Giveton Gelin has always played like someone carrying more than one home inside him, and on Island Dreamer: III of III, the Bahamian-Haitian trumpeter turns that duality into a sprawling, seventeen-track statement. This is his sophomore full-length, arriving on Island Dreamer Records, and it plays less like a collection of songs than a single long exhale — one that moves from grief to groove to total release, with the ocean never far from view.
The album opens in near-silence. “Hurricane Dorian (a moment of silence)” uses musical restraint itself as the subject — tension built from what’s withheld rather than what’s played, the trumpet reading like a voice caught between comfort and warning. It’s a heavy way to begin, but it sets up everything that follows as a kind of recovery. “Blue Hole” answers with release: a steamy, humid atmosphere that slowly gathers into a strong melodic line, like a single drip from a faucet widening into clouds that part just enough to let light through. “When You Cry I Cry (Footprints)” picks up the pace with drums driving hard underneath a broad, constantly reinventing groove, and “Moun Lakay” settles into something warmer — musicians audibly listening to each other, finding one shared vibe rather than just trading solos.
The record’s emotional center arrives with back-to-back tributes. “Roy Hargrove — Level II” folds in a spoken testimony from the late trumpeter, ocean waves rolling underneath his voice, ending on advice that could serve as the album’s thesis: “sing through your horn.” Gelin answers that charge almost immediately on “I Solemnly Swear to Live,” a peaceful piece that feels like Hargrove’s words made audible. “Wynton Marsalis — Level III” repeats the gesture with Marsalis himself praising Gelin’s originality, and “Eargasm” responds in kind — playing exactly like a young master stepping fully into the inheritance he’s just been handed.
Elsewhere, Gelin lets the record loosen up. “Get Loose (Lucy)” brings in vocals as texture rather than lyric, built purely to move a room, while “Take a Bow” pushes the voice further forward into something rhapsodic and inspired. “Ancestry” is the album’s adrenaline spike — piano, bass and drums locked into a lickety-split, virtuosic sprint that never once loses its footing. By the closing stretch, “Place of Eternity” settles into polish and shine, before “Fighting Spirit Blues” ends the album on total freedom: a sax leading the way, answered by horn, joined by the full band, until everything narrows back down to a steady pianissimo and fades out on the echo of one last trumpet note.
Island Dreamer: III of III isn’t trying to be tidy. It’s a record about continuity — between islands, between generations, between a hurricane’s silence and a closing track’s total release — and Gelin plays it like someone who already knows exactly who handed him the horn. Out November 1st on Island Dreamer Records.
