Carol Banks Weber

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Title: Gathering Musical Thoughts in ‘Rosendals Garden’

Yelena Eckemoff Trio floats floral lines in classical-jazz-funk motifs for one helluva travelogue, with two ABBA references thrown in

Rosendals Garden is set to drop globally on March 27, 2026, right around the time winter melts into the first kiss of spring. Yelena Eckemoff’s 11-track instrumental album is a musical tour of the Swedish landmarks and the emotions

“My 2026 release, ‘Rosendals Garden,’ is a very different album comparing to the previous ‘Scenes from the Dark Ages.’ It features wonderful cello played by one of the best living jazz cellists — Svante Henryson, who also plays electric and double bass on the album.”

On the surface, Rosendals Garden (L & H Production) presents as a musical tour of some of Sweden’s historic, memorable landmarks, even a nod to one of the country’s biggest pop bands — ABBA — done in pianist/composer/artist Yelena Eckemoff’s atypical fashion, utilizing classical curvatures and eclectic jazz’s spatial density, along with a full track-by-track description, plus accompanying art.

An entire travelogue for the off-the-beaten-path traveler — and listener.

Everything blossoms from her piano first, with augmented instrumentals, depending on the scenery, the scope, and the meaning — thought through a feeling, nostalgic lens.

But dig in deeper, and you get wonderful, personalized projection in the rosy melancholic filter of a Moscow-born, classically trained, America-settled immigrant far from home, chasing memories, seeing ghosts, reimagining history as if she were really there re-living hellos and goodbyes.

It is when we can see ourselves and our daily lives in the historical reference points of great monuments, ruins, and homages left behind — what it must’ve been like for those people during those times long ago — and somehow revive that feel in marvelous music that amalgamates the classics with the modern touches…that’s where Rosendals Garden thrives.

Eckemoff is joined by percussionist Morgan Ågren, serving as the anchor and the unpredictably compelling march of time, and Svante Henryson underscoring and accentuating passing influences on acoustic/electric bass and cello.

“Ruins of Älvsborg,” maybe because of the cello, makes sad, crawling sounds on what once was sacred ground. Best for loneliness, a poem about becoming a ghost, leaving your hometown behind, the breaking heartbeat of Eckemoff playing her piano’d past, as cellist/bassist Henryson picks up on every nuanced weathervane of longing goodbyes and a sparrow glimpse of hopeful new beginnings, an immigrant legacy, as only a string worship can.

The track paints a somewhat forlorn picture of an historical site left mostly in ruins, built over by a sugar mill, then hotel and brewery…advances of civilization mixed in with more human invention.

Eckemoff imagines what life must’ve been like for families to be protected by stone, brick, and stalwart guards bordering a once-great fortress, families very much like her own, growing up in Russia, before having all that wrenched away by the whims of those who rule over us, reaching for the familiarity and relatability of such comfort, as well as the melancholy of watching those families disappear, a clear reflection of Eckemoff’s own grappling with mortality.

“Laying their children to sleep in the evening, mothers sang the lullabies; quietly they sang about brave men watching over their loved ones as the darkness fell. And the wives slept better knowing that their husbands were up there on the fortress’ steep walls armed and ready to defend their lands and everything dear to their hearts,” she wrote in the track list, comparing remnants of Toppsockerfabrik’s sugar mill to “an old broken toy half enclosed into the palm of a giant; “so, it seems as if Toppsockerfabrik protects Älvsborg.” Rather, “Älvsborg [may] actually still [be protecting] Toppsockerfabrik?”

What would a tune called “ABBA Museum” sound like? In Eckemoff’s hands, it had to have a distinctive, easygoing melody, or melodic strain, that plays throughout, wrapped up in importance. The opening EDM music quivers and waves, promising greatness before bouncy drums usher in a kind of party pop vibe, and the cellist together with the pianist extricates an elongated form of what might’ve been the next ABBA hit single, influenced by today’s mainstreams with sophisticated restraint.

Eckemoff was and is a huge ABBA fan, taken in by their glamorous pop music that bridged gaps and made the most of earworms.

“Naturally, in an album about Sweden I would have to pay tribute to ABBA. I composed an earworm tune that – hypothetically – might have been attributed to ABBA. At the same time, in that track I wanted to examine the phenomenon of ABBA from my personal point of view.”

Like a flickering candle inside of a lighthouse.

Her personal point of view lies in how she extends the melodic line, putting on her own glamorous outfits, finishing the ends of curvy notes crisply, making room for the cello to dub in an old world meets post-industrial translation, and turning a loosely defined pop earworm into an eclectic classical-jazz tightrope walk, hovering over dangerously close pauses, disruptions, and embarkments.

The trio manages to thank ABBA in the band’s own time, as if looking back, tipping a hat, remembering best-of moments, without breaking the character of a fan flipping through album covers or trying to one-up what already was one of the best things to ever happen to Sweden.

What’s weird is that the title track, “Rosendals Garden,” sounds more like the end of an ABBA era than the “ABBA Museum,” but on Eckemoff’s terms.

The opening almost references the opening flute of an ABBA smash hit, “Fernando” (before the drums and the poppy chorus came in).

The Eckemoff Trio spins off the flight of that flute-y opening, giving a body, density, and rippling contrast to the tune, leaving it aloft for a second before making a meal of falling in love with a plethora of earthly delights in the “huge park in [Djurgården] with vegetable and herbal gardens, orangeries, selection of different trees native to Sweden, and an enormous fruit orchard. At the time of our visit, all the apple and pear trees were heavy with ripe fruit and I eagerly tasted so many varieties until I was stuffed and I couldn’t take another bite.”

It’s Eckemoff’s own unique touch to the feeling of breathing in all that floral loveliness, giving it surprising range, complexity, dynamism, and a bass funkiness. The way the piano sings and dances around the bass dropping hints before sinking into a full-blown soundtrack of forever is also quite lovely all its own.

“You’re losing yourself in that Kingdom of Flowers, melting into it, inhaling the fragrances and letting your sight feast on lovely colors. People who walk through these flower fields have face expressions as if they came to worship these flowers. All visitors are allowed to freely pick any flowers and make bouquets to take home. I made a little bouquet myself and took it to grace our hotel room.”
 
“Skansen Park” runs around like a child’s online video game Webkinz, the one with the cars and the race to grab all the tomatoes on the way home. But it’s also a kind of soupy samba. No wonder, the tune is Eckemoff’s musical version of a popular Stockholm tourist destination for kids, with a zoo, amusement park, aquarium, “the world’s oldest open-air museum,” and more.

The serious, adult historical part comes later, as the instruments settle down, sink in, and ponder evocatively streets that might’ve once been active during the Medieval period. Even walking by the houses, taverns and shops, and farmsteads is replicated on the piano’s rush-about.

There’s a heady reverence for Skansen’s gooseberries and old-time logging houses in the zig-zag whirligig of piano, bass, and drums, trying to find its footing, reverberating, going deeper, more resonant throughout. Lively, slick, off-on button shades of Eckemoff’s own personal fondness for her own personal memories as a child, picking berries at her grandparents’ house.

“…they don’t grow in the south of the United States where we now live, and I miss their aromatic, tangy taste. Finding these berries and being allowed to pick and taste them was one of the highlights of our first visit to Skansen Park.”
 
Eckemoff plays the notes of discovery and remembering, giving the tune a romantic aura in the midst of so much change, while Henryson cops a bit of Level 42’s Mark King in his “Mr. Pink” rev-up phase, letting it ride.

“Öresund Bridge” presented a bit of a “Lord of the Rings” challenge on a loop from Copenhagen to Malmö, Sweden, Goteborg, then back via ferry through several Danish cities to Copenhagen. Climbing toward the top of a bridge in a rental car, piercing clouds, buttressed by looming towers and blustery winds, feeling like giants…compressed in this anticipatory, swinging rhythm that felt like a horror movie, where the damsel in distress pressed forward into a dark and dangerous haunted building.

“Large container ships looked like toys! Tall towers zoomed above us. It was a spectacular, if unsettling view, filling you with a sense of your own smallness and yet — an utmost respect to those who engineered and erected such an incredible structure.”
The wonder is in the string-work that performs a different tune from Eckemoff quickly interspersing the memory and the might in how she walks her piano keys while merging them, giving off both cause and effect, the treacle turning doors.

 “Gamla Stan” — you really must read her liner notes, they’re mini-travel-stories in themselves — rides on the wavelength of a multi-talented musician bending his cello and bass to finely, deeply, firmly indent the paragraphs of the past to the present, juxtaposing old stone walls of the Old City that lead almost nowhere to the bustling, touristy modern town of trash bins, “anxious sightseers, lots of them, who, as it seems, greedily shop in numerous gift stores and eat non-stop in the numerous eateries — all designed to serve visitors. But even through the hustle and bustle I could still hear the history slumbering below the cobblestones and inside the thick walls. Old and current times here live happily side by side. Old time is tired and resting in shadows, while new time is busily rushing by.”

