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LONELY MAN AND HIS FISH bio, Feb. 27, 2023
If Yelena Eckemoff knows all about the revelatory power of narrative, it’s because her own story is so unlikely and inspiring. Since the release of her first concept album in 2010, the conservatory-trained Russian-born pianist has carved out a singular niche with an extraordinary, expansive body of programmatic compositions shaped by European classical music and jazz’s expressive interplay. Working from her home in rural North Carolina, the astonishingly prolific composer has connected with a diverse pool of master improvisers, supplying them with music requiring rarefied storytelling skills. A brilliant new cast of players bring her musical tale vividly to life on her18th release, the double album Lonely Man and His Fish (L & H Production).
With Eckemoff on piano, Rhodes, and vintage Ampli-celeste, cornetist Kirk Knuffke, redoubtable bassist Ben Street, drummer extraordinaire Eric Harland, and Masaru Koga on shakuhachi and other flutes, Lonely Man and His Fish traces an elegantly simple story that unfolds with the evocative power of a parable. On the surface, it’s an oft-told tale. Man meets fish. Man loses fish. Fish and man are reunited. But in the musical realm of Eckemoff, who’s also a poet and graphic artist responsible for the album’s striking cover art, seemingly simple stories reveal both the numinous glow of everyday life and our spiritual ties to the natural world. Like her previous projects, Lonely Man and His Fish is a triumph of casting, with the titular roles interpreted by unmistakable instrumentalists.
The prolific Knuffke is a cornetist sought out by a wide array of creative musicians looking for an improviser equally fluent in inside and outside settings. As a leader and co-leader, he’s recorded several dozen albums that have earned him numerous awards and honors. He brings the soul and inner spirit of the Lonely Man to life with empathetic warmth and concentrated feeling, subtly portraying melancholy, affection, remorse, anxiety, and joy without a hint of sentimentality. His aqueous companion is beautifully rendered by Koga, a player who has been gaining recognition on the New York scene since relocating from the San Francisco Bay Area three years ago. A saxophonist and flutist who was born in Japan and grew up moving between Europe and the United States, Koga is best known for his work with veteran Bay Area drummer Akira Tana’s Otonowa, a group that has honed a gorgeous repertoire of jazz settings for traditional and popular Japanese melodies.
Eckemoff knew she wanted the Fish to be portrayed by the Japanese end-blown bamboo shakuhachi, and was drawn to Koga’s playing by his command of jazz idioms. “Other players were way more traditional,” she says. “He’s more of a jazz player. I was thinking about my story and I heard the Lonely Man represented by cornet, and the Fish by the flute, but I wanted Japanese flute. Masaru played shakuhachi and also a regular Western flute with an attachment that made it sound Japanese. I wanted that sound, not clarinet, not saxophone.”
Eckemoff’s liner notes detail the narrative that guides the music. A recently retired orchestra player salves his isolation by purchasing a fish that he dubs Spark. They delight in each other’s companionship until a bicycle accident puts the man in the hospital, setting in motion a chain of events that ends up with Spark, unbeknownst to the man, taking up residence in a nearby pond. The man’s trumpet playing facilitates a reunion, returning his lost Spark. It’s a sweet story that speaks to our isolation, our longing for connection, and maybe our search for faith while lost out in the stars.
What makes Eckemoff’s tale so effective is that her music carefully observes and comments on the events and feelings with a light, affectionate touch. From the opening track, “Lonely Man,” the story unfolds with sly observations that seem tailormade for Knuffke: “There is playfulness, a lightness in his playing. It was a perfect fit.”
Almost every piece could be played independently. The whimsical “Breakfast for Two” feels like it could be a theme for a remake of The Odd Couple (one of jazz’s great texturalists, Harland plays with translucent acuity throughout). But like most of her concept albums, she designed the project with a cohesive flow and sequence.
