Today, the streets are mostly filled with the runoff of whatever Future song nearby clubs are playing or the reverberations of a rock show from Trees or Ruins. But there’s still a vibrant jazz scene just below the surface that Trio Glossia aims to illuminate with their upcoming album.
“There’s definitely a lot of history with jazz and avant-garde jazz in Dallas, but it’s sometimes kind of hidden,” bassist Matthew Frerck says. “It’s not really the first city that people would think about.”
The trio's latest single, “Zoomorphology,” is an eight-minute journey led by Joshua Cañate’s musings on the tenor sax, while drummer/vibraphonist Stefan Gonzalez and Frerck push and pull him along.
Trio Glossia has been around for about two years, but its members have always been musicians. Frerck began piano lessons at 4, then picked up the bass guitar at 13 after stumbling upon the greatness of Led Zeppelin. Cañate started playing after discovering a passion for Rock Band and Guitar Hero. Gonzalez has been steeped in jazz culture since his birth.
“Stefan’s dad was Dennis Gonzalez,” Frerck says. “He was a trumpet player, a composer and he was a monumental figure in the Dallas avant-garde scene.”
Dennis Gonzalez played and recorded music throughout most of his life. He was also an educator who hosted the KERA radio show Miles Out for more than 20 years, using his platform to give exposure to experimental jazz, local jazz and music from different parts of the world.
“I grew up in this atmosphere with all these different musicians,” Stefan Gonzalez says. “My dad never pushed music on me, even though I ended up playing it with him. He just had a drum set lying around; I started playing at age 4, and I just soaked things up.”
By fourth grade, Gonzalez was sitting in for his older brother’s garage band rehearsals. They initially saw jazz as “boring adult music” and leaned into grittier genres, but after high school they started to give swing a second glance.
“I started listening more to the music that my father had made in the '80s,” Gonzalez says. “I started raiding his record collection and listening to everything I could that was in the avant-garde and free jazz realm, and it really spoke to me, because it still has this visceral thing. It could be very spiritual, but it can also be filled with rage or just unbridled energy.”
Gonzalez has performed with several groups, including Yells at Eels, a trio his father and his brother Aaron formed in 2001. Recent events in Gonzalez's (who uses they/them pronouns) life have given the musician a new appreciation for the music and their heritage.
“Since my father passed in 2022, I think it was just like a mass realization that I had to kind of honor this part of my lineage,” Gonzalez says. “I've fallen more in love with jazz, even more since then, and I’m really leaning into that as much as I can now, especially with playing vibraphone more and being more of a melodicist than just solely a drummer.”
Trio Glossia was set in motion when Gonzalez and Cañate crossed paths at a gig.
“Some of my heavier bands were playing with Joshua’s band, same brain,” Gonzalez says. “They have a bunch of open sections where he mostly plays drums, but then he picked up his saxophone and motioned for me to come on stage and do a heavy noise improv with them. Whenever that happened, that solidified that we needed to play in something together.”
Gonzalez and Frerck played in a group in 2017 and had already been on the hunt for a third person to start up another trio.
“I mentioned Joshua’s name and Matthew was like, ‘Yes, let’s do that,’” Gonzalez says.
The group’s synergy was immediately evident.
“The first few times we played together, it was absolutely open, with no preconceived notion of what was going to happen,” Gonzales says. “We brought the vibraphone, bass, drums and saxophone, and just let it rip. We felt that we had such good chemistry, and we all had compositional ideas, so we decided to put the brakes on having shows and put an emphasis on writing music.”
The band's lineup also affords them unique creative possibilities because of the different skills they bring to the table. Gonzalez is a menace on the vibraphone and Cañate digs into the tenor sax, but they both know their way around a drum set. This dynamic allows the group to swap around their instrumentation depending on what each song calls for without sacrificing their sound or chemistry.
“Zoomorphology” starts with a musical game of red-light-green-light between Cañate on tenor and Gonzalez on drums, which Frerck interrupts for a back-and-forth between upright bass and tenor sax. Gonzalez rejoins them, then busts out an extended solo before reigning the group back in. The track tends to stray on the side of disarray, with peeking semblances of structure that contrast with the more tangled-up sections.
“I would say it’s equal parts improvisation as it is composition, but the composition aspect really helps to free everything else up,” Gonzalez says of their creative process. “You have more freedom to work with when you have some sort of a blueprint or vibe that sets the pace.”
The trio’s first single, “Nerdy Dirty Talk,” is as salacious to band nerds and jazz cats as the title suggests. It kicks off with a call and response among the three, with Cañate on snare while Gonzalez hits the vibraphone frame and Frerck smacks the bass to match the percussive energy. Gonzalez then starts running frantically up and down the vibes as Cañate matches with an abundance of color from the kit. It often feels like Frerck leads the charge, as he freely transitions from laying down quarter notes to spastic double-time runs with plenty of notes deftly crammed in between.
Frerck plucks all the way up the neck of his bass and the trio shifts into one of several percussive breaks, which feature Frerck swapping between plucked and bowed bass. At times, the track is bustling and chaotic, while other sections make the silence feel like an uncredited fourth player in the mix.
Regardless, each listen inspires the same enthrallment and sense of wonder associated with live improv jazz, but the recorded tracks can't hold a candle to the group’s live sound.
“The songs have developed so much live since we got them recorded on tape that I think by the time people get the CD, they're gonna see that it's like that, but on steroids,” Gonzalez says. “We've really flushed it out, big time.”
They're all happy with how the tracks have turned out, but laying down music in a studio environment proved to be a degree more difficult than playing to a crowd in a bar.
“It’s tougher to play because they’re different conditions,” Frerck says. “I have my bass miked up in three or four different places, when I'm used to just playing through my pickup. I can't move a certain way, because if I hit the mic then that could ruin a take.”
New Music, Old Continent
“There are certain things we can't capture in the studio that we capture in rehearsal,” Gonzalez says. “There are certain things we can capture in the studio that we can't capture live, and vice versa. Every setting brings out a different beast.”Frerck adds: "But I think because we did that, now everything else feels easier to play.”
Their album is set to release early next year, and with it, Trio Glossia looks to immortalize their compositions by giving themselves a bigger repertoire to draw from on stage. They're also hoping that the release will provide momentum to start touring around Texas and, eventually, Europe.
“Europe has a very deep appreciation and also financial and artistic support of this particular kind of music,” Gonzalez says. “Free jazz is seen as a dignified American art form in Europe more than it is here.”
For now, the group has made a home in Dallas. Their recent performance at the Bath House Cultural Center was part of Gonzalez’s Free Fall: Hard Blues and Harmolodics Firm Rooted Jazz Series. It was one of their longest and most memorable sets yet.
“That was about an hour and a half,” Frerck says. “I get such a reaction from looking at the pictures ... I thought we played our asses off there.”
Trio Glossia has another performance on Nov. 9 at the Bath House (521 E. Lawther Drive, on White Rock Lake) to wrap up the Free Fall series. It’s free to attend, and they expect to see a diverse turnout.
“It's just energy music, you know?” Gonzalez says. “We have from literally toddlers, to like people in their 70s coming to see us and everything in between. We check off all these random boxes that I didn't think we would. I thought we just have our group of nerds that know about this stuff, but I feel like something about this band has been transcendental on a community level.”