“Sunrise in Rimbo” features a fog in reluctant retreat as a new day begins, anthropomorphism in musical display. Like most of the tracks on this album, the tune lays out unsettling and unsettled, as if finding its cues from the shifting environment growing all around — much like a garden on the precipice of spring — as one instrument births new wonders and another takes shape, interweaving spectacles witnessed by the bravery of one morning bird daring to step out into the world that is not quite awake.

“Losing its fight with an orange-yellow light, fog starts to curdle, it grasps for trees, hides behind boulders, spreads across the grass. Yet its lithe demise is like a retreat of a snarling fox: it makes a promise to come back as soon as orange yellow light grows tired.”

As the cello gradually silences itself, the piano tinkers with the lights in this establishment, not afraid to crack, signaling the snarling fox’s final, reluctant retreat — in indolent, maximizing free-jazz colors, an equality of what strings and piano can do for the senses from far away, together.

“My husband is determined to taste every single variety of pastry, and they laugh good-naturedly at his fervor. Bright white tables and chairs are scattered on the thick grass between apple trees and we sit down. Suddenly, we see the elderly woman with a cane who just now arrives at the café. She gets a hot drink and pastry and situates herself at the table, smiling whimsically and gazing inward. Looks like she is reliving some happy memories of her past that took place at this very spot. Cheerful conversations around the tables don’t disturb the fresh morning air.”

“Country Orchard Café” by the track listing description may seem like a still-life ballad, as smoothly, innocently rendered as elevator music. But the piece is broken up into still-life moments, as the eye (of a tourist) goes from here to there, trying to take it all in…mined by a sorrowful cello forewarning the inevitable end of all good things.

The music tries to take it all in, too, by turns lovely and stark. Eckemoff’s piano, for example, goes from a traipsing narrative to metallic ringing, the fading, twinkling version of settling into a place tucked into the middle of nowhere. Henryson’s cello transforms from the full nature of splendor into particulate matter, a shadow of its former self, seeming to inquire where the road leads back, a setting sun of sorts.

“Storanden Nature Reserve,” one of the hardest tracks to crack, signifies the true eclecticism of Eckemoff’s free classical-jazz foray. This is perhaps her most adventurous, experimental pursuit of bold, descriptive, ethereal, ambient sounds-like soundscapes.

Nothing can be pinned down or held onto for long, because the music is constantly changing clothes, going somewhere else mid-stream, locking onto a stream of thought before locking onto another.

However, this tune is full of remnants of sounds from the wild, more safari than rainforest. Lean in, and you can hear what Eckemoff hears, the silence of nature in the gaping emptiness, the “humming of the trees, murmur of the wind catching through the vegetation, gentle bubbling sounds of invisible brooks, chirping of the insects and various birds’ calls. Occasionally if you’re lucky, you may hear animals rustling in the bushes and making strange, chilling sounds. Maybe they talk to each other in their animal language; they’re probably angry and alarmed to sense humans disturbing their peaceful habitat…” in the piano and cello filling up and emptying, agitated and ushered along by the percussive rhythms that make their own kind of music.

“Strandvägen Pier” fairly rocks in an upward, upbeat stream, a cross between the rush of modern jazz, heavy on righteous drum solos, and an R&B-inflected funk aftermath…perhaps an acknowledgement of the pier’s own grandeur and history versus accessible tourism, attracting both sides of the tracks, rich and poor and middle class.

But that’s all before Eckemoff slips in with her own classical language that manages to stand at attention and ease into comfortable clothes that toy with the meaning of life and all its vivacious ends, the best soundtrack to the best movie about growing up and leaving childish things behind.

The time signatures, hurried to leisurely in perfect harmony, and musical styles capturing the ballet of classical music and the disturbance of jazz defiance, of both very different lifestyles are represented thusly:

“The very long, straight marina is packed with boats of all kinds from many destinations far and close. Walkers-by, making their promenade past the long line of vessels, present a striking contrast to the unhurried life of docked yachts lazily bobbing on the sparking waters. Speaking many different languages, the boulevard crowd is noisy and chaotic, while the pier life is unhurried and quiet, as if in slow motion. There is an invisible wall dividing these two worlds that seems impossible to cross…”
 
The theater and the history of “Gripsholm Castle” “on the shores of Lake Mälaren in the charming town of Mariefred (not too far from Stockholm)” gives Eckemoff, Ågren, and Henryson plenty of material to pick at, and they do so with fervid rotation, giving every lyrical turn and harmonic resonance everything they’ve got.

“But even without knowing the historical facts about the prisoners, this room transcends the aura of many people that were confined there. We stood at the opening into the room for a long time, bewitched and stunned by the echoes of painful (and some happy) memories that the room emitted. I heard the cries of babies that were born in that room, the groans of sick people, and the stale, spicy smell of old times still lingered in air.”

The tune seems innocent enough, at first glance, a piano tip-toeing up the stairs of some grand design. Toss in some sound effects for good measure. But then “Gripsholm Castle” opens up, piano, drums, and cello adding a little extra oomph, a modern, dramatic awakening, and all of a sudden, by the second act, they’re not tip-toeing anymore…they’re playing in their own self-fulfilling prophecy that captures the feeling of your first prom, the first time you hear a favorite song on the Top 10 radio, the same song that plays at your grandmother’s funeral and makes everyone tear up with remembrance…a song and a feeling that reverberate and echo through the soul of any restless traveler in search of the unreal and the fascinating, the new and the different, and…a little bit of the home left behind.

All that from an ancient castle full of ancient history, not all of it good?

Yep.

That’s the beauty, the elusive beauty of sitting with yet another Yelena Eckemoff masterpiece, just waiting to be discovered and appreciated for what it is. A look inside her restless traveler soul.

All but the first of the artist’s quotes are from the liner notes.
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Carol Banks Weber for Substack

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Songs About Enviable People

Flying Steps, Eckemoff’s third proper jazz venture of 2010, released on Dec. 14th with live musicians — double-bassist Darek “Oles” Olezskiewitz and percussionist Peter Erskine — captures the people most dear to the classically-trained/jazz-turned piano-composer through impressionist-immersive musical portraits.

“Music has surrounded me since my very beginning, as my mother was a professional pianist and teacher. I started to play piano by ear around four years of age and made up my own little pieces about things like fishes in the pond, birds in the forest, and squirrel cracking nuts, which my mother wrote down (and dated) in a music notebook that I still have in my possession.” — “15-YEARS ANNIVERSARY in 2025,” Yelena Eckemoff, website

Flying Steps traces the tender care of a mother, the aching absence of a grown son, the devotion of a husband — the essence of the special people in Yelena Eckemoff’s life — as only music can.

Her music.

The Dec. 14, 2010 Bandcamp self-release — the third of that year — featuring the classically, Moscow-trained pianist and composer, with critically acclaimed double-bassist Darek “Oles” Olezskiewitz (Ravi Coltrane, Art Farmer, Lee Konitz) and Grammy-Award-winning percussionist Peter Erskine (Weather Report, WDR Big Band, Steely Dan) — captures what it feels like to be in the presence of the ones the artist holds most dear.

The multi-faceted artist turns intention and vision into a time-traveling, immersive experience, wrapping the notes, bridges, and solos around her fingers, letting the music of the 11 original tracks fly.

All About Jazz’s Karl Ackermann extoled Eckemoff’s virtues, her ability to press forward “with conviction,” within a sculpting genre quite unlike her classical origins, and with a strong, yet intuitive band, recognizing who among a sea of jazz talent can and should tag along with the incomparable likes of her.

“…In truth, it is the presence of Oleszkiewicz and Erskine that more firmly root ‘Flying Steps’ in the jazz genre. Eckemoff’s natural style leans closer to classical, as may be expected given her Moscow State Conservatory training in form, theory and composing. Yet, at an early age, she began exploring and honing her skills as a jazz composer while incorporating her classical influences. The resulting compositions are jazz of a more pastoral texture and tone with her rhythm section adding embellishments through intricate and complementary patterns….”

Yelena Eckemoff comes fully prepared, months, if not years ahead of her recording time. She knows where every note goes and how it should be played, leaving space for other musicians to expand on her soulful repertoire.

She can’t wing it, not with studio dates locked in and personnel on board. Besides, she comes from a classically trained background, from which other, more playful genres springboard, like prog rock and jazz.

