Apr 15, 2025 11:44 AM
Blindfold Test: Ethan Iverson
Between last Christmas and New Year’s Eve, Ethan Iverson performed as part of the 31st Umbria Jazz Winter festival in…
To record Dream Manifest (Dom Recs), Croker convened artists from his current and recent past ensembles, plus special guests.
(Photo: Bruno Barreto)Partway through his early set at Smoke Jazz Club, Theo Croker blinks the room back into focus. He leans over the piano. “That was fire,” he says to Idris Frederick. The small moment transcends the crowded listening room. It’s a moment of tenderness that, in its briefness, exposes the humanity in Croker’s music.
On that Sunday night in New York, Croker shared songs from his June release, Dream Manifest (Dom Recs). A meditation on what can coexist, Croker’s eighth leader album experiments with acoustic, electric and digital layers. On deep grooves, serenity and tension form covalent bonds. Trances become conversations. Beautiful, dreamlike melodies collide with grounding pads and gritty rubs.
Live, the music sparks many bright moments. But the energy on the bandstand eclipses everything. Croker transmits warmth and encouragement to his fellow artists. The audience can’t help but receive it, too.
For years, the 39-year-old trumpet player, composer and producer has worked to create a kind of artistic ecosystem within and around his work. It’s communal. One person’s gesture creates room for someone else’s. Before he begins a new project, Croker imagines what he’ll create and how those around him can participate in its creation.
“The manifestation begins with you being able to visualize it,” says the Florida-based artist, who, in 2022, booked 17 days at The Bunker Studio in Brooklyn — a week to record, 10 days to mix. He didn’t have much in hand; he’d sketched out one tune on a sheet of notebook paper. But the band had just wrapped a 90-show run, and Croker had a complete vision for what he wanted to record. He had confidence in his fellow artists. “If I have an idea, we can execute it very quickly — without overthinking. I didn’t want to overdo it. As soon as I had an idea and a melody, we did it.”
The entire session was a boardroom brainstorm: Honor every idea, banish self-criticism. No concept, no progression was “too simple” to explore, he says. Time and again Croker returned to the principles of manifesting: “If mind is all, and you’re looking for inspiration, when it comes, if you don’t accept it, you’re telling your subconscious, you’re telling the universe, ‘No, I don’t want it.’ So I trusted everything that came to me.” Once the songs materialized, the experimenting could begin. “Look at ‘Pinocchio’; it’s straightforward. I don’t mean it’s easy, but it’s straightforward, what it is. Then, when you listen to the record, you’re like, ‘What are they doing with it?’”
As a producer, Croker deploys different strategies to capture what his mind conjures. “I don’t try to match a performance, but I do try to get that same energy and focus,” he says. At Bunker, he first sought to make his fellow artists relaxed and comfortable. He needed them to be comfortable. Rather than loops and digital elements, humanness — instincts, second guesses, energies and breakthroughs — would inform the music.
“There might be some loop from a demo that we use as a foundation,” says Croker, “but they’re all takes. There’s no overdubbing person by person or ‘just play this loop and chop it.’ Really, everything is some portion of a take or a full take.” So, how would they get that sound? That groove, that pulsing vibration, that readiness?
To spark the energy of a live performance, Croker directed the artists to play entire songs continuously until they took shape; “64 Joints,” which features singer Tyreek McDole, emerged from that live loop.
“There’s a 12-bar chord progression that I made out of a sample,” says Croker. “I would have that on repeat and I would let [the rhythm section] play over that for like 20 minutes, 15 minutes, without telling them anything. And they’re playing; they might stop and use their phone or whatever, but they’re in there just locked into that groove.” That foundational motion, according to Croker, drives the music into the unknown. “When intuitively it started to turn into something, I’d be like, ‘Roll the tape.’ I’d go into the booth and we would start the take.”
