Short Press Release
Nick Morrison is a French-American guitarist, singer, and composer. His passion for West-African string music is already audible on his first recordings (My Poor Kingdom, 2012), which predate the experience of jamming backstage with Tinariwen and learning how they tune their guitars. Over the next decade he brought his afro-tinged guitar style to the Charity Children, the Soul Thrivers, and several Berlin-based afrobeat projects. In 2014 he spent two months in Sénégal, and on returning released two colourful ‘global-folk’ EPs as Pallet of Leaves, in collaboration with his wife Maike Novák. He has played on numerous records as a sideman, and through his association with the Polyversal Souls and the Philophon label, he shared the stage with such luminaries of African music as Alemayehu Eshete, Stella Chiweshe and Lee Dodou. Throughout this period, he continued to refine his Kora-influenced approach to the guitar, creating a body of songs that range from the melancholic to the ecstatically joyful.
On ‘Mountain Goat’, his début single as a leader, he is backed by Ekowmania & the Rhythmers, an afro-highlife band lead by the Ghanaian drumming legend Ekow Alabi Savage.
Releases (as a leader)
Mountain Goat - Nick Morrison (2024)The Gift Village - Nick Morrison (2020)Pallet of Leaves - Pallet of Leaves (2017)My Poor Kingdom - Nick Morrison (2012)
First-person Bio (in progress)
Listeners have often asked, listening to acoustic guitar recordings I’ve made, whether there are two guitars, or whether it is a guitar at all. They have heard Irish music, American folk, Caribbean rhythms, and the blues. Hankus Netsky once commented on a subtle French vibe; when I used to busk in Mauerpark, comparison to Nick Drake, Jose Gonzalez and Robert Thompson were common. With the release of Mountain Goat, I'd say I've finally paid tribute to one of my personal inspirations, Paul Simon.
There are some reasons it might be hard to put my music in a box.
I was born to American parents in Paris in 1982. We didn't go see much live music music growing up, but both my parents are music lovers, and they had records, a mixture of jazz, 60s and 70s rock & pop, and classical, all of which I absorbed. At age 8 I began playing piano. I had several excellent teachers, but a part of me is still surprised by the fact that none of them ever thought to introduce me to jazz or pop on the piano; in my social milieu, the superiority of classical music, at least as the basis for a musical education, was still taken for granted.
When I arrived at boarding school in the US at age 15, in 1997, I had pretty much missed the hip-hop revolution, and grunge had barely registered. In spite of that record collection, I had never heard 'Freebird' or 'Stairway to Heaven', and very little black music after Miles Davis. I was a kind of cultural outsider. But I aced music theory in 11th grade, and studied composition through my senior year with Michael Gandolfi, who is now the chair of composition at New England Conservatory (!). I wrote a pseudo-minimalist string quartet, and gave a senior recital at the piano.
Also during this time, I started playing acoustic guitar. My best friend Thibault could play the blues pretty well, and at the summer camp I worked at (Chewonki, in Maine, for 10 years), the acoustic guitar was the primary medium for music, which was an important part of the culture there.
By the time I got to the University of Chicago, I had mostly stopped playing piano and was beginning to take the guitar more seriously. I started playing in a band with Thibault. Then it happened: sometime in the fall 2002 or 2003, probably in my junior year, age 21, I went to the original Velvet Lounge.
The drummer Vincent Davis was leading a trio with Malachi Favors (the bass player for the Art Ensemble of Chicago) and Ed Wilkerson, an extraordinary tenor player. It was basically the first time I had seen jazz played live. I saw versions of that band probably 70 more times over the next couple years, but even if I'd only seen that first concert, it would have still changed the course of my life forever.
I spent most of the rest of my twenties obsessed with 'free jazz' and 'improvised music'. Chicago was and by all accounts still is an amazing place for this music. The legacy of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians was strong. The avant-garde, the experimental were highly valued by musicians and by a small but loyal public. On the north side of the city was a noise-music scene that bordered on the 'free-improv' scene, both of which mixed to some degree with the blacker music on the south side.
Alongside all of this 'modernist' music, Vincent Davis and Hamid Drake brought a strongly African flavour to their drumming...I became obsessed with the need to be able to swing.
There is a story about me dancing irrepressibly to a steel drum band when I was 6 or 7, on vacation somewhere in the Caribbean. But, for whatever reasons, it seems that for the next 15 years this seeming natural impulse was...repressed? At the very least there was no natural outlet for it during the rest of my childhood. Anybody seeing me gingerly rocking back and forth on the dance floor during college would have pegged me as a stiff white boy. So to decide at age 21 that I was obsessed with jazz and black music and was gonna learn to swing, goddam it...this was quite an audacious decision.
I spent the next 5 years diligently practicing, working here and there as a recording engineer in Chicago. I got to record–and therefore listen very closely to–many of the finest players on the scene in those years, including Roscoe Mitchel, Ed Wilkerson, Vincent Davis, Tatsu Aoki, Michael Zerang, Jeff Parker, Correy Wilkes, Isaiah Spencer, Mckaya McCraven, Nicole Mitchel, Josh Abrahms, and many more. These were usually live recording, and I was using early 2000s consumer digital gear. The recordings weren't very good, and probably almost none of them were ever released. But I was charging almost nothing–I just wanted to be near the music–and I guess I came off as a well intentioned kid, because no one ever complained.
Next up: New England Conservatory.
Just before this move, I recorded my début album ‘My Poor Kingdom’ in my mom’s bedroom. It was my farewell to the USA, delievered on a blue note. My passion for African string music is already audible on these early recordings, long before I jammed backstage with Tinariwen and learned how they tune their guitars. Over the next seven years I played in several Berlin-based afrobeat projects, spent two months in Sénégal, and in collaboration with my wife Maike Novák released two EPs as Pallet of Leaves in a colorful global-folk style. Through my association with the Polyversal Souls and the Philophon label, I shared the stage with such luminaries of African music as Alemayehu Eshete, Stella Chiweshe and Lee Dodou, and in 2020 I released a solo EP, 'The Gift Village’.
Since then I have been slowly preparing the release of my first mature band recordings as a leader, featuring the great Ekow Alabi Savage on drums and many other first-class Berlin musicians. The first single to emerge from this process is the song ‘Mountain Goat’, a song co-written with Maike back in 2014, due out on April 11th 2024!
