Matt Wilson’s Good Trouble

Matt Wilson’s Good Trouble is one of several groups led by the drummer and composer Matt Wilson, who grew up in Knoxville, Illinois, and built his reputation in New York as a sideman with players such as Dewey Redman and Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra. His own records, many of them on Palmetto, include the long-running Arts and Crafts band and Honey and Salt, a project setting the poetry of Carl Sandburg.

Wilson plays the kit melodically and with obvious enjoyment, moving between straight swing, loose free passages and something close to a marching band, often within one tune. His groups treat standards and originals the same way: as open frames that the band can stretch, joke with and pull back together.