Over the course of their thirty-some years together, Medeski Martin & Wood have followed their collective instincts in every facet of their work as unerringly as they do within the spontaneity of their moments live on stage. A quarter-century reflection upon The Dropper thus vividly indicates how the threesome constantly challenge themselves and, in doing so, exhibit confidence in their individual and collective technical abilities as well as their musicianly instincts.
MMW tossed a sharp left curve at Blue Note Records with its follow-up to its 1998 label debut, Combustication. Choosing to experiment more than play it safe, that expression of an iconoclastic attitude began with some bizarre, cryptic cover art: if the graphics were designed to leave the viewer/listener off-balance before hearing the music, the gesture worked.
The very first cut of The Dropper (released 10/24/00) cements that impression as the trio eschews groove reminiscent of the prior record (and classics like 1996’s Shackman) in favor of jarring dissonance and frenetic rhythms, alternating in quick succession. In contrast, on “Big Time,” the threesome bounces along in funky synchrony, hearkening to ’95’s Friday Afternoon in the Universe: John Medeski’s swirling organ lines top off Billy Martin’s earthy foundation, while Chris Wood’s bass bubbles just below the surface.
The younger of The Wood Brothers’ playing on “Felic” is equally prominent, leading into the cut’s metamorphosis from a leisurely gait to a driving, insistent tempo, Martin maintaining it through his NOLA-influenced second-line drum patterns. Such a stalwart rhythm section bond ensures this long player is at once whole and complete unto itself, yet still of a piece with MMW’s body of work at large.
Kudos to them too for not only bringing in other players as humble as they are inventive–on the latter cut saxophonist it’s Marshall Allen, long-time member of the Sun Ra Arkestra–but also in co-producing with Scotty Hard: that technical collaboration ensures the finely-parsed likes of Marc Ribot’s guitar get its just due on “Note Bleu.”
Something of a conventional strut, this track appears wisely placed in the thirteen-track sequence. The title song is another jagged interval–nevertheless hypnotic to a degree in its deliberate atonality–and “Philly Cheese Blunt” is a veritable microcosm of the album, illustrating how, seemingly effortlessly, Medeski Martin and Wood extract structure straight from their own internal shared chemistry.
So, after the ever-so-brief “Sun Sleigh,” “Tsukemono” begins a recapitulation of the album, thereby reminding precisely how the threesome maintains a discernible level of accessibility on The Dropper: with most tracks in the three to four-minute range, they do not go on for too long in any one direction.
Medeski, Martin & Wood continued further in this general direction on the next album, Uninvisible, as well as their finale for the famed label, End Of The World Party (just in case). With the hindsight of a quarter century, that approach bespeaks a process of expansion and contraction that culminated in Out Louder (with John Scofield) and culminated in The Radiolarians Series, issued three years later under their own Indirecto Records imprint.
Not surprisingly, Medeski, Martin & Wood soon entered a quasi-hiatus state as idiosyncratic as their approach to playing together. Intermittent group activity — including sporadic performances like the one in 2022 at Brooklyn Comes Alive — preceded talk of a new studio release in 2026 (the very work the trio was shown recording during the splendid 2024 documentary Not Not Jazz).
All of which activity reaffirms that, for this triad of remarkable musicians, the creative process is a kinetic state of being, perhaps never more vividly captured, at least with twenty-five years of retrospect, than on The Dropper.
