Billy Mohler to Release COVELL With Mark Turner and Joe LaBarbera

Bassist Billy Mohler will release Covell, featuring Mark Turner and Joe LaBarbera, on Contagious Music on October 23.

In so many ways, Covell, the new trio album from bassist Billy Mohler, is simply a great jazz record — the sort of album you need on vinyl because it deserves to be heard in room-filling analog sound, ideally with a coffee or beer in hand. It features Mark Turner, one of the greatest tenor saxophonists of his generation, who acts here as a fount of lyricism, unspooling one gorgeous, nimble melodic line after another. On drums is Joe LaBarbera, a staple of the Los Angeles scene best known for his work with Bill Evans and Tony Bennett. His sound is pure midcentury swing — delightfully free and raw and responsive, the sort of touch you can only develop by gigging night after night, decade after decade.

Covell features six durable Mohler originals plus one tune ('Round Trip') by Ornette Coleman, whose piano-less trio records no doubt inspired the aesthetic here. The track lengths are mostly tight, and the session was captured largely in single takes, at the laid-back L.A. wine bar that gives the album its name. Covell is a real jazz fan's jazz record.

As an improviser, Mohler can summon up the unpretentious support of Charlie Haden; the melody-forward attack of Scott LaFaro; and the power and pugnacity of Charles Mingus. A graduate of the Thelonious Monk Institute, which he attended on a scholarship, he's performed with Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter, and has led or played on sessions featuring contemporaries like Jeff Parker, Chris Speed and his dear friend Nate Wood (who mastered Covell).

He sounds so consummate as a jazz bass player, in fact, you might never expect that his c.v. includes credits with Ringo Starr, Smashing Pumpkins, Jon Brion ('Little Person,' from Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York), AWOLNATION (the alt smash 'Sail') and so many others. A Grammy-nominated producer and songwriter who has essentially lived in L.A. studios, Mohler has stories — about hanging with Dolly Parton, for instance, before a star-packed Grammy performance — that most jazzbos don't. If all that sounds larger than life, consider too that his godfather is Bill Medley of the Righteous Brothers.

Mohler is also, like so many artists, a bereaved son and nephew mending his wounds through music.

Covell explores a time of profound upheaval for Mohler, following the deaths of his father and then, just six months later, his uncle. It was a period marked by intense soul-searching, through ideas about mortality, sure, but also betrayal, trust, love and the Native American roots Mohler inherited from his mother. 'It was very shocking to have two deaths of people I love so dearly, so close together,' says the bassist. 'It's a door that's unlocked now that I can't turn back from. Once you've experienced that kind of loss, and that depth of loss, you can never relate to anybody who hasn't.'

As men and figures in Mohler's life, his father and his uncle couldn't have been more different, though the bassist loved both deeply. With his father, Mohler had an 'interesting, strange relationship,' he says. 'My father wasn't the role model I could look up to, as far as taking care of the family,' Mohler explains. 'That really wasn't in his nature. His nature was to be off on his own, but he had five kids. By the time I was in sixth, seventh grade, he was never around.' He was a master of performative warmth and affability — Mohler's friends tended to think he was a great guy — but he was also manipulative to the point where he simply could not be trusted.

As his son's success in the music industry grew, Mohler's Father's visits became excuses to work an angle: a request for a contact, a favor, a loan — but never a pure and goodhearted attempt to connect with Billy or his children. The two men became estranged for several years, reconnecting only just before the elder Mohler passed.

But the betrayal had only just begun. After his father's death, Billy and the rest of the family discovered he'd racked up an astronomical tax debt in secret, and that they were responsible for making good with the IRS. 'He even hawked his car and lost the pink slip, so we couldn't sell it,' Mohler recalls, still visibly upset. 'That took nine months to get a new pink slip, so the car just rotted in the driveway because we couldn't do anything with it.'

Mohler's journey through grief and healing defines much of Covell. 'The Reckoning,' he explains, explores that moment 'when everything I thought I understood shifted beneath me.' 'Pertuda,' he says, 'is about yearning for a relationship that lives in my imagination but can never fully exist,' while ''Consolation' grew out of the feeling of walking a long road of deception. … Solace has to be found in understanding what can't be undone.'

In reflection, Mohler's uncle, a member of the Chippewa tribe who lived on a reservation in Oklahoma, was the light to his father's darkness. 'He was one of the best uncles you could possibly have,' Mohler remembers. 'So engaged. Whenever I'd travel to Oklahoma with bands I was touring with, he'd be there. He'd come to my hotel room; we'd go get lunch. He was so proud. As odd as it sounds, his passing was more devastating to me emotionally. I'd already written my father off.'

Three tracks on Covell meditate on his passing and probe the family's Native American heritage, which Mohler absorbed during frequent childhood visits to powwows, reservations and Indian art markets. He wrote the melody to 'Ceremony' while attending his uncle's traditional Native American funeral in Oklahoma. 'Rituals' thinks about the 'small, grounding acts' Mohler uses to stave off uncertainty. 'Slowdive,' he says, 'was written as a tribute to my ancestors and the sacrifices that made my life possible.'

As articulate as he is in detailing his musical and familial history, Mohler is hesitant to define the artistic muse using words. 'I don't really know where songs come from, and I never have,' he says. 'But now there's a certain feeling to some of them, with these losses that I've dealt with. Writing is kind of like therapy now, in the sense that I lose myself in it.'

Credits

Billy Mohler - bass

Joe LaBarbera - drums

Mark Turner - tenor saxophone

Tracklist

Side A

1. The Reckoning (3:25)

2. Round Trip (4:53)

3. Pertuda (3:29)

4. Ceremony (5:59)

Side B

5. Consolation (1:19)

6. Rituals (1:19)

7. Slowdive (7:07)

Songs 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 by Billy Mohler Music BMI

Song 2 by Ornette Coleman

Release date: October 23, 2026