“At first I get an idea about a project, whether it’s stages of life, colors, smells, or animals,” Eckemoff says. “I’m looking for the frame, the concept. I did Cold Sun about early spring and late winter and Everblue about the ocean. It becomes my world for the duration of the project, like when you read a long novel. Once I get an idea, I don’t write out the story before the music. I have the story worked out in my head. When I compose, I already know how the story is going to come out.”
No one could have guessed how Eckemoff’s story would turn out given her early trajectory. Born in Moscow in 1962, she was a musical prodigy who began playing piano and composing at the age of four tutored by her mother, a noted piano teacher. By seven she was studying at the prestigious Gnessins Academy with Anna Pavlovna Kantor, whose other students included Evgeny Kissin. Eckemoff went on to the elite Moscow Conservatory as a young teen, but her musical curiosity eventually propelled her off the classical path. Enamored by Pink Floyd, she started dissecting prog rock, and became smitten with jazz when she attended Dave Brubeck’s famous 1987 Moscow concert. “And then I was studying jazz in the experimental Moscow Jazz studio,” she says. “So that’s how I was educating myself.”
Teaching and composing, she and her husband carved out a comfortable niche, but seeking more opportunities they decided to emigrate to the U.S. with their three children in 1991 as the Soviet Union started to disintegrate. A long, arduous process eventually found the family reunited in North Carolina, where she started to build a new life playing occasional concerts, teaching music, and working as a church musician. Frustrated by the uninspired level of local jazz talent, she eventually connected with veteran Danish bassist Mads Vinding via his MySpace page where he offered his services to fellow musicians. Thrilled with the results, she sent the overdubbed duo recording to drum legend Peter Erskine in Los Angeles. Duly impressed by her music, he added his contribution, which is how her breakout 2010 concept album Cold Sun was created.
She was off and running. Later that year she released Grass Catching the Wind working remotely with Vinding and Danish drummer Morten Lund, and the live session Flying Steps, featuring Erskine and first-call LA-based Polish bassist Darek Oles. She’s produced at least one album a year since then, working with the finest improvisers in Europe and the U.S., leading to critically hailed albums such as 2014’s A Touch of Radiance with Mark Turner, Joe Locke, George Mraz, and Billy Hart, and 2017’s In the Shadow of a Cloud with Chris Potter, Adam Rogers, Drew Gress, and Gerald Cleaver.
“It is how an avalanche starts,” Eckemoff says about her ever-expanding creative community. “You make a snowball and throw it down. It rolls down gathering more and more snow, and before you know there is a mass of snow, ice, and rocks falling rapidly down a mountainside.”
The rock supporting all of Eckemoff’s expression is her faith, which she brought to the fore on 2016’s Better Than Gold and Silver, a double album featuring her vocal and instrumental settings for 10 Psalms. She returned to the Bible in 2022 with I Am a Stranger in This World featuring Ralph Alessi, Drew Gress, Adam Rogers, and Nasheet Waits in a program of gospel-inflected instrumental settings for another selection of Psalms.
Whether a project is driven by a narrative or not, “every album I do is conceptual,” Eckemoff says. “I’ve been composing music since I was four. I don’t even try. Tunes come to me. Sometimes it’s too much. God created me like that. That’s why I don’t perform that much, and don’t want to perform anymore. I have so much to compose. And in the genre I compose, the project is only finished when recorded with jazz musicians. I design the project for them to be able to express themselves.”