With everything meticulously planned to the letter, or chord, Eckemoff’s music could easily go hands’ off, arm’s length seated upright on velvet cushions in designer finery mode, sterile and incomplete. Yet, to her credit, it never does; themes and crescendos overlap, crest, and tumble, as scripted, in fine technical form, but with the natural feel of a spontaneous moment.

Magic, really.

Eckemoff with her Flying Steps band, Darek Oles (double-bass) and Peter Erskine (percussion). Image taken from her Facebook

Jazz is all about technique and feel — head and heart — coming together, but the technique and feel of letting the listener decide for herself, not telling her what to hear, the equivalent of laying out the pages then setting fire to them in real time.

Eckemoff understands this well. All of her pieces are well thought-out, a kind of arch storytelling, but overflowing with character…what it looks like to remember your loving mom, along with what it feels like, to be touched by her weathered, tender hands.

A glimpse…

“Promise” instantly sends the listener back in time to those tender moments, where they were touched by another living soul, someone who got them, who never needed over-explaining, who didn’t mind sitting with them in quiet solitude, watching grassy fields sway in the unseen breeze. Just from the kind way Eckemoff, Erskine, and Oles touch their keys, following a specific playbook but feeling the enormity of the journey just the same.

The beauty of each pristine note makes the listener forget to pay attention to the wheres and wherefores and just enjoy how Eckemoff can make her piano sing.

She gives wide berth to Oles’ rising tides on string-pulling bass, as Erskine sinks down in a swirling, shuffling, springy engulfment, as if smitten.

“A Smile” rides a contemplative wave of a piano-bass ballad over what sounds like a percussive-rumbling cha-cha-cha tempo going up and over a slow-moving roller coaster, stopping at breathtaking places while Oles has his say almost vocally, Eckemoff setting off a last-call jazz night, and Erskine giving them both plenty of room to spread their wings. It has the feel of musicians taking in the view, seeing what their hands in movement can do.

“Good Morning” sounds exactly like the song title. It is here where the listener realizes she’s in someone else’s life, back in time, waking up to all the people in the past who’ve come back to spend breakfast, gardening, field trips, and campfire nights with…an expansive, musical time to be alive.

Eckemoff’s bright keys signify blooming hope, stunned gratitude, and eagerness to see what the day has in store. In those keys, she also holds the bright friendships and family ties forged through the years, glimpses of the people she adores most in their glory.

It’s the second act of “It’s Your Life,” tuning into your favorite radio station in your grandparents’ kitchen, sunlight streaming in, cats swatting at balls of yarn underfoot, mom laughing softly over a pot of oatmeal, dad whistling in the other room.

With her “Harry…” Image from Facebook

“For Harry” is devoted to Eckemoff’s husband and manager, the man who’s been with her through thick and thin, always on her side, her biggest fan, the one who delights in her happiness and cries when she suffers.

A melody, as if bubbling up mid-conversation, opens up halfway along with the bass in response. It’s as if she put together this piece from that give-and-take, probably about something innocuous, like what to have for dinner and, Isn’t this a nice batch of petunias from the garden?, a passing thought that churns into this moving tribute.

The tempo of the tune goes from serenely atmospheric, classical in nature, to bustling swanky, lifted from an intense jazz interaction, Eckemoff giving as good as she gets — a kind of defiant rebuttal to All About Jazz’s Karl Ackermann’s assessment that she leans more toward the classical pastoral.

Did he hear right?

The lyrically sweet ballet intro seems to last forever before Eckemoff turns up the heat, challenging the other band members to do the same, adding in swatches of jazz-blues-funk, heavily bass in nature, flourishing off the harmonic beats, on another level.

“Isolated” can’t take its eyes off what could’ve been, love and loss and longing bedecked in Eckemoff’s fingers’ next move, and in our succumbing hearts, staring out a cold window into an even colder world that has moved merrily on, a flurry of careless people pushing and shoving toward an unseen, pointless destination, but an echo of where they wish they could be — all in the depths the lady maestro plays on her piano…the way she touches the keys, how far she’s willing to go.

It is her personal satellite call, the one she sends out to others who feel as she does. It is one of the most lovely send-offs.

Eckemoff is a mother. You can hear it in, “Where Is Maxim?,” about a son who is grown and off living his own life — something many mothers can relate to. The best part contains both the good and bad, pensive and yearning and ever-hopeful for the best in your children, in her compelling back and forth on the piano, glancing at notes that depict major and minor chords in a rainfall caught hovering before the deluge.

You can hear her as a mother wishing her missing son well, even though she cannot be with him as before. The melancholy, torn and piecing itself together.

“Tears Will Come,” all six minutes and 28 seconds, arrives in piano steps, tread with bass and symbolic drums (hissing elaboration), the tempo, tone, and tumult coming in like a drunken man at midnight, finding his way to the bed by other means — bumping into jutting furniture, playing those juts and bumps and “excuse mes,” staring uncomprehending at a night light in the corner of the sunken tub, blinking back the emptiness of what once was a home.

Eckemoff plays her piano in a scattered beacon, heading for land, through a moss of pain that will eventually turn to helpless human salt water, proof that we are real…experience over the overwhelm. The tune isn’t sad, per se, but it’s getting there — together with the sense that crying is okay, let it out.

The artist in her element, working out another studio album. Image from Facebook, July 19, 2023

“Insomnia” opens like the opening of a horror movie, anticipatory, unresolved, unsettling — that flickering light above the sink, did you turn it off before going to bed? — before playing out in a hefty jazz toll, bass and percussion adhering neatly, where the singularity of thought isn’t the sum of its parts.

This tune enables the musicians to explore the notes on the page, interact brilliantly, and leave space for each other — especially Erskine hustle-booming on drums — to drive meaning home. Consider “Insomnia” an open-ended encore finale, where jazz can go wonderfully off-set, giving everyone the freedom to let loose creatively.

With “Mama…” Image from Eckemoff’s Facebook

Eckemoff loved her “Mama,” fiercely.

This was a woman who poured everything into her child, made sure little Yelena was happy, making sacrifices, making the everyday, the toil of it all, burgeoning hopes and dreams and try again fun and full of the kind of possibility the artist embraces to this day…the ideal mother all mothers want to be.

In turn, the artist pours her everything into a song about her mama, the loving, kind gestures, extra helpings, hugs after boo-boos, a better life ahead. Eckemoff plays her piano with pride, consideration, and a miraculous showmanship appropriating an orchestral work of two to three pianists.

It is a calming, light rain, soothing dark rain clouds — the “Both Sides” now that Joni Mitchell sang about, twice, but with the undercurrent of understanding and empathy that only Eckemoff seems to exude in her conceptual albums humanizing every element on earth.

It is the cool touch of a mother’s hand after a fevered pitch that every child remembers through the hard times after the harsh words. It is the regret of many summer moons, the warm soup after Christmas sledding, the smiles and laughter of birthday wishes, the smell of home.

It is Eckemoff staying in her mother Olga’s presence, musically, without wanting to go anywhere or be anyone other than her daughter.

It is six minutes and 47 seconds of pure, unconditional love.

Always listening, always composing, always playing, always music… From Eckemoff’s “15-YEARS ANNIVERSARY in 2025,” website

What does forgiveness feel like? Perhaps, the gradual dissolvement of “Steps.” Here, the piano is spare, wooden, alone and writing out the beginning of a glorious sonnet in a three-movement sonata, then more and more until the listener sits back and basks in a shimmering masterpiece caught between the Renaissance and this post-modern era, constantly aglow.

Eckemoff oscillates between piano steps, shedding skin, the narrative of a Shakespearean play before fairies descend on “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” to an enhanced, Gregorian chant, but with Beethoven/Bach and a little Coltrane by her side, pushing her forward — do more, shank the folds — unfolding in an ebullient mass of volcanic piano, oh my! bass, and encroaching drums sync’d up to the high heavens.

“Steps,” the longest instrumental on the album at 12:26, serves as the jazz anchor, a lead-up to “Tomorrow’s” end, back down to earth in a hybrid of classical-jazz thoughtfulness, spelled out and going in on itself — a tune regarding the unresolved notes of its past, with the other instruments gently, compellingly encouraging the pianist to look up and out, into the future.

Just when the listener thinks it’s over, Oles turns up the heat in a quietude bass solo in about the span of waking up from a vivid dream to tripping out of bed, to reaching for the bifocal light.

Flying Steps is Yelena Eckemoff’s jazz-classical answer to the age-old questions, What would my family and friends sound like, if I were to write songs about them?

Would they be sound and fury? Bass and harp? Funk in the acoustic edges?

Her answer? Yes.

She pondered, sat with her people in the theater of her mind, with nothing but high regard, and then wrote and wrote and wrote out her heart and soul, bringing them to chord-fire-and-anchor life, and it is as profound and heartwarming as any fan of hers would think it would be.

