Featuring composer and arranger Lucas Gillan on drums, James Davis on trumpet, Jim Schram on tenor saxophone, and Daniel Thatcher on bass. 

Freedom and order. Lyricism and abstraction. Sensitivity and raucousness. Lucas Gillan’s Many Blessings, a Chicago-based jazz quartet, finds comfort in the space between these opposites. Gillan, the drummer and bandleader, composes music that hooks listeners with insistent grooves and memorable melodies even while subverting expectations with outré harmonies and freewheeling improvisations.

While Many Blessings' 2017 release, Arroyo, exclusively featured Gillan's original compositions, their new album, Chit-Chatting With Herbie, showcases Gillan's arrangements of the music of pianist Herbie Nichols, one of the great under-appreciated geniuses of jazz. The Many Blessings album is a track-by-track re-imagining of the 1956 Blue Note LP Herbie Nichols Trio. Gillan was inspired to arrange Nichols’ music for his piano-less quartet because of the common thread he felt with his own music — swinging, melodic…