Mauricio Morales

Morales has been a rising force as a player and bandleader/project leader for the past several years, but his formative musical life goes back to his picking up the electric bass at 13 years old and the upright bass six years later. With the noted artist Tere Lojero as his mother and a music aficionado father to guide his interests, Morales discovered a passion for writing and manifesting his own music. Working on the East Coast scene after heading to Berklee School of Music in 2012, Morales migrated westward to Los Angeles in 2018.

Morales launched what has become a diverse discography with the sometimes fusion-tinged tracks of 2021’s Luna, followed by the improvisation-leaning trio album Eclipse in 2022 and The Endless Ride last year, in 2023. The pop resonances and qualities on that album, including vocals, are in marked contrast with the almost entirely acoustic sextet context of Seven Days.

Of the variety between projects, Morales explains, “I want to explore different areas of my artistry. My first record had a very youthful essence to it. I wanted to put everything within seven songs–my writing, my playing, and everything else. And then the second record was the complete opposite because it is completely stripped down.” With The Endless Ride, he explains, “I wanted to also experiment with all my influences of when I was younger because when I started playing music, I wasn’t really listening to jazz at all.”

Clearly, from the evidence of Seven Days, Morales is by now deeply steeped in jazz, as a player and composer, and expertly equipped to create his own new vision within the genre. In terms of influences on his writing, especially in a discernible “jazz” mode, he points to such prominent artists as Aaron Parks, Brad Mehldau, Brian Blade, and especially Pat Metheny. “Even though his music can be complex,” Morales says of Metheny’s music, “there’s something very accessible about it that I’ve always resonated with since before I played jazz.”