic and harmonic ideas on which he incrementally expanded by turns. The process felt both systematic and spiritual, the sort of concentrated period of creativity and reflection hard to come by in the teeth of the attention economy. The music began to cohere around linked compositional procedures while taking cues from the riparian setting. “Interesting things happen when you’re observing a space in nature for a few days,” Harris says. “Sometimes it’s sunshine glistening on the water, sometimes darkness in the woods. The songs took on those contrasts.” 

This mix of light and shade is apparent on the album’s titular opening track. It starts with a foreboding, melancholy section—with its crisp tempo and tense intervals, the tune seems indeed to be chasing shadows. The title has a sweet origin, though—Harris’s son, as a little boy, used to chase his own shadow—and the song soon gives way to a soaring, cinematic melody. Like much of the album, “Chasing Shadows” is quickly hummable but doesn’t settle into a key center. Instead, Harris uses careful chromatic voice leading to ground his high-contrast melody. For the solo section, Harris, Wozniak, and Nichols pass the baton through the song’s three-part form, an appealing introduction to their distinct improvisational conceptions.  

“Moonrise” demonstrates one of the group’s signatures: how deftly Harris and Wozniak meld on unison heads. The opening bars teeter-totter through variations of an almost Monkish phrase, and as the theme progresses, we see that, again, Harris is using an inviting melody to connect nonfunctional harmony. His leadoff solo displays his lyricism and rich, sculpted tone. Drummer Johnson is unflappable through the frequently shifting time signatures of “Catalyst.” Listen especially to how he locks in during Nichols’s galvanizing solo. For the piece, the album’s lead single, Harris wanted to explore different ways to break up eleven; the tune swerves and surprises, but the pulse is ever kinetic. 

     “Fleeting Moments” is aptly named: it’s fast and swinging and doesn’t linger in a tonality. Wozniak, who with Chris Speed provide the tenor madness in Dave King Trucking Company, plays a dark-toned solo stocked with inventive lines and smartly placed rests. Harris’s driven solo shows his deep study of blues. “Worlds Apart” highlights the quintet’s interplay, nurtured over years of friendship and collaboration and honed further while touring in support of Small Wonders. Bates, one of Harris’s bandmates in Atlantis Quartet, is a maven of time and tone and an expressive soloist, as evidenced by “Pinwheel,” a dynamic meditation in three.

Like a few of the album’s other compositions, “Conduits” derives some of its allure through constant-structure progressions, that is, by moving a single chord quality through changes not readily analyzed through functional harmony. The album closes with “This Day,” a ballad with a bobbing groove and a transporting build. Under Harris and Wozniak’s solos, Nichols, Bates, and Johnson know precisely when to recede and when to prod. 

That last title is another one credited to Harris’s son, who preferred “this day” to “today.” By stressing this, the phrase was a reminder to live in the moment, something many of us strive to do and something this album models. Written in a concentrated burst but born of a lifetime of devotion, in the end Chasing Shadows lives in several moments: fleeting, decisive, ongoing, eternal.  

The album will be released on vinyl, CD, and download on November 15, 2024.