I’m happy Ize Trio is based in Boston because they encompass so many of my musical loves: American jazz fused with classical traditions of many cultures. San Diego-based pianist Chase Morrin, Cypriot percussionist George Lernis and Palestinian cellist Naseem Alatrash met through the Berklee Global Jazz Program. Their 2024 debut album was featured here on All Things Considered. Their new record, out on Friday, is called Global Prayer. Ize describes it as a prayer for a better world. The group’s pianist, Chase Morrin, composed all the music for Global Prayer, and he joined GBH’s All Things Considered host Arun Rath to talk all about it. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of their conversation.
Arun Rath: I love this record, so excited to talk about it. And the first piece I want to talk about, “From the Stars” — it’s a tribute to the brilliant late saxophonist and composer Wayne Shorter. And I thought “From the Stars” was a nod to his love of science fiction, but I was reading your note about this tune, and it actually goes a lot deeper than that. Tell us about “From the Stars,” and how we hear or feel Wayne Shorter.
Chase Morrin: We are deeply inspired and impacted by Wayne Shorter and his legacy, and mostly in particular, our colleagues, mentors, good friends Danilo Perez and John Patitucci, who played in his band for 20 years. A lot of the lessons and the language and the musical ideas and human ideas that we’ve learned and tried to embody in this trio come from them and from Wayne’s spirit.
So we wanted to do a dedication to Wayne in particular. This track is for Wayne, and it is a nod to his love of science fiction, but also kind of a nod to our cosmic place in the universe and the idea that we all come from the same materials, the same chemicals that make up the suns, the stars, the whole universe. And we’ve been meditating on that for a while and trying to embody that in the music, both personally and as well as in the sounds we create.
Rath: You have to have a special saxophonist to pay tribute to Wayne Shorter. And you have Lihi Haruvi playing sopranino saxophone. She is amazing. Tell us about her.
Morrin: That’s right. Yeah, Lihi and I have been good friends for many, many years. She’s also a fellow faculty member at Berklee College of Music and teaches at the Global Jazz Institute with Danilo and John Patitucci and others. This felt like the perfect track for her to join us because she’s deeply inspired by Wayne, as well as John Patitucci himself joins us. So they both wanted to play with us for this particular track, and it was a special moment in the studio for sure.
Rath: It’s really wonderful, and it kind of leads into the first track, maybe I should have started out this way, cause the album is kind of programmatic in this way. The first track is called “Flying,” and you mentioned Danilo Perez and his relationship with Wayne Shorter. Tell us a bit about Danilo Perez and his importance for Ize.
Morrin: So, Danilo Perez, I’m sure everyone knows of his legacy and his work as an incredible jazz musician. He’s the artistic director and the founder of the Global Jazz Institute, where we all met as students. We studied with Danilo and many other great artists there and were inspired by their vision for what jazz can mean, and specifically the idea of inclusion in jazz. And that’s really what the heart of the Global Jazz Program is, is that people from all over the world, from different traditions, as we embody, you know, Naseem from Palestine, George from Cyprus, me from San Diego, We can all come together and find a way of having a voice in the music and contributing to the jazz tradition while honoring the deep tradition and legacy of the music.
Rath: The title track of the album, “Global Prayer,” has this peculiar quality about it. It’s somehow mournful and hopeful at the same time.
Morrin: Yeah, that’s a very spiritual piece for us because it’s actually the very first piece we ever played together. But ironically, we weren’t actually in the same room together. We played it from our distant rooms because I wrote this piece four days after we all went home to isolate when the pandemic hit. So at that time, “Global Prayer” meant a very specific thing then, like, ‘Whoa, the world is very uncertain right now. No one knows what’s going on and we have to find each other and hope somehow in this crazy time.’ And it’s evolved over the years and now it’s a little bit of a different type of prayer, but the meaning behind it kind of lies the same of us trying to connect and make music and come together in some capacity, even though we really don’t know what the future entails.
Rath: And that playing from Naseem is just, again, it covers emotional ground. I don’t feel like I have words for the emotions that he’s covering.
Morrin: Naseem’s so special. We’ve been good friends for many, many years, and his background coming from Palestine is rooted in Arabic maqam, so a whole tradition of music that actually is not native to the cello. He’s one of the innovators who, I think, is truly one of the world’s best players of that tradition on the cello. And, you know, he’s been playing with Terence Blanchard, and he’s part of the Turtle Island String Quartet. He’s a very, very special person who can move between these different worlds — classical, jazz, Arabic, folkloric traditions — and in this particular track, you hear all of those together. You hear him playing these soaring classical lines and then playing these intricate maqams with microtones and sounds and improvising over changes altogether, and he brings all these emotions out.