Artists who lean hard on their humanness — their strength and frailty — at some point must confront or embrace vulnerability. Croker was prepared for that. He wanted to feel it in his songs. He wanted listeners to hear it. During his time at Bunker, he took different psychedelics to summon what he knew needed to come out in the music. “I use them as medication,” he says. “I’m not bouncing off the walls or hiding under the couch. I know I’m high off of it, and I’m channeling that energy into this song.” Another critical benefit of taking psychoactive drugs: “It helps me quiet my ego: ‘I gotta impress somebody. What would DownBeat think of the record? What would the critics think? What would the audience — how would we do this live?’ All of that shit doesn’t matter.”
What does matter is the community of artists and loved ones contributing to the music’s sound and the album’s gesture. Dream Manifest convenes members of Croker’s past and current ensembles, including Mike King, Eric Wheeler, Michael Shekwoaga Ode and Miguel Marcel Russell, plus guest artists McDole, Estelle, Kassa Overall, MAAD, Gary Bartz, Natureboy Flako, Malaya and multidisciplinary artist and creative director D’LEAU. Working within an ecosystem of skilled, imaginative artists — particularly those who’d been with him on the road — helped Croker activate his vision in real time.
“Usually I’ll make a record and then we’ll figure out how to make it sound the way you want it,” he says. When he recorded his 2021 release BLK2LIFE // A FUTURE PAST and 2022’s Love Quantum (both on Star People Nation/Sony Masterworks), Croker and his fellow artists recorded the tracks, then made adjustments. “With Dream Manifest, the drums sound how they sounded at the session,” he says. “All those things were locked in while we were creating it, which was instantly giving it that sound. So it was very easy to do it: create it, tweak it, move on.”
If the sound on Dream Manifest is human-to-human hookup, the mood is tenderness. While intrinsic to “One Pillow” — in Overall’s lyric, in the heart-beating drums — qualities of tenderness appear all over the record. On “Prelude 3,” Croker’s trumpet solo pulls the music into one intimate moment, then another. A laid-all-the-way-back melody line on “Crystal Waterfalls,” self-observant, reflective, gives the entire song room to move. Throughout the album, the music has the notion to lift and cradle the listener.
The motivation behind that tenderness and intimacy, like so much of Croker’s music, has layers. “So, here’s where it gets personal,” he says. When he shifts the conversation to his mother, Croker speaks in soft cadences and matters of fact. “She’s incredibly intelligent,” in her academic pursuits and achievements, and in daily trials of life. Not long before the session, though, his mother experienced a psychotic episode after a change in her medication dosage. “She was on antidepressants, like most people in America, for 20-something years. And when she didn’t take them anymore, it caused a crack in her system.”
Suddenly, Croker found himself at a crossroads. He and his brother were caring for their mother, and the session was approaching. “She was here. And we have to make this record,” says Croker. “I can’t not make this record; if I don’t make this record and turn it in, I won’t have a way to support my family or spend time with my mother to help figure this out.”
When he and his brother brought their mother to the studio, Croker wasn’t sure what would happen. Then something amazing took hold. Surrounded by artists and studio engineers, his mother, at last, seemed present. “I’m looking at my mom through a control booth after six weeks of her being in a complete state of psychosis,” says Croker. “I’m watching her be able to ground herself and be present while there’s music playing. And the whole band knew it.”
While they recorded “Crystal Waterfalls,” he remembers thinking, “How far behind the beat can I play? At the same time, I’m watching my mom not walk in circles, not fiddle and be gone. She was able to bring her mind into it.” That moment became a testimony for Croker. “Music has this very powerful healing aspect to it, and always has since the beginning of time.”
Times of crisis can leave little room for reflection. That settles in later. For Croker, supporting his mother long-term meant learning when to lean out. “Now I see my mother as a human being who had to deal with her own traumas and her own issues from her parents,” he says. “She has to heal and deal with her own things. That’s helped me heal my own heart … just seeing my mom as a full human, not someone who owes me something or is responsible for anything.” And he continues to reflect: “That’s where a lot of that tenderness came from.”
The level of presence and honesty Croker achieves on Dream Manifest follows micro eras of experimentation and grind. “It took me years to get to the point where I could practice a lot of things soft,” he says, referencing endless nights spent playing trumpet at a volume lower than the TV in his New York apartment. “At first, it just started off being certain exercises, long tones and things like that, until I could build the muscles to play that soft, not forcing it. I think it really started to click three or four years ago.”