But, it is also surprisingly jazz impressive, woven in the fabric of her technique-to-feel ratios and thematic, conceptual grand designs.

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Medieval (Time-Traveling) Orchestra in Two Immersive Volumes

Yelena Eckemoff walks ‘among castles, horses and carriages, kings and princes’ in her latest, ‘Scenes from the Dark Ages’ — classical-jazz immersion therapy, upended by heavy-duty prog-rock

“This project is so different from my others, because it has prog-rock feel.” Illustrations by the artist.

“I didn’t want just guitar and bass. I wanted rock guitar and electric bass and really strong drums. On this recording, you’ll hear me playing not only piano, but medieval instruments like organ, clavichord, harpsichord, and celesta. I also wanted violin and flute, and I think this somewhat atypical instrumentation gives the music another dimension.” — Yelena Eckemoff, artist

Yelena Eckemoff does nothing halfway. The Moscow-born, classically trained pianist finds her bliss by making the magical whirlwind of existence and all its incarnations come to vibrant life in a kind of hybrid music that passes through the formal structure of theme and variation, the complicated improvisation of feel and function, and the wonderful hand of God that connects the two in melodic striations everyone can enjoy.

The North-Carolina-based artist likes to funnel her far-out ideas into concept albums, usually in two elaborate parts, as she did recently on her Medieval-themed release, Scenes from the Dark Ages. The two-volume, 15-track album (self-released on her L&H Production label) — with each concerto-like tune clocking in between four and a half to over 11 minutes — was recorded at Digitube Studio in Mantua, Italy, on June 16-18, 2023, with guitarist Riccardo Bertuzzi, tweaking the prog-rock — her debut of sorts, violinist Eloisa Manera, bassist Riccardo Oliva, percussionist Trilok Gurtu, and flutist Carlo Nicita.

Over 22 albums later, she turns the Medieval Orchestra of her wild, childhood imaginings into Scenes from the Dark Ages, combining cinematic scope with contemporary, chart-topping feel — all while somehow transporting listeners to another time, one that has the past, present, and future simultaneously playing out at once, as if in a dream or watching the greatest blockbuster fantasy out on the edge of the Grand Canyon under impossible Northern Lights.

This isn’t her first prog-rock, medieval rodeo.

“In my late teens, I played in a progressive rock band, which influenced my composing with prog-rock idiom,” she told Suzanne Lorge for the liner notes. “Later, after immigrating to the United States, I was working in my MIDI studio and utilizing the rich possibilities of Kurzweil K-2000 sequencer and created a project that I called Medieval Symphony, where I mixed a medieval feel with prog-rock and fusion. This project represented my reincarnated childhood dream about medieval times — how I imagined them, according to all those wonderful, illustrated fairy tales I used to read and love.”

As a child, she would pore over those illustrated books and engage in a make-believe game “about living on a different planet, set in medieval times, where I walked among castles, horses and carriages, kings and princes.” The musically gifted child prodigy would soon put pen — and notes — to paper in the fourth grade. “Funny, but a couple of the melodic ideas from that effort made their way into this album [liner notes, Oct. 2024].”

Eckemoff’s one-woman MIDI Medieval Orchestra simmered in the background, as she made other albums and eventually discovered the “live touch of real musicians.”

Eureka!

“…I reworked all of the tunes from the original Medieval Symphony, added new material, and infused it all with jazz improvisation.” Indeed, she did.

This year marks the 15th anniversary of an illustrious, prolific career of master-crafting original, immersive musical experiences, accompanied by art and story. Because for her, the musicians on her projects, and her devoted fans, music should be an experience, not a one-off.

SKIMMING THE SURFACE OF AN INFINITE DEEP, Disc One

 

“Adventures of a Knight” (9:42) starts off prog-rock strong — electrified guitar, drums, and keys firing away — confident, in no uncertain terms, before snow-drifting off into a piano and violin concerto, wrapping around a thoughtful segment of an ambient, but unambiguous jazz furlough in a series of what sounds like question marks, as the knight forges ahead, with the six-piece band quite literally and figuratively capturing his forward-plodding movements and the changing seasonal scenery unfolding around him, from the spritely flute spring to the wistful melancholy of dying leaves in wintry sleep, and back again to the violent mission at hand — defeating foes and winning crowns, of battles and a good night’s rest. Not surprisingly, the instruments converge, from the group dispensing prog-rock to classical jazz over a jazz dictum, to one massive, fiery multi-dimensional, all-genre collective, proving…

…violin can serenade and rock, keys can go heavy and soft…

(We’ll see this same, all-hands-on-deck pageantry winding out the centrifugal much later…)

In this one opening track, Eckemoff showcases the versatility of instruments long pigeon-holed as one or the other, busting the divide wide open, and all while maintaining the musicality of riding and riffing off a discernible mainstream melody, herself included.

The lady can rock ‘n roll, lithe and jam when she wants to.

Believe it or not, “Battle” sounds very Rush-like.

You remember Rush from the 1980s, double-dipper of artisanal synth prog-rock, tonal jazz, and subversive, yet feel-good social message (“Tom Sawyer,” “Subdivisions,” “The Spirit of Radio”).

“As a story-telling enthusiast myself, playing music where every song is an accurate description of a medieval scene helps to get into a specific mood. All the tracks are different from one another, and you cross a lot of genres. There’s a lot of harmonic courage, and dynamic and tonal variety. From the point of view of guitarist, it was all the more interesting, because I found myself trying, with the guitar, to describe the scenes that were the subject of each song as much as possible.” — Riccardo Bertuzzi, electric guitar

This second, opening salvo underscores and oscillates — in tremendous leaps and steps — the way Geddy Lee and Neil Peart might on a post-millennial revival tour…perhaps an extended play of “Tom Sawyer” for the instrumentalists.

Eckemoff transforms the battle scene, along with the primary focus of her raging guitarist — taking on the hits and misses and fleshy landing — transforming her instruments (she plays an entire range of piano, organ, synth, and clavichord throughout) accordingly.

Even though there is also a hard and fast melody to hold onto, it is in what the musicians do with that heavy-to-light train of thought that fosters listener fascination, especially the main event at her peak. Brilliant.

When it goes, and it goes in 4:45, you’re still waiting for the encore.

“Chivalry” (5:29) could’ve come right out of the latest fantasy-drama on Netflix or Apple, in easy-to-binge parts, more musical narrative than demo showcase. It’s what two people feel when they interact, one giving way, the other fluttered and fluttering like a flute-fettered dove. Eckemoff’s piano opens scenes in wide apertures, cushioning missteps in a poetic license, as subtitles might give way to hidden nuances setting the stage and translating what we cannot say.

“Tournament” (6:03) appears hard to figure out, at first. Until you realize you’re not supposed to pick it apart but sink in and let its multi-figured, medieval-genre tapestries (a funnel cloud of flute, back-bending, subdued guitar, and circular rhythmic percussive keys) come together and untether, as perhaps children’s clothes on mother’s clothes line out back, curtains pulling back naturally for the approach of hooves and flags and celebratory cattle calls.

This composition tells the story of a literal tournament, pomp and circumstance, in thematic pirouettes (Eckemoff’s piano, Nicita’s flute, Manera’s violin) that carry on like shooting stars (Bertuzzi’s win-over guitar, circling the landscape) of musical verve.

Just when you think you’ve fallen in love with the violin’s curves, Bertuzzi steals the show with his guitar solo, cutting through the light and lively medieval countryside with a bit of contemporary, metallic flair — over a constant running rhythmic brook underneath. This one could go on forever, revealing endless charms, and you wouldn’t mind.

“Yelena’s writing recalls the progressive rock of the 1970s, but with distinctive characteristics of its own, which comes from her poetical approach. It’s very dense music, mostly written, even if there are some improvisational sections. It’s also very well organized, and within this organization, everyone found their own space. In addition to the ancient and the modern, there is a somewhat mystical atmosphere to it.” — Eloisa Manera, acoustic/electric violin

“Masquerade” (4:25) is as medieval-sounding as you’ll get (clavichord?). But you know Eckemoff will mince a lot more than a pleasant, “Partridge Family”-meets-carousel TV opening theme set to a dance peopled with ladies and knights behind elaborate masks and costumes — and she does as soon as violin begins to eke out a living off that clavichord dew drop, serving as mood, tempo, and delight around every corner. Eckemoff and her band make the most of a few opening trinkets, infusing wonderful depth to a ring-around-the-rosie fairy tale.