With Lonely Man and His Fish, Eckemoff has expanded an already capacious creative universe. Knuffke, Koga, Street, and Harland are amongst jazz’s most prolific recording artists, but interpreting her music reveals previously unheard wrinkles in their instrumental personalities. Joining in the telling of her story, they’ve added a new chapter to their own, which is the sure sign of a great jazz composer. •
I AM S STRANGER IN THIS WORLD press release, Feb. 17, 2022
YELENA ECKEMOFF EXTENDS THE SCOPE OF AN AMBITIOUS PERSONAL PROJECT WITH “I AM A STRANGER IN THIS WORLD,” TO BE RELEASED MAY 20 BY L&H PRODUCTION PIANIST-COMPOSER CONTINUES HER MUSICAL SETTINGS OF BIBLICAL PSALMS WITH A CRACK ENSEMBLE INCLUDING RALPH ALESSI, DREW GRESS, ADAM ROGERS, AND NASHEET WAITS,PLUS SPECIAL GUESTS
Pianist-composer Yelena Eckemoff adds to her already impressive corpus of settings for the Psalms on I Am a Stranger in This World, due for a May 20 release on her own L&H Production label. The album is a new installment in a long-term musical project that began with 2018’s Better Than Gold and Silver, and once again teams Eckemoff with that album’s trumpeter Ralph Alessi and bassist Drew Gress, along with guitarist Adam Rogers and drummer Nasheet Waits. (Violinist Christian Howes—with Ben Monder and Joey Baron also in lieu of Rogers and Waits, respectively—also appears on three holdover tracks from Better Than Gold and Silver.)
Eckemoff converted to Christianity while still living in her native Moscow during the waning days of the Soviet Union: a time when to be Christian was still a dangerous transgression. Her new faith, along with a hard-to-procure King James Bible, combined with her pedigree in classical and jazz piano to inspire a celebration of the Old Testament’s wisdom and poetry.
Eckemoff, however, finds more than just inspiration in the Psalms. “I am a melodist, but the melodies that come from the words I hear in the Psalms, I think they are the best melodies I create,” she says. “And I think it’s because there’s a power in those words…. You can feel the power that God channels through that music.”
Of course, the musicians working with Eckemoff channel power of their own. I Am a Stranger in This World was recorded during the 2020 pandemic, and there’s a palpable passion from Alessi, Gress, Rogers, and Waits simply to be making music again. But that alone doesn’t account for the tenderness of Rogers’s lines on “As Chaff Before the Wind” (a setting of Psalm 35), the soul in Alessi’s soft fills on “I Shall Not Want” (from the famous Psalm 23), or the full band chemistry of “Keep Not Your Silence” (Psalm 83).
“Eckemoff’s new Psalms settings display an expanded stylistic range,” writes CD annotator Mark Sullivan. “Who knew that Psalms could sound like blues? ‘I Shall Not Want’ embraces the vibrant blues feeling [as does] ‘Lighten My Eyes.’ . . . Here for the first time on her jazz recordings her keyboards are expanded beyond acoustic piano to include organ on ‘Keep Not Your Silence,’ Fender Rhodes electric piano on ‘Truth in His Heart’ and ‘The Wine of Astonishment,’ as well as some synthesizers on ‘At Midnight I Will Rise’ and ‘Like Rain Upon the Mown Grass,’ subtly broadening the group’s timbral palette.”
Although Eckemoff first wrote these settings as vocal features, there are no singers on I Am a Stranger in This World. Instead, she offers her purely instrumental interpretations of the Psalms, titling each with a line from the appropriate Biblical verse and citing each Psalm for the listener to read and draw connections to the music—and perhaps to their own ideas about faith in a higher power.
Eckemoff is no evangelist, but her work with the Psalms does offer an important message to the world. “There is some higher power,” she says. “Even the people who don’t believe in God but have faith in government or in society or humanity—well, the government or society or humanity is the higher power. Something greater than themselves. My message is that people can overcome fears and insecurities and trust in a higher power.”
Yelena Eckemoff was born in Moscow, where she started playing by ear and composing music when she was four. She would go on to study classical piano the most prestigious music academies in Russia: the Gnessins School for musically gifted children, followed by the Moscow State Conservatory.
Gradually, however, Eckemoff’s ears wandered beyond her classical training, discovering first rock, then jazz. When she saw Dave Brubeck’s performance in Moscow in 1987, she settled on jazz as her permanent musical path.
That path turned out to run through the United States, where Eckemoff immigrated in 1991 and settled in North Carolina. Now ensconced in the country that gave birth to jazz, she went in search of players who could do justice to her intricate ideas.
