Baltimore-based pianist, keyboardist and composer Lafayette Gilchrist reconvenes his hip-hop, funk and go-go fueled ensemble New Volcanoes for the exuberant Move With Love, the acclaimed band’s first release in seven years. While the title captures the infectious, joyous, groove-heavy sound that New Volcanoes has honed over the last two decades, it’s also a plea for community during turbulent times.
“We need to move with love,” Gilchrist insists, “because the whole world seems to be moving in the opposite direction. The only way to move towards the future is with humanity, with compassion, with care – with love.”
Out July 25, 2025 via Morphius Records, Move With Love arrives as Gilchrist embarks on a new chapter in his career, as he joins the legendary Sun Ra Arkestra in the piano chair inaugurated by the ensemble’s iconic namesake. The wide-ranging palette of the Arkestra, whose orbit pulls in influences from the earliest eras of jazz to the cutting edge of the avant-garde and beams it back to Earth through a dazzling Afrofuturist lens, seems a perfect fit for the eclectic tastes of Gilchrist. Though all of his music is informed by hip-hop and the D.C.-born go-go style, it manifests in different ways depending on the band that the keyboardist channels it through. With his quintet, the Sonic Trip Masters, Gilchrist hews closer to a traditional acoustic jazz sound, while the more expansive New Volcanoes delves deeper into his funky, groove-oriented side in the form of a combustible nonet.
On the band’s first album since 2018’s Deep Dancing Suite, Gilchrist unveils a retooled New Volcanoes on Move With Love. Guitarist Carl Filipiak and bassist Anthony “Blue” Jenkins return from the previous incarnation, while percussionist Kevin Pinder transitions onto the drum kit. They’re joined by trumpeter Leo Maxey, trombonist Christian Hizon and saxophonists Shaquim Muldrow, Ebban Dorsey and Efraim Dorsey, with guest percussionist Bashi Rose joining for four of the album’s six tracks. The album captures a rollicking live set on home turf at Baltimore’s Club Car, in the room that had previously housed the Windup Space.
The venue itself is indicative of Gilchrist’s message on Move With Love. While the Windup Space had been a headquarters for jazz and experimental music in the city, the Club Car is a “queer venue and cocktail bar” whose calendar typically features drag and burlesque performances. When the opportunity to perform there arose, Gilchrist was unsure if the New Volcanoes would be a good fit for the new focus.
“I didn’t know if the audience would show up for jazz,” Gilchrist recalls. “I thought they might be expecting more of a house music or disco thing, something more upbeat than what I’m doing, and the jazz audience can tend to be more conservative. But the new owners insisted it would work, and I realized that the New Volcanoes had never really attracted the straightahead jazz audience anyway. It ended up being a great night and the energy was amazing, so we decided to put it out.”
Move With Love is infused with both the energy of that evening and the urgency of the moment we’re living through. “We’ve got to look out for each other and sincerely care about each other,” Gilchrist elaborates. “Love is more than a fuzzy feeling. Love is a consistency. Love is a justice. Love is a reciprocity. Love is a giving. There’s a lot in that four-letter word, l-o-v-e. But we’re moving another way.”
The resolute “Cut Through the Chase” opens the album with a street-level anthem for the country’s working people, a population that Gilchrist knows well, hailing from as notoriously gritty an urban center as Baltimore. “That’s about the struggle of every day folk,” the composer explains. “They say for poor folk, every day is an emergency. But the music doesn’t mirror the drudgery of everyday existence, because it’s all the more reason to celebrate being alive. You need the release, you need the release to be real, and you need it to be beautiful.”
The buoyant title track, co-written with Pinder, is followed by “Bamboozled,” a stealthy tune whose sly groove hints at the gaslighting perpetrated by the political class. Carl Filipiak’s Sicilian heritage provided the title of “BASTA,” an Italian interjection meaning, “Enough!” That command lends the album’s most go-go inflected track its ferocious spine. The lurching “Baby Steps” allows that progress can be slow moving while reflecting the innocence of the young people that Gilchrist sees on their way to school, “still just learning the world. The world is not some awful place to them. It’s still a place of wonder and potential.”
The album closes with “Crosspollination Aggregation,” which pays tribute to the paths that crossed in the audience that evening at the Club Car, a model for the love movement that Gilchrist hopes to inspire with his music. “In the mass media and on social media, we’re invisible,” he says of the like-minded community he counts himself a part of. “But out here on the ground, we’re all around. Love definitely has that power to eventually build up to the point where it’s an undeniable force. It’s hard to have faith sometimes because we’ve never lived in an age where that’s prevailed, but history is an ever-current event. We can change humanity’s destiny.”
Lafayette Gilchrist’s music has graced the soundtracks of David Simon’s acclaimed series The Wire, The Deuce & Treme. It draws on the span of jazz history from stride to free improv, with inspiration from hip-hop, funk and D.C. go-go, making surprising connections between styles, boldly veering from piledriver funk to piquant stride, vigorous swing to hip-hop swagger, abstraction to deep-bottom grooves. The Baltimore-based pianist, keyboardist and composer leads his own bands, New Volcanoes and Sonic Trip Masters, and is a member of the legendary Sun Ra Arkestra under the leadership of centenarian Maestro Marshall Allen. He is also a longtime collaborator of saxophone great David Murray, including a lengthy tenure in his quartet.