“Alchemist,” at 8:35, runs long, immediately conjuring up an ambient, expanded jazz setting with a slightly downturned flute posing as the classical ballet backdrop. The tune musically follows the painstaking work of an alchemist, pouring elixir and mixing potions, the peaceful, but purposeful work that must be done — a perfect soundtrack effect of scene-building, as well as the inner voices that sustain such a steadfast resolve to keep building nature’s medicinal herbs and life-saving, magical concoctions…the medieval period’s version of a pharmacological chemist. The tempo goes from slow to medium-fast, and back to slowly wafting chimney smoke up into the sky by the end of the day (track).

“Quest” (9:16) contains one of the most beautiful flute renderings in the album, followed by the electric guitarist pressing pulse points to get his amplified melancholy and internal bastion of a kind of anti-heroism across…the living epitome of less bleeding out into more — if you stay awhile and let the instrumental tune have its say.

Flute and guitar portray the riveting quest in all its hopeful, fearful glory, restrained artistry that lets out proverbial monikers of poetic fusion, lyrically encircling that time traveling Eckemoff does so well in her deep, complex music — seemingly telling time through musical equivalents of archetypal character portraits we can somehow identify with, as if we’ve lived through those past/present/future glancing moments with her.

Special kudos to Bertuzzi, who — in between equally captivating interactive/solo interludes of flute and bass/drums and resounding colorful keys, bubbling and buzzing in tuneful micro-to-macro heights — cranks out a solo that serves as both scene stealing and storytelling.

“I was really surprised … how Yelena managed to put jazz band with the medieval-like melodies. For me, as a bass player, it was really unusual to play some melodic lines. They were super well-written, between the other instruments. It was challenging, but in a good way, and the tunes were beautiful.” — Riccardo Oliva, electric bass

“From the Life of the Lords” (5:58) wraps up Disc One in a resplendent, streaming, star-spangled prog-rock hustle, where all of the instruments at Eckemoff and her band’s disposal echo lavish nobility with the industrious busy of noble purpose…in music that sets the scene, glimpses the lords’ inner circle, and rocks the jazz, classical, prog-rock balance.

Arrestingly, Bertuzzi’s one-man, electric-guitar play becomes both a part of the band’s progress and incremental Paul Revere Midnight Ride, sounding off impending news, while also pondering the news’ impact, making way for Disc Two.

GETTING EVEN MORE ESOTERIC-SPECIFIC IN DISC TWO

 

It’s not, but “Pilgrims” (5:38) seems flute-centric — the intro is quaintly, oddly plodding and offbeat — and that is the genius of Eckemoff. She’s able to pour an entire symphony, in her own clearcut, back and forth, medieval/contemporary style, into each musician’s chart, scripted and improvised, for full effect, together as a cohesive unit listening and harmonizing with one another, and individually, in those stupendous, sustainably animated solos.

If you’re not carefully patient, you’ll assume the Disc Two opener is just more of the same sound-effect soundtrack from the previous volume.

“Pilgrims” is the encore of every late-night jazz jam session, but within the Medieval Orchestra context, telling and following stories, and giving off character-actor vibes; in this case, the musical make-up of pilgrims braving the wild to set up their own kind of heaven on earth — strangely reminiscent of the highs and lows of a densely populated figure-eight of Disc One’s “From the Life of the Lords,” but more spread-out, thought-out, and, dare we say, tonally interesting.

Each instrument, especially the electric guitar, seems to pull more soulful between-the lines — the elaborate descriptives of every mystical tale — of everyday, seemingly ordinary conversation and interaction, breathing meaning in even the simple act of handing a child a bowl full of porridge after a hard day’s trek.

She can make the mundane intoxicatingly musical through traditional, conventional instruments.

Somehow, Eckemoff personifies not only what it must’ve been like to be a pilgrim during that time, but all the sights and sounds, in a rhythmically pleasing, musically forward, aesthetic vibe that makes as perfect sense to people living in 2025 as in the 14th century.

“When Yelena let me listen to her music, I was immediately attracted to this mix of the ancient and the modern. It is precisely what interests me in music — creating a bridge between the ancestral, ancient way of playing and finding a modern, more captivating way. Yelena’s music embraces this world. It has many colors, shades, and settings to it. The whole experience [in the studio] was very beautiful, very intense, though it wasn’t easy, because the compositions are very complex in the way they evolve.” — Carlo Nicita, soprano/alto/bass flute

What starts off simple, winds through a lot of complexity, and a lot of genres, to leave a lasting effect on the listener. This track is an endless treasure trove of discovery and enchantment.

“Village Tavern” (5:18) gives off an herbal, rainforest, jungle, caroling of the bells feel at its outskirts, and is as eclectic as Eckemoff gets, without losing the flute-flavored medieval theme. You know, the theme and the rhythmic bowing and skirting dance of a thousand gatherings by the fire.

Carlo Cantini manning the boards…

Eckemoff makes her clavichord bend, change, sing, and curtsy in the Middle-Aged medley of spin-offs, as the rest of her band merrily joins in before — at the 3/4th mark — Bertuzzi does something striking…

His solo, rocketing out from the medieval fluttering flute, recalls Pat Metheny’s prog-jazz of yesteryear, during the height of that metallic ascension encompassing all we know of emotional time travel, where memories blink and thrum and stir something real inside us.

“From Peasants Life” (5:14) reverberates on a musical shimmering light that flashes and twinkles in the classical-jazz night sky, elevating hardship into inspiration.

Yes, “Nicita’s lyrical flute” does reflect a “pastoral…country life,” but it is Eckemoff’s hand on ivory that guides, glistens, and underscores the peaceful and the hard-won amidst the lark and the limitless of gravity and air taking sharp, puffy intakes of breath and that lithesome flute doing its own swan dive.

A good jazz adventure always includes cutting corners and spiraling harmonic fantasy. “Spell-Bound Fortress” (10:37) mirrors this octave tendency to great, compelling effect. Every beginning turns within itself, every fade flares up and glows, a rounded wave stretching toward home. Maybe Eckemoff’s Medieval Orchestra is trying to describe for us the oasis up ahead, locked and surrounded by invisible warning signs.

Again, she turns in a lyrical, but rigorous jazz phase on post-bop, Orwellian piano, all contrary and melodically discordant, as does Bertuzzi sliding into nirvana — and a blink and you’ll miss the country-western “Shane” draw — on electric guitar, embracing what they know of the present into the past.

It’s funny. Eckemoff thought I’d really like the accessible, melodic throughline of prog-rock — fusion jazz for the people — in this album much more than her past classical-jazz/EDM stuff, but it is her charm with complicated jazz in unforgiving classical form that truly got me here to begin with, especially on this track, one of my favorites.

Another jazz trait can be found in the depths of “Monks in Scriptorium” (6:56), and that is anticipation. The best characteristic of anticipation is in its boundless depths; a musician who knows what she’s doing can play a lifetime’s worth of albums on this alone.

To capture literal monks in Scriptorium, bowed heads and scribbling fingers in a dark void below taverns and castles, Eckemoff and her band strip away musical monikers to bare bones first, then build brick by noteworthy brick the pure feeling of worship — creating worlds out of nothing, let there be light uncovering — and the painstaking wilderness of the conflicted yet divine spark in us all, all of that must entail.

The solos justifiably rock and reverberate out of the past into the 20th century, where, let’s face it, most of the best music resides — and can never be monetized.

Plus, she does it with flute and violin, two decidedly classical instruments.

You’re definitely in a “Cathedral” (5:30). Hear the organ welcoming weary believers into its fold, how its durge-y notes float apart and rest around the tincture of stained glass and weathered wood, the creaky opening of a gold-lined book, rustling of fine-tissue paper, arch of a faint choir in the distance — in eternal rapture, children’s laughter as they assemble to and fro in a nearby, wall-less room, hinting that it’s a cathedral of a more natural kind, taking place outside under bough and eave.

Scenes from the Dark Ages’ Medieval Orchestra, realized: (left to right) flutist Carlo Nicita, bassist Riccardo Oliva, guitarist Riccardo Bertuzzi, violinist Eloisa Manera, percussionist Trilok Gurtu, and the artist herself, keyboardist/composer Yelena Eckemoff.

Poetic, intrinsic music realized, the Source of all living things, lives above us, inviting comparisons to a jazz and classical tone poem, a magical haiku that says everything that needs to be said for strangers to lock hands and look into each other’s frailties and gifts.

The echo of voices permeating here and there…church bells ringing in the fade…is everything you need to know about this self-sustaining soundtrack, where quiet wonders never cease, another favorite.

“Legends of the Castle” (11:05): an epic spiritual, emotional, mental, and very nearly time-traveling physical journey of Eckemoff’s Scenes from the Dark Ages, on an ambient + lyrical + pull-out-all-the-stakes coming together jam-session finale befitting the multi-media, multi genres.