The search was a long and sometimes frustrating one, but it paid off when she was able to work with the likes of bassist Mads Vinding and drummer Peter Erskine on her 2010 album Cold Sun. Later collaborators have included Mark Turner, Joe Locke, George Mraz, Peter Erskine, Manu Katché, Billy Hart, Chris Potter, Jon Christensen, and Joey Baron, along with Alessi, Gress, Rogers, and Waits. Her unique, sophisticated, and highly expressive music continues to draw support and creative energy from the finest musicians in the world.
ADVENTURES OF THE WILDFLOWER press release, December 7, 2020
Yelena Eckemoff Intensifies Her Conceptual Approach to Music with "Adventures of the Wildflower," Set for March 19 Release
With her latest conceptual gem, “Adventures of the Wildflower,” Russian-born pianist and composer Yelena Eckemoff reaches her highest pinnacle yet of originality and personal expression. The two-disc set, recorded in Helsinki with a superb Finnish ensemble, tells the heartwarming story of Columbine (named after the flower) from germination through her final time on earth, and includes poems and illustrations by Eckemoff herself that provide personal “accompaniment” to the music.
Pianist-composer Yelena Eckemoff unfurls her most elaborate and ambitious musical work yet with “Adventures of the Wildflower,” which her own L&H Production label will release on March 19, 2021. As its title suggests, the double album is the story of a life, from birth to death (and rebirth), of an anthropomorphic columbine flower. Its story is told through the inspired work of Eckemoff and a Finnish ensemble that includes saxophonist Jukka Perko, multi-instrumentalist Jarmo Saari, vibraphonist Panu Savolainen, bassist Antti Lötjönen, and drummer-percussionist Olavi Louhivuori.
Long a conceptualist, Eckemoff has previously tended to craft albums of thematically linked but discrete pieces. “Adventures of the Wildflower,” however, functions as a single narrative. The flower—aptly named Columbine—undertakes a vivid journey, growing from baby to mature plant as she observes from her garden spot the whirl of nature and of life, plant and animal, around her. She even learns to communicate with her garden mates, a real phenomenon that inspired Eckemoff to create the album when she read about it in a magazine.
“I was intrigued to learn that plants communicate with each other through the air, by releasing odorous chemicals, and through the soil, by secreting soluble chemicals,” she says. “Such communal life sparked my imagination. I started to envision how a single plant would feel being part of such an interconnected community and how it would react to its neighbors who lived next to it. Soon I had a kernel of an idea about a wildflower.”
Eckemoff supplements the original music with an 18-part narrative poem (one part for each composition) that tells Columbine’s story. While nuanced, the narrative is built on an earnest simplicity, like a children’s story. The music, on the other hand, is much more complex. The multiple levels of melody in “Home by the Fence” or “Children Playing with Seed Pods” are sumptuous feasts for both the ear and the intellect, while pieces like “Chickens,” “Butterflies,” and “Another Winter” are filled with experimental, even psychedelic, textures.
Credit for these soundscapes must go as well to the musicians who work with Eckemoff. The sounds Saari conjures from his guitars, theremin, and glass harp lend the music a unique palette, augmented by the bold, unconventional playing of Perko, Savolainen, Lötjönen, and Louhivuori. “They were fearless in approaching my extensive lead sheets,” the pianist affirms. In Adventures of the Wildflower that fearlessness has, like Columbine, blossomed into a splendid and very alive specimen of its own.
Yelena Eckemoff was born in Moscow, where she started playing by ear and composing music when she was four. By seven, she was attending the Gnessins School for musically gifted children, eventually matriculating at Moscow State Conservatory to study classical piano.
In her twenties, Eckemoff found herself drawn to jazz—at a time when the music, or at least recordings of it, were a rare commodity in the then-Soviet Union. Yet an appearance by Dave Brubeck behind the Iron Curtain reinforced her newfound love of the music and shaped her creative path thenceforth.