Throughout his career, he’s worked with Jill Scott, Ari Lennox, J. Cole, Common, Ego Ella May, Uele Lamore, Jazz at Berlin Philharmonic and countless other leaders and style icons. He drew early inspiration from conversations with his Grammy-winning grandfather, the late Doc Cheatham. Later on at Oberlin Conservatory, he encountered Bartz and the late Donald Byrd, who became influential instructors. Croker recalls their respective teaching styles with gratitude. Rather than coddle or prod, they encouraged him to make his own discoveries and access his own motivations, which he did alongside Overall and his then-roommate Sullivan Fortner.
Not long after graduating, Croker landed a residency in Shanghai, where he met Dee Dee Bridgewater. The chance encounter would lead to the most pivotal, unexpected mentorship of his career. “Dee Dee Bridgewater, the jazz singer, made me do this,” he says with a twinkle. The legendary bandleader pushed Croker to explore the range of his artistry. “‘You’re not going to make a straightahead swing record,’” he remembers her saying, as a matter of fact, after they’d played a number of gigs together. “‘You need to meld all this stuff together and put out a record that shows all these different faces that you have, and styles that you have.’ And that’s what set me on that path. Because I was going to go head and make a straight-ahead record. And she said, ‘No, we’re not going to do that — that’s not the future.’ And I’m so grateful to her for that.”
Croker considers his trajectory with Bridgewater something of an aspirational tale for young artists. “When Dee Dee signed me, I wasn’t walking around looking for a record deal,” he says. “I was doing the thing. I was playing 10, 12 shows a week in China with different bands. She happened to be there for a week and met me at the rehearsal and was like, ‘Man, show us around. Let me hang with you.’”
In fact, at many points in his career, preparation and camaraderie have bonded with a desire to experiment, moving his music to its next level. Somewhere between Star People Nation and BLK2LIFE // A FUTURE PAST, Croker’s live sound went through critical changes. “I’d produce these records, but when you would come to the show live, it would be acoustic,” he says. During the pandemic, he finally had time to shift his perspective and conceptualize bringing his production voice to life on the bandstand. When he befriended D’LEAU, Croker mentioned his goal to bring out those production elements during his live performances. Without further discussion, D’LEAU went home and began experimenting.
“He basically engineered the setup where I’m using a DJ mixer and Ableton and all the samples from the record and all the tracks from the record and I’m melding that with the live situation,” says Croker. “And that’s what I’ve been doing since 2022.” He even uses vocal takes when he can’t bring singers on tour, again imbuing his digital setup with humanness and room for error: “Every time we play, it’s still different. It’s tricky.”
Even so, Croker keeps it analog. Frequently, artists and listeners alike will ask about his effects. “It’s just reverb and delay,” he says. “The reverb has two or three buttons; the delay has two or three dials. They’re both analog. So I don’t know what’s going to happen. When I play a note into it, I have to adjust immediately to what I don’t know. It’s not digital. It’s not user friendly. It’s experimental friendly. It’s creative friendly, in-the-moment friendly.”
The brain may work to organize information, but the heart beats for chaos and evolution. That humanness, the people-ness in Croker’s music, breaks through the music industry’s quantizing and categorizing. “There are lots of records I always go back to,” he says. “One is Gato Barbieri’s Caliente!, which is very fusion-funky. But Gato Barbieri was an avant-garde jazz saxophonist, playing with growls and squeaks and moans. His shit was free-jazz almost. To hear him in the context of playing “I Want You” by Marvin Gaye, I’m still hearing that guttural, free-jazz tonality on the tenor. But it’s this infectious dance groove with it. Genre-wise, it’s all these elements happening at the same time that transcend what people think something should or shouldn’t be. The way these things are going together, that really fascinates me.”
Back on the Smoke bandstand, he calls McDole to the mic. As the singer approaches the stage, Croker works the mixer. Though his focus is on the sounds he’s programming, he clocks the audience’s response to his guest and smiles. The ecosystem slides and shifts, welcomes one more artist, activates the next unknown. DB
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