Words can’t sufficiently describe what is happening here, and that’s okay. You’re supposed to experience Bertuzzi singularly soaring high, strings ablaze, Eckemoff burying her classical upbringing entirely, over a synth-driving spectacular, Eloisa Manera — a revelation — chopping up and drowning her monk-to-lord electric violin’s Brahms-kissed connective tissue…and everyone else splitting off in monumental stride.

Breathtaking. All of it.

Time traveling isn’t that hard. Take a listen for yourselves.

Quotes taken from Suzanne Lorge’s liner notes.

Carol Banks Weber for Substack

,

Title: You Had Me at Poetry
‘Romance of the Moon’: Federico Garcia Lorca inspires new, ‘balm on your soul’ jazz concept album from prolific Russian piano composer Yelena Eckemoff

“Lorca is one of the best poets [who] ever lived.  I’ve been moved by his poems (in Russian translations back then), while still a teenager and wrote a few settings for voice and piano. In fact, ‘Memento,’ which made [it] to [the] ‘Romance of the Moon’ album, is one of those…. I can’t wait to learn of your impressions of the album, and I hope this music would make you feel good and hopeful.”

The late Spanish poet Federico García Lorca (Romancero gitano, Gypsy Ballads, 1928) built compelling interest in small (anthropomorphized) things most people take for granted or overlook, like snails, lizards, cats, a “Guitar,” and a “Barren Orange Tree.”

A multi-faceted artist who hid his pain in his work, Lorca also threw himself into other artistic expressions and styles, including Japanese haiku, Spanish folk, sketching, and the avant-garde.

His first play revolved around a lovesick cockroach, and bombed miserably.

He was open to collaboration, to bending and blending traditional with contemporary, comedy and farce with tragedy, pushing every boundary, leaving himself open to ridicule and profound discovery with later generations.

In many ways, Lorca resembles many jazz artists of our time, in his ability to transform abstract ideas and technical proficiency into a feeling on various canvasses. Perhaps, none more aptly than Moscow, Russia-born, North Carolina-based classically trained Yelena Eckemoff, who turned to jazz to further complete her conceptual expression.

Also multi-faceted and prolific to the core, Eckemoff last year recorded 13 instrumental pieces, inspired by some of her favorite, soundtrack-ready Lorca poetry, accompanying them with her own visual art.

“Each track expresses a poem, and all 13 poems are published (in my English translation) in the booklet.”

Romance of the Moon (released May 10, 2024, L&H Production) features composer Eckemoff on piano, Paolo Fresu (trumpet, flugelhorn), Riccardo Bertuzzi (electric guitar), Luca Bulgarelli (double-bass), and Stefano Bagnoli (drums).

It is Eckemoff’s first time playing with these particular musicians, some of Italy’s finest. She made sure to ease their transition into her complex world, where every single note possesses a magical, musical life of its own and everything in her magical, musical world sings its own soundtrack, providing Italian translations of Lorca’s poems.

“In jazz, the project is only finished when recorded with jazz musicians,” she explained in a press release. “I design each project for them to be able to express themselves.”

Loneliness lingers on Fresu’s horns throughout Romance of the Moon, threading, mesmerizing, haunting each poker-still-to-burnished-cloudscape track. There is a bassist keeping languid, nervy time, like a backbone that never breaks…a shutter that always opens, but Eckemoff simultaneously joins in, leads off, and conducts the suite as both driving, restless, maternal narrator and part of the band.

She does what she does so well, infusing each piece with moonlight while leaving musical breadcrumbs in and out of animated reverie, and gently, patiently showing the listener what it must be like to be her, discovering Lorca’s poetry and then singlehandedly going forth to make nebulous sense of his intangible-tangible world.

To the tracks, the long and the short of it:

“In the yellow towers,
The bells are tolling.
The yellow winds transmit
The sound of chimes…”

At first, the chorus-like “Bells” seems to be all-encompassing, as the pianist assumes the primary role, introducing the horns, softening the outward strains, a bit of bass signal, then a faint bleed-into-memory melody — right at the beginning, so you kind of hear it in the foreground and the background, guiding you along windswept hills but never too far from home.

Her piano elaboration is insistent, particularly pointed, yet a falling over backwards kind of letting go, tossing your cares and woes aside…the equivalent of following a path, then diverging from it, standing erect, hands clenched, then tossing cherry blossom petals into the air to watch them fly.

The band faintly illuminates what it means to be and see “death crowned with | Wreath of withered flowers,” humming and strumming ancient lute songs, “the ringing of bells in…yellow towers,” and dust on silvery sails.

“Woodsman,
Cut out the shadow beneath me.
Spare me from the anguish
Of seeing my fruitless reflection…”

“Barren Orange Tree” is anything but. It is a lively, compact-to-expansive wish in floral, flitting notes that contract, bind, and release. It is everything the barren orange tree fears it is not, on the cusp of wanting to be more (hope) and wanting nothing more than to be free of a prison where it is nothing to no one (hopelessness).

It is the horn and the piano playing out the parentheses in a futile game of what-if, what could’ve been; the tree’s dream of being normal, pregnant with life…down to the movement of ants, the ventricular growth of vines and natural aging of bark stripped down to the bone.

It is also a wonderful amalgamation of traditional (threaded, hide ‘n seek melody) and contemporary avant-garde the band plays so well, from the thrill-seeking, downward-thrumming horns and the pecking order of finger-key trills, down to the drummer’s slam-dances and the tree’s lingering bass heartbeat.

“The weeping of guitar begins,
The chalices of dawn break.
The crying of the guitar begins…”

You can tell Eckemoff really loves “Guitar.” She and her band make a meal of the melody, turning a few sanguine notes into the reason for being.

Bertuzzi is a revelation, mining for gold in the desert, his flickering light a beacon of ancient philosophies, reverberating through the ages as a spark to every hit single, every blockbuster movie finale, every sold-out concert.

Here, each band member stokes invisible fires, encircling light and shadow, extracting the ultimate anthropomorphized concept into a living, breathing, humanity-shifting show.

“From afar, the sea smiles:
Teeth of foam, lips of blue skies…”

“Ballad of the Sea Water” is one of the most imaginatively descriptive of Lorca’s poetry. You don’t even want to know the story or what happens at the end; you’re just helplessly lost in his lyricism…the way he sees the sea and sky and all around, how he melds nature with man-made perspectives and conversations in his head. Again, the loneliness turned upside-down, naturally producing art.

Most of the accompanying music rests in how the horn (think this is flugelhorn) diverges diversely from its own downstream tale. It sounds as if the band is improvising, too, in the same full-bodied, fleeting, off-the-cuff vibe that Lorca gives off, composing in the moment, going with what it feels.

At times, Fresu plods on — Eckemoff giving off vibrant hints of what’s to come — before bleeding himself dry, landing on fertile ground, where he taffy-pulls the highest notes, threatening squalor.

At others, further towards the middle and the end, he zigs and zags into sorrowful infinity, marked by striking difference, interspersing dark, brooding monotony with an almost euphoric break, a wellspring of an answer to “Those salty tears | where do they come from, mother?”

“Domesticated Mephistopheles is lying in the sun.
He is a graceful cat with the demeanor of a lion,
Well-mannered and friendly,
Albeit somewhat sarcastic.
He is very musical; he understands
Debussy, but doesn’t like Beethoven.
At night he walked on the piano keys,
Oh, how gratifying for the soul!
Debussy must have been a philharmonic cat in his former life.
That brilliant Frenchman understood the beauty
Of the cat-like chords on the keyboard —
Avant-garde chords of murky, shady water…”

Throughout and underscoring “About Cats” is Eckemoff playing a cat stepping on piano keys, producing a kind of accidental musical score every cat owner can relate to…the kind that startles, then intrigues, then, they go back to their work until the cat latches onto a few more.

A good poet picks and chooses memorable examples, expertly slipping them into the momentum of a snippet of a story or mood. Instead of, “The moon looks like a round white circle in the night,” a poet will wrote in something specific to compare and contrast and make you want to linger a while longer.
Something like:

“The moon came to the forge
In the flurry of tuberose blossoms…”

That was Lorca’s specialty, one Eckemoff easily picks up and riffs on in her high-low heartbeat monitor on the title track. “Romance of the Moon” goes back and forth between a guitar-y oil lamp, flickering and sputtering itself on and off, and Eckemoff’s god-like hand, finishing what Bertuzzi started in electrified stanzas.

“Romance of the Moon” is one of those tracks you can do anything with. Have it play on repeat in the background as you go about transcribing an interview for a magazine feature on deadline, do the laundry, or try to compose a Dear John letter while scrolling the Internet for the latest news on Trump and P. Diddy.