That path turned out to run through the United States, where Eckemoff immigrated in 1991 and settled in North Carolina. Now ensconced in the country that gave birth to jazz, she went in search of players who could do justice to her intricate ideas.
The search was a long and sometimes frustrating one, but it paid off when she was able to work with the likes of bassist Mads Vinding and drummer Peter Erskine on her 2010 album “Cold Sun.” Later collaborators have included projects with Mark Turner, Joe Locke, Ralph Alessi, Billy Hart, Chris Potter, Adam Rogers, Joey Baron, Arild Andersen, and Jon Christensen, the Norwegian drum great whose final recording was on Eckemoff’s 2020 release “Nocturnal Animals.”
With “Adventures of the Wildflower,” Eckemoff wanted to make an offering of positivity to her adopted country. “I was moved to make this record as my answer to our turbulent times,” she says. “I believe that nothing is more important than for all earthly beings to find a way to live together peacefully, next to each other in the same community. Characters of my story may have disagreements with each other, but in the end, they always find a way to coexist together on the same plot of land.”
er Yelena Eckemoff reaches her highest pinnacle yet of originality and personal expression. The two-disc set, recorded in Helsinki with a superb Finnish ensemble, tells the heartwarming story of Columbine (named after the flower) from germination through her final time on earth, and includes poems and illustrations by Eckemoff herself that provide personal “accompaniment” to the music.
Press Release in Germany:
Die Pianistin und Komponistin Yelena Eckemoff entfaltet ihr bisher aufwändigstes und ambitioniertestes musikalisches Werk mit Abenteuer der Wildblume, das ihr eigenes Label L&H Production am 19. März 2021 veröffentlicht. Wie der Titel schon andeutet, ist das Doppelalbum die Geschichte eines Lebens, von der Geburt bis zum Tod (und der Wiedergeburt), einer anthropomorphen Akelei-Blüte. Seine Geschichte wird durch die inspirierte Arbeit von Eckemoff und einem finnischen Ensemble erzählt, dem der Saxophonist Jukka Perko, der Multiinstrumentalist Jarmo Saari, der Vibraphonist Panu Savolainen, der Bassist Antti Lötjönen und der Schlagzeuger und Perkussionist Olavi Louhivuori angehören.
Nachdem sie zuvor mit Savolainen, Lötjönen und Louhivuori an ihrem 2017 erschienenen Album Blooming Tall Phlox gearbeitet hatte, wollte sie unbedingt nach Helsinki zurückkehren, um wieder mit ihnen aufzunehmen. Das tat sie im Sommer 2019 mit zwei hoch angesehenen Finnen: dem Gitarristen Saari und dem Saxophonisten Jukka Perko, der einen Staffelstab des Trompeters Verneri Pohjola übernahm.
Eckemoff, der lange Zeit eine Konzeptualistin war, neigte früher dazu, Alben mit thematisch zusammenhängenden, aber eigenständigen Stücken zu erstellen. Adventures of the Wildflower fungiert jedoch als eine einzige Erzählung. Die Blume mit dem treffenden Namen Columbine unternimmt eine lebhafte Reise während des Wachstums, indem sie von ihrem Garten aus den Wirbel der Natur und des Lebens, der Pflanzen und Tiere, um sich herum beobachtet. Sie lernt sogar, mit ihren Gartenfreunden zu kommunizieren, ein echtes Phänomen, das Eckemoff zu diesem Album inspirierte, als sie in einer Zeitschrift darüber las.
“Ich war fasziniert zu erfahren, dass Pflanzen über die Luft miteinander kommunizieren, indem sie geruchsintensive Chemikalien freisetzen, und über den Boden, indem sie lösliche Chemikalien absondern”, sagt sie. “Solch ein Gemeinschaftsleben beflügelte meine Phantasie. Ich begann mir vorzustellen, wie sich eine einzelne Pflanze als Teil einer solchen vernetzten Gemeinschaft fühlen würde und wie sie auf ihre Nachbarn, die neben ihr lebten, reagieren würde. Bald hatte ich ein Körnchen einer Idee über eine Wildblume.”
