Check Out North Texas Jazz Fusion Artist Robert Trusko’s New Easy-Listening Single As He Continues to Build His Genre-Bending Catalog.

Welcome to Song of the Day, where we hip you to all the new local releases you should be caring about. By highlighting one new North Texas-sprung tune every week day, our hope is that you’ll find something new to love about the rich and abundant DFW music scene five days a week.

Trusko – “Miles”
RIYL: Jazz fusion for unpretentious people
What else you should know: Trusko, the eponymous solo project from Denton composer Robert Trusko, has been playing among a small but mighty jazz scene rooted in the University of North Texas’ prestigious jazz studies program.

Trusko was previously enrolled in UNT’s Grammy award-winning program, where he received an M.A. in Music Composition.

Over the course of his career, he has taken lessons from other impressive musicians including Snarky Puppy’s Michael League, among other musical scholars with several letters after their name. We won’t bore you with the mundanities, but we’ll just say that Trusko’s resume is impressive.

Anyway, Trusko dropped a new track last week titled “Miles” and it is actually rather admissible for those who haven’t developed a taste for jazz or classical music. The song is a bit atmospheric, as its introduction is reminiscent of Brian Eno. Trusko goes into a waltz-y, galloping vocal melody about 30 seconds in and accompanies this passage with some idiophone instrumentals in the background. As he concludes the final cadences of the first verse, drummer Matt Young uses cymbal mallets to hit the ride cymbal as the song becomes more layered and dynamic.

String instruments and jazz guitar swells fill the bridge, and between the second and third vocal passages, the song delves into what appears to be improvisation. Trusko then closes with “I can see for miles it is repeating / falling through the ground I know I won’t wake.”

Overall, “Miles” is a tasteful execution of jazz fusion. If you like the jazziness of Steely Dan but wish they experimented more with chamber rock and ambient styles, then hey, give this a shot.

Cover photo via Trusko’s Twitter feed

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