Whatever you do, it works.

“An arm of the night
Enters through my window.
A big, brown arm
With water bracelets…”

The palatial use of spacial relations raises the swoon-worthy “Window Nocturnes” to a special level. The band doubles-down on that haunting, yearning lonely romanticism resplendent in Lorca’s poetry, musically fulfilled.

His unique look at life in poetic form, coupled with Eckemoff’s classical-jazz kinship with everyday things made magical, exalts their dual-purposed, multi-faceted, like-minded genre in a fluid, floral, almost spiritual groove that only sinks deeper into the skin.

No musical interpretation could ever do such poetry justice. But Eckemoff and her band come close.

Theirs is a naked, interlocking invitation, a finger brokering ever closer — or the “big, brown arm with water bracelets” — into Lorca’s strange, ethereal world, where everything and everyone has a say, where it’s safer to be among wild, belly-crawling creatures and crooked-limbed sentinels than the scary, predictable, self-destructive drudgery of humankind, and all of it holds a multi-dimensional allure of color, sound, movement, instinctive heaviness, and feel.

Every instrument serves as a time stamp, a purpose, a striation of Lorca’s original intent in natural harmony. A horn player searches the sky, pointing out cloudy, starry, sunset sea change, while embodying the best of those worlds. The drummer traipses by, a stray cricket, perhaps, struck by a wandering moon…and Eckemoff leads them all astray, with reminders to come back home soon, supper’s waiting.

“The diamond of a star
Has scratched the infinite sky,
Like a bird of light that wants
To escape the universe
And flees away from the huge nest
Where it was imprisoned for ages
Not knowing that it is bound with
A chain tied around its neck…”

You might think you’ve heard it all by the time you reach the eighth track, “Diamond,” but something in the way the pianist raises the curtains, shakes off the musky doldrums, rustles the leaves, and rushes the tipsy trade winds — like an old-time jazz monk — convinces you to stay for Bulgarelli’s bass-required measures that tip and sail.

Stay.

Fresu harps on his horn so insistently, referencing what Miles Davis could’ve been if he hadn’t been so hung up on two defiant notes.

The birth of the musical adaptation of “Diamond” is what pain does to a lowly outcast who has nothing left to lose but write his last will and testament…the most brilliant piece of straight-ahead jazz art — in its truest form — ever created in a down-home brothel at the turn of the last century.

Eckemoff’s “Diamond” is what happens when Burt Bacharach jazz gets a hold of poetry that sings of the beauty in all living things through the eyes of the enslaved, trying to cope with a chain around their neck.
An untouchable moving on…

“There is a childlike sweetness in the quiet morning.
Trees spread their arms to the earth.
A trembling mist covers the sprouts,
And spiders tend to their silk threads in the air…”

“Adventurous Snail” takes on a rock groove (yes, that’s Eckemoff), with every last note wavering on a lustrous, resonant high.

Piano notes hover, glimmer, and glow, guitar strings separate, a portal to all of their senses, reaching for the stars, knowing what the gutter feels like.

The tune represents the literal and figurative path of a curious, but timid snail wandering away from her comfort zone and meeting strange new creatures who tell her to go, who talk about god and other spiritual paths, who make snap judgments, who try to explain their lot in life (“I have seen the stars”).

The poem is one of the longest in the album, and the most interesting of divergences — fitting for a jazz respite.

“The afternoon says, ‘I thirst for shadows!’
The moon speaks, ‘I thirst for stars.’
The crystalline fountain asks for lips
And the wind — for groans…”
Like much of Lorca’s writing, “Thirsty for News Songs” has unrequited carnal desire embedded in its history, verbiage, and innuendo. The artist himself may or may not have had a tortured affair with Surrealist painter Salvador Dalí.

That fleshy push-pull theme of his (“You are a Christian storm and you are in need of some of my paganism…[Dalí]”) spills out here and there in this poem, a reawakening of a torrid sort, and to a lesser extent, in the mostly chaste afterglow of a tune that focuses more on what Lorca seemed to desperately hold onto despite temptation — the mirth, the joy, the peace of undisturbed nature (“I am thirsty for aromas and laughter | Thirsty for new songs | Without moons or irises | And without doomed loves”) — in place of the darkening shadows of earthly need.

Which tells you where artist Eckemoff’s head’s at.

“When I die,
Bury me with my guitar
In the damp river sand…”
“Memento,” the poem and the tune, is short and bittersweet and unintended, romantically lingering, full of longing for people, places, and things that have never been and never will be — generalized, sublimated, and truncated under the horn and piano umbrella.

Its rising tide shines in percolating, tender, timid grips, in the way the horn rests on a last trailing train of thought before the piano runs away with the piecemeal scenario and the bass billows like a forlorn, obsessive loon too far away in a mostly sorrowful, resigned state.
Fresu shakes off his rattling horn for unsettled effect. Eckemoff blankets his furry, fuzzy navel-gazing with the majesty of what could be, the best in humankind, lifting the nitty-gritty ground-breaking internal structures with cerebral transformation…spiritual liberation — the equivalent of taking a person’s head in the sand and turning his face to the sun.

The horn is Lorca, speaking from within, with all his restrained, roiling secret desires. The piano is Lorca’s offshoot aspirations, beyond this conflicting realm, but still scarred.

Somewhere in eventide, Eckemoff rolls off a poetic ballet piece of her own, evoking the image of a black swan slowly tossing her elongated perch to and fro, shaking off rustic feathers of a foregone conclusion.

“In the parched path I’ve seen the good lizard
(a distant relative of a crocodile) meditating.
With his green overcoat of a devil’s abbot,
His proper posture and his stiff collar,
He sadly resembles an old professor.
Those dull eyes of a failed artist,
How they watch the fainting of the afternoon!”

Lorca mixes animal and human metaphors, his own personal history, the battle of spiritual will and earthly lust in “Old Lizard,” a deceptive nursery rhyme wrapped up in a soulful riddle about love in safe, burrowed places…as if asking himself in these made-up characters, what’s it all for?

Eckemoff answers in a musing rock/jazz fusion grid, fueled by guitar strands, dwelling on the mode of staring up at the unknown, unknowable universe, settling for what is and what could be than what was and what could’ve been.

One gets the sense that Lorca often escaped his inner turmoil with a walk in the woods, looking at the unbothered creatures going about their day, making up stories, putting himself in their shoes, and, if you listen very carefully, leaving rain puddles of what he may have been struggling with away from paradise lost.

A muted battle Eckemoff softens and beautifies and blows back in streaming, hollow echoing guitar, a string of pearls piano, frosted glass percussive drops splashing here and there…the musical picture of inward-outward gazing.

“A balanced combination
Of juicy peach and sugary sweetness,
the sun is hiding in the evening glow,
Like a pit in the fruit pulp…”

“August” ends on an orchestral jazz encore, with the horns taking on two or three more players (it seems), the piano winding up a good gig in ruminative runs, as if re-trying the previous set list…as the band does its best to embody the month of August, its summer frills, and the feel of lying in a boat, row-row-rowing along.

The horn rides on a melodic, sliding scale (but upward), taking melancholy turns, a tiny bit sad and wistful, the full-circle regard of a grown-up thinking back to childhood’s innocent luxuries.

Armed with piano and drums, Eckemoff eases the melancholy, setting a table full of favorites, a kettle of hot tea, chocolate chip cookies, daffodils and peonies in French cobalt-basalt drinking glasses…warm conversation, mirth, a hand and heart toward the setting sun and the blossoming stars just beyond the event horizon, drifting off to sea…

…the perfect juxtaposition of what Lorca denied himself and loved so dearly.

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Carol Banks Weber for Substack

,

Title:

‘Lonely Man and His Fish’: Yelena Eckemoff’s Rippling New Double-Album Touches on Love, Kindness, and Courage in Surprising Places

Conservatory-trained, Russian artist integrates horn and Japanese flute to the classical-jazz equation

Russian-born, North Carolina-based artist Yelena Eckemoff builds on her voluminous collection of music, art, and text with the latest installment, “Lonely Man and His Fish” (L & H Production). She enlists cornet whiz Kirk Knuffke to portray fictitious horn player Tim Baskin and Japanese flutist Masaru Koga to be Tim’s pet fish, Spark, in the latest five-person, double-album musical, dropping April 28, 2023. The new concept album is her 18th release. Cover by Yelena N. Eckemoff

“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.” 

Russian jazz-classical piano-composer Yelena Eckemoff thinks in multi-dimensional, multi-media hues: a blossoming, night-sky Van Gogh set to Beethoven, Bach, and all the post-modern jazz masters looking for a new high.