Eckemoff ergänzt ihre Originalmusik durch ein 18-teiliges erzählerisches Gedicht (ein Teil für jede Komposition), das die Geschichte von Columbine erzählt. Obwohl nuanciert, ist die Erzählung auf einer ernsthaften Einfachheit aufgebaut, wie eine Kindergeschichte. Die Musik hingegen ist viel komplexer. Die verschiedenen Melodieebenen in “Home by the Fence” oder “Children Playing with Seed Pods” sind sowohl für das Ohr als auch für den Intellekt ein prächtiges Fest, während Stücke wie “Chickens”, “Butterflies” und “Another Winter” mit experimentellen, sogar psychedelischen Texturen gefüllt sind.
Das Verdienst für diese Klangwelten gebührt auch den Musikern, die mit Eckemoff zusammenarbeiten. Die Klänge, die Saari aus seinen Gitarren, dem Theremin und der Glasharfe zaubert, verleihen der Musik eine einzigartige Palette, die durch das kühne, unkonventionelle Spiel von Perko, Savolainen, Lötjönen und Louhivuori ergänzt wird.
“Sie haben sich meinen umfangreichen Notenblättern unerschrocken genähert”, bekräftigt die Pianistin. In Abenteuer der Wildblume ist diese Furchtlosigkeit wie Akelei zu einem prächtigen und sehr lebendigen Exemplar aufgeblüht.
Yelena Eckemoff wurde in Moskau geboren, wo sie mit vier Jahren begann, nach Gehör zu spielen und Musik zu komponieren. Mit sieben Jahren besuchte sie die Gnessins-Schule für musikalisch begabte Kinder und immatrikulierte sich schließlich am Moskauer Staatskonservatorium, um klassisches Klavier zu studieren.
In ihren Zwanzigern fühlte sich Eckemoff zum Jazz hingezogen – zu einer Zeit, als die Musik, oder zumindest Aufnahmen davon, in der damaligen Sowjetunion eine seltene Ware war. Doch ein Auftritt von Dave Brubeck hinter dem Eisernen Vorhang bestärkte ihre neu entdeckte Liebe zur Musik und prägte ihren kreativen Weg von da an.
Es stellte sich heraus, dass dieser Weg durch die Vereinigten Staaten führte, wohin Eckemoff 1991 einwanderte und sich in North Carolina niederließ. In dem Land, das den Jazz hervorbrachte, machte sie sich auf die Suche nach Spielern, die ihren komplizierten Ideen gerecht werden konnten.
Die Suche war langwierig und manchmal frustrierend, aber sie zahlte sich aus, als sie mit Bassisten wie Mads Vinding und Schlagzeuger Peter Erskine an ihrem 2010 erschienenen Album Cold Sun arbeiten konnte. Später arbeitete sie unter anderem mit Mark Turner, Joe Locke, Ralph Alessi, Billy Hart, Chris Potter, Adam Rogers, Joey Baron, Arild Andersen und Jon Christensen, dem norwegischen Bassisten, dessen letzte Aufnahme auf Eckemoffs Album Nocturnal Animals (2020) erschien.
Mit Adventures of the Wildflower wollte Eckemoff ihrer Wahlheimat ein Angebot an eine positive Stimmung machen. “Ich war bewegt, diese Aufnahme als Antwort auf unsere turbulenten Zeiten zu machen”, sagt sie. “Ich glaube, dass nichts wichtiger ist, als dass alle irdischen Wesen einen Weg finden, friedlich nebeneinander in der gleichen Gemeinschaft zusammenzuleben. Die Figuren in meiner Geschichte mögen zwar Meinungsverschiedenheiten miteinander haben, aber am Ende finden sie immer einen Weg, um gemeinsam auf demselben Grundstück zu koexistieren.