By Frank Alkyer | Published November 2025
When a band from Austin, Texas, drops music into the offices of DownBeat, there are expectations. The band Atlas Maior, hailing from that acclaimed music city, blows those expectations away. No Texas twang, no guitars, no songs about late nights and lost women. Instead, this quartet delivers art jazz from the edge and sound explorations of the highest order. The instrumentation is, well, unexpected. Josh Peters slings an oud or lutar instead of a guitar. Joshua Thomson performs on alto saxophone and flute. Josh Flowers finds open space on his upright bass fiddle. And Gray Parsons delivers the sparsest of grooves on drums. The music they perform pulls influences from around the musical globe. Latin tinge, Middle Eastern maqam and avant-garde jazz seep into the group’s sound, and it’s all on display with Palindromlar. The album offers a fascinating listen, always leaning toward sparse arrangements with plenty of room for exploration. Take, for example, “Las Conchas,” a sometimes foreboding yet playful composition where Peters and Flowers enter the tune with a quirky-cool call and response on oud and bass, respectively, before Thomson and Parsons join in, the drummer taking a slow groove for Thomson’s rapid-fire alto work. Nothing is hurried; each band member listens as much as they play, entering only to add or amplify what is being played in the moment. The band’s third album, Palindromlar grew out of a tour to Morocco, including a three-night residency in Essaouira. The music has a mystic, noir quality. It’s out there, no doubt about it, bridging culture and breaking down musical walls in a most beautiful way.
