Transcontinental Music lies at the heart of Joe De Gregorio’s Trilogy. It is an ambitious recording project realized across two continents in a single year (2025).
The Trilogy consists of three distinct yet connected albums. Together, they bring renowned jazz artists from different nations and generations. As a result, the project highlights Joe De Gregorio’s vision as a pianist, vocalist, composer, and bandleader working between tradition and innovation.
Concept & Vision in a Transcontinental Music Project
At its core, the Trilogy explores the evolution of jazz through three clear perspectives: heritage, cross-genre dialogue, and song interpretation. Each album stands on its own. However, each also contributes to a broader story of jazz as a living, global art form. Seen through the lens of Transcontinental Music, the project reflects movement, exchange, and cultural dialogue.
The Trilogy (Volume I)
The Trilogy (Volume I) is an ambitious three-album project by pianist, vocalist, and composer Joe De Gregorio, recorded within a single year across New York, Los Angeles, and Paris. More than a collection of albums, The Trilogy is a unified artistic statement: a musical journey through jazz history, geography, and identity, created in dialogue with some of the most influential voices in contemporary jazz, including Ron Carter and Peter Erskine.
At its core, the project explores a central question: how can jazz honor its roots while speaking authentically to a global, modern audience? Each album answers that question from a different angle—blues, cross-genre composition, and the vocal tradition—while sharing a common musical language shaped by improvisation, storytelling, and deep respect for the jazz lineage.
The recording process itself became part of the artistic narrative. De Gregorio chose to document each chapter in a city deeply connected to the music’s spirit: the historical weight of the New York jazz legacy, the creative openness of Los Angeles, and the lyrical intimacy of Paris. Rather than using a single fixed ensemble, each album’s collaborators emerged organically from its concept, resulting in three distinct yet interconnected sonic worlds.
1. In Blues (For Blues Sake)
Special Guests: Ron Carter & Peter Erskine
In Blues is a return to the source. Rooted in the blues—not as a genre frozen in time, but as jazz’s most enduring emotional foundation—the album revisits classic blues-based forms alongside original piano variations, treating the blues as both structure and compass.
The project’s storytelling begins in one of the most iconic spaces in jazz history: Van Gelder Recording Studio in Englewood, New Jersey. On February 27th, 2025, De Gregorio recorded piano and bass there with the legendary Ron Carter, capturing an intimate dialogue between two generations of jazz language in a room where countless masterpieces were born.
The rhythmic dimension was completed across the continent: drums were recorded at PUC Studios, Peter Erskine’s home studio in Santa Monica, Los Angeles, adding a uniquely personal layer to the collaboration. The result is an album that feels both historic and immediate—grounded in tradition, yet alive with spontaneity.
2. Crossover
Featuring Peter Erskine, Ike Sturm & a Premier Los Angeles String Quartet
Recorded entirely in Los Angeles, Crossover reflects De Gregorio’s fascination with musical permeability. The album dissolves stylistic boundaries, weaving together jazz, funk, Afro-Cuban and Brazilian rhythms, and classical chamber textures.
The sessions took place at Puck Productions Recording Studio (Santa Monica) on October 6th and 7th, 2025, bringing together a core trio of remarkable sensitivity: Joe De Gregorio (piano & vocals), Peter Erskine (drums), and Ike Sturm (bass).
A defining feature of the album is the inclusion of a string quartet—not as ornamentation, but as an equal partner in the ensemble. The quartet features Gallia Kastner (violin I), Myra Choo (violin II), Rita Andrade (viola), and Caleb Vaughn-Jones (cello), with arrangements and conducting by Daniele Truocchio.
The strings were recorded separately in an intimate setting—Truocchio’s home in Montebello (Los Angeles) on October 9th, 2025—creating a layered production process that mirrors the album’s theme: different musical worlds converging into one cohesive voice.
The result is a cinematic and deeply melodic reinvention of contemporary jazz, balancing compositional precision with improvisational warmth.
3. Crooner’s Journey
Featuring Géraldine Laurent, Louis Moutin & Stéphane Kerecki
Crooner’s Journey shifts the focus to voice, language, and song. This international jazz vocal project celebrates the timeless repertoire of popular standards, interpreted through De Gregorio’s dual identity as pianist and vocalist.
Recorded in Paris at Bobcity Recording Studio on December 28th and 29th, 2025, the album captures the intimacy and lyrical sophistication of the European jazz scene.
De Gregorio is joined by an exceptional ensemble: Géraldine Laurent (alto saxophone), Louis Moutin (drums), and Stéphane Kerecki (bass), with additional vocal presence by Karine Fôret.
Performed in five languages, the album reflects De Gregorio’s cosmopolitan artistic path and his belief in song as a universal emotional bridge. Rather than replicating traditional crooner aesthetics, these interpretations feel conversational, personal, and profoundly modern—where each arrangement serves storytelling above nostalgia.
Why The Trilogy Stands Out
What sets The Trilogy (Volume I) apart is its cohesive vision across diversity. Each album inhabits a different aesthetic space, yet together they form a unified portrait of an artist navigating tradition, innovation, and global identity.
From the historic resonance of Van Gelder Studio, to the intimate creativity of a legendary drummer’s home studio in Santa Monica, to the poetic atmosphere of Parisian recording sessions, The Trilogy is not only a musical release—it is a geographic and artistic journey.
For journalists and listeners alike, it offers multiple entry points: legendary collaborations, cross-genre experimentation, vocal storytelling, and a deeply human approach to jazz as a living international language.
The Trilogy is not fusion for its own sake—it is continuity, transmission, and connection.