Peregrinations continues saxophonist Wilson Shook’s focus on resonant site-specific improvisations, a practice which converges with his interest in urban exploration and the geography of forgotten places.

The sessions which, presented in their entirety, make up Peregrinations, took place in a semi-abandoned Oakland warehouse, converted into a kickboxing gym before ultimately shuttering in the early days of COVID-19. Vacant space is all too common in the midst of the Bay Area’s sky-high rents, crashing economy, and critical levels of housing insecurity. Shook inhabits this tenuous landscape with sensitivity and strident imagination.

Peregrinations picks up where 2015’s Straying Echoes left off: intimate, expansive, vulnerable flights of wounded virtuosity. Halting attempts at a new language for soprano saxophone. Recorded alone, in the dark, amid the nascent ruins of the American metropolis.