Willie Morris: Unbound Inner

This album is a culmination of much more than just the compositions, the solos, or the time spent in the studio. It is the coming together of many years of life experience between the musicians featured, the producers, the engineers, and hopefully the listeners. It is a small piece added to an ongoing stream of conscious and unconscious desire to find peace within and fully allow ourselves to embody and express who we are. This music centers on people, their struggles, and their moments of joy and beauty. The music is about opening up to a world that has created so much pressure to do the opposite. The music is about moving toward the Unbound Inner.

Flyover Country is one of my earliest compositions and is meant as a tribute to the place and people who raised me. The Midwest gets stereotyped as being an extremely boring place laden with cornfields and people who have never left their county, let alone their state. I see it differently. I see people who have continued to sustain themselves despite so much of the work and infrastructure they relied on being stripped from them. I see people who check in on their neighbors and accept them for all their quirks and faults. I see a place that allows and even forces one to dig into their creativity and work together to make something beautiful. There are undoubtedly negative aspects worth discussing about the Midwest, but it is an area filled with people who continue to press on and create despite the feeling that nobody is ever checking on them.

Played in a duo setting this time around, Jon Davis does a great job of remaining playful in his comping and interpretation of time giving a push and pull that I find to be extremely indicative of life in the "Flyover Country."

"Patterned" is meant to represent the battle we fight with routine or patterns and our desire and ability to break away from them. Being in a routine is extremely comfortable and even necessary, but we can also lose ourselves to it. We begin going through the motions, only trying to get from day to day. We don't realize how much life is passing us by until we look back on it. Solos were not discussed before we made this recording and midway through the composition, time ceases to exist for a moment. This is a brief moment in which we realize our agency and free will, only to fall back into the pattern as time returns.

"Comfort Zone" is a beautiful composition by pianist Jon Davis. In playing this tune, I was struck by the brief moments of light that exist sporadically throughout what is, generally, a pretty dark or maybe pensive composition. It is as though we are moving between our comfort zone and the unknown. I particularly felt that the whole band created a nice arc in this recording, especially moving through the out chorus making what is a fairly long track into an interesting and enjoyable experience.

"The Folks Who Live Down the Hill" is a derogatory term for people from East St. Louis and, more generally, black people in the St. Louis Metro-East area. East St. Louis is a community that has been devastated time and time again in so many ways including race riots, white flight, and the removal of industry and, thus, jobs. It has resulted in a city that on the surface looks extremely bleak, with its abandoned, and often bombed-out buildings, mostly damaged roads, struggling school system, and a population that is constantly on the decline for various reasons. There is a deep history of the mistreatment of people from this area and it continues even to this day with little attention brought to it. Despite the constant hardship faced by the people of East St. Louis, the people of the city remain vibrant, funky, and full of spirit. These are my people.

There was no shortage of vibrance, funk, and spirit on display with the bass lines of Boris, the pocket of Rudy, and the playful and exploratory nature of Jon allowing me to feel right at home on this recording.

"How To Get Away With Murder" represents how we are drawn to the many forms of media as a means to escape the hardships of life and, consequently, move further away from the human connection that we as social creatures crave. One can make the argument that we are still maintaining connections through many social media platforms that exist, but I can't help but feel that these platforms water down those connections. We painstakingly curate our online presence and, in essence, put on a mask. The more time we spend with this mask on, the further we move away from accepting, appreciating, and outwardly expressing our organic selves. We scroll endlessly in search of something to make us smile, laugh, or even cry as if the world does not give us enough to feel already. We are dead outside of the confines of an app.

The speed of the composition and the short bursts of improvisation from each member of the band represents the pull from one form of media to the next, never stopping to take stock of what is happening right in front of us. I found the hookup between Rudy and Boris to be extremely strong on this track which provided the soloists the ability to remain free in their warring for attention.

"Charade" was written at a time when I was struggling with the many different spaces that I existed in, feeling that I was never truly able to be my authentic self in any of them. Much of this was self-manufactured, but it was nonetheless exhausting and caused severe imposter syndrome and burnout. The melody is meant to be extremely simple but in an area of the horn that I am, admittedly, very self-conscious about, representing the feeling that so many people know so well of having to cautiously walk a tightrope to maintain the status quo. The rhythm section of Jon Davis, Boris Kozlov, and Rudy Royston do a wonderful job of keeping everything grounded while Behn Gillece provides a dream-like counter line as if to represent the whimsy of wanting nothing more than to be.

"Into Somewhere" is a fun contrafact on "Out of Nowhere" penned by Jon Davis. This composition and recording fully display the playful nature that I am constantly talking about in Jon's playing. The chord changes provide so many twists, turns, and new areas to explore. Despite it being a contrafact, the twists and turns forced the band to play completely differently than we might with the original source material, and that, to me, is what makes a great contrafact.

"Dialect" was inspired by a young saxophonist from the Bronx that I met as he was auditioning for a pre-college program I was a part of at The Juilliard School. The student came in and was quick to inform my colleague and me that he did not read music, an admission that would ultimately crush his chances of being accepted into the program. However, his playing was beautiful as he played music unfamiliar to me with a title he explained was from his dialect. It was seeing this audition that had me questioning what the ultimate goal was for these institutions. I still have my qualms about how music education is handled in the United States, as countless programs are cut in places where they matter the most. We have, seemingly, created and propagated a system that does not necessarily reward artistic merit or vision, but instead how much money or opportunity one is born into.

The composition's A sections contain a palindrome with the first 4 measures stating a theme and the next 4 flipping each piece of that theme around. This is meant to represent how we often arrive at the same outcomes as one another but are admonished for not doing it in the way of the dominant culture.

"Tell Me A Bedtime Story" is such an incredible Herbie Hancock composition. I was actually exposed to it by my mother long before I had even touched a saxophone, let alone had any inkling of an idea that I wanted to be a jazz musician. This track has a double meaning, with the first being a representation of the calm in those moments right before we let our heads hit the pillow, washing away whatever the day put on our minds, bodies, and spirits. The second and most important is my appreciation for the way my mother supported my sister and me, encouraging us to bring to fruition whatever dreams we had in our heads, big or small. I'll say it a million times, then a million more, Mom is everything.

Behn Gillece creates an amazingly dreamy texture that perfectly captures my purpose behind this recording.

"What's Expected" was written in jest. At the time of writing it, I was creating music that was different than that which surrounded me, leaving me to feel as though what I was doing was wrong or lacking in artistic integrity. This composition was my way of confronting the norms of the institutions I existed within while giving me a vehicle to express that "something else" that I was and continue to explore. The blues is a form that has been used extensively throughout the history of this music, and "What's Expected" is my way of giving my take on it.

Liner Notes copyright © 2025 Willie Morris.

Unbound Inner can be purchased here.

Contact Willie Morris at All About Jazz.
Hailing from the vibrant music scene of St. Louis, saxophonist and composer Willie Morris emerges as a fresh and exciting force in the jazz scene, with a deep-rooted appreciation for the Black-American art forms that have flourished in his city, and a dyn

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