In her latest two-disc concept album, Lonely Man and His Fish, she and her five-piece band imagine everyday life with intimate clarity, fantastic vision, and the additions of a Miles Davis kinda-blue with a patterned haiku narrative in a Salvador Dali and Roald Dahl setting, where the smallest detail takes on significant meaning.

The April 28, 2023 release follows the story of a retired trumpet player by the name of Tim Baskin, who, at the urging of friends, goes to a pet store and adopts a goofy-looking baby Oscar fish in the cichlid family with the bug eyes and the “pouty lips.” Together, they develop a comfortable routine and weather many storms, including a bicycle accident and a heartwarming reunion in a nearby pond.

Only Eckemoff could come up with a humble, yet wildly imaginative concept such as this. She is the artist who previously brought a pane of glass, a winter solitude, childhood and colors, lions and cubs, and a wildflower to life, crossing the animal kingdom with the human experience.

Eckemoff, in her usual multi-faceted fashion, wrote the story that goes with her music and illustrations. One cannot enjoy one without the other two. In fact, better to read the story in the album liner notes first before proceeding.

“At first, I get an idea about a project, whether it’s stages of life, colors, smells, or animals. 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.”

Each disc contains seven instrumental soundtracks, totally original, discernible, delicate melodies cushioned in harmonic convergences, fractals, and diaphanous departures, with the distinctive narrative thread of Tim’s horn, interwoven throughout.

Eckemoff’s melodies aren’t like everyone else’s melodies. They’re folded and unfolded in waves, complex, concentric harmonies, harmonious sound effects, interesting counterpoints, phrasings, and layers upon layers of orchestral soundscapes.

As rising star cornetist Knuffke (Cherryco, NPR “Best Jazz Album of the Year”) put it, “nothing follows a traditional song form.” Beautiful melodies, yes, but all other facets manage to fall in line and fit “together in a logical way.”

Fantasy and logic…melody and harmony…lingering and sharp and soft…they all combine to convey love, kindness, and a little bit of heroism found the everyday things, people, and places often overlooked in a society consumed with larger-than-life personalities, idols, gods.

In Eckemoff’s world, a wildflower is capable of profound, hard-won wisdom, surrounded by fluttering, flighty caring creatures, like bees.

In her latest creation, a lonely man and his pet fish — together and apart — learn to love (and sacrifice) better, find greater understanding, forge a deeper friendship, and push through the pain and suffering through circumstance and hardship.

“…I like to select some music from the piles of already existing tunes that I’d sort for hours and decide if some of them seem like a good fit to various parts of the project; but I also compose a lot of new material inspired by the images in my head (and in my heart). In the process of developing a project, music and story go hand-in-hand: one feeds the other. The more I develop my story, the clearer I see how I should develop and arrange my music material. Also, in arranging the music to a certain band, I tailor the music to the known musicians who’ll be performing it, so they’d feel comfortable in their ‘roles.’”

“Lonely Man” introduces the character of Tim, “a shy and humble person,” who learned early on to do without (company, home and hearth) while in the passionate pursuit of his music — playing trumpet “so well that he was in high demand in orchestras and ensembles,” touring “all over the country.” Faced with a retirement and long days and nights alone, his friends pushed him to get a pet.

Knuffke introduces himself in the role with earnestness and bravado, mingling the greatest hits from the past with a baleful look toward the great unknown. He plays mostly solo, signifying the loneliness, yet picks up the exuberance and remembered fullness of playing with a multitude, as Street and Harland lay the still-scintillating groundwork.

Eckemoff’s always-lyrical piano stays by Knuffke’s side in the undercurrent, stirring up a hornet’s nest of dormant, long-buried feelings. They seem to take turns with something momentous to say in the then-and-in-between, on the precipice of some grand adventure.

At the “Pet Store,” Eckemoff’s wandering piano replicates the musical equivalent of frolicking, barking, purring animals vying for Tim’s attention. Her notes bubble, bounce, and burst, going here and there, as the listener can practically hear the sound a furry animal makes playing hide and seek.

“Lonely Man and His Fish” band: (top, left to right) percussionist Eric Harland, flutist Masaru Koga, (bottom, left to right) bassist Ben Street and cornetist Kirk Knuffke, with keyboardist Yelena Eckemoff (center). Photography by Sehee Kim, Yelena Eckemoff

Knuffke’s horn — portraying Tim — strides, then gets cut short as he interacts with, observes, and marvels at the potential pets — embodied by Eckemoff pouncing on piano — going cage to cage, then eventually to one particular aquarium housing a perky, curious Oscar fry that would become the trumpeter’s best friend. It’s an ingenious musical characterization, call and response, cause and effect, again falling perfectly into the musical maze of a cohesive composition, full of darting melody, harmony, and intersecting phrasing.

“First Evening at Home” derives its underlying rhythm from the languid strokes of the little Oscar fish Tim names Spark. Inspired, Tim literally plays along, just as Knuffke does, tracing his own languid, but lyrical notes, as echoed and expanded with sparkling, energetic efficiency by Eckemoff, who both comps with bejeweled illumination and solos, like a maestro gone rogue. The feeling is that of going around spit-shining the dullest of silver.

Then, Koga slips in on Japanese flute, a rich, lush, exotic expository of Spark’s rhythmic movements, the light at the end of its tunnels. His contribution lends a mysterious, other-worldly effect, reminding the listener of the fish’s ancient, murky origins, from a far different place than this suburban hideaway.

“This is my second project working with Yelena. She’s always bringing the most difficult and unexpected music for us to play. She’s got a great sense of humor, as we try to keep up with her and bring the music to life, and it’s always great to record with her.” — Ben Street, bassist

“Breakfast for Two” has Spark breaking up the monotony of Tim’s morning routine in the most delightful manner, sending the new pet owner to and fro to learn more about Oscar fish — Knuffke zig-zagging on his own cornet accordingly.

The movement of the piece goes from strong, sure, and confidently in one specific direction, accompanied by Koga’s flute and Eckemoff’s squirrelly piano — threatening a lovely, beckoning revolt — to erratic, confused, and loping along into free jazz territory, where anything goes and anything can happen.

At one point, 3/4ths into the track, Eckemoff flourishes her piano to give off the impression of the fish burrowing, flinging, and swishing away…as if to mimic Spark pulling out those nasty live plants one by one.

Spark’s mischievousness forces Tim to improvise with fake plants and a plastic ball, which turns out to be the fish’s favorite play toy. This, too, can be heard as piano and cornet jump and jive, together and apart, and back together again toward the composition’s end.

“Man and His Fish” is the longest chapter, detailing Tim and Spark slipping into a routine they’ve built for themselves — a nice and easy give and take of any pet owner and his pet, from feeding to playing to winding down for the evening, watching documentaries or animated movies about the sea and its creatures.

The tune is just as diverse, with the immersion of what sounds like a xylophone — chunks, bits, and bobbles bouncing off the walls in a melodic coercion of childhood dreams, carousels, cotton candy, and blue skies. Must be Eckemoff working her keys.

“Glad to be on this great session with Yelena. It’s my first time playing with her…. She told me how much she’s played with ‘Jabali,’ who we all know is the great Billy Hart, Nasheet Waits, Peter Erskine, so I was like, ‘Whoa, okay! I’m honored that you actually called me to be a part of this project,’ and it’s great, it’s been fun. You can tell that she’s very rich in the classical tradition, and observing her compositions and the way they’re through-ly composed, harmonically and rhythmically, how everything really comes together is beautiful.” — Eric Harland, percussionist

Harland’s hands and feet expertly rush the beat, giving the tune on wheels a quick, wavy groove.

“Accident” disrupts the reverie of comfortable routine when Tim lands in the hospital after a near-miss with a careening truck.

You know immediately something bad’s about to happen from the first ominous, jumpy piano notes (lightning overhead), cornet trailing obliviously along. The deceptively engaging horn-and-piano intro signifies the beginning of every wrong turn in every Broadway musical about kings and witches before disintegrating into the most lovely jazz interlude — Tim riding his bike, enjoying nature, looking up just as fate steps in.

The cornet melody comes in loud and clear, as a dramatic mix of dichotomies — calm and asunder, serenity and disruption, nature and man-made calamity, melodious, insistent distraction — tugging at the main and subsidiary musical lines, like day-old taffy.  

Eckemoff’s solo exudes soft, gracious understanding, the serene wonders of Tim’s world, nature in quiet repose. She plays the notes of a sunny day, just before its warmth is engulfed in dark clouds.

Knuffke’s breakaway horn solo, however, is another story, that of Tim and his sudden encounter with disaster, slipping and sliding and swerving to avoid an oncoming truck until — BAM! — nature and man collide, nothing left but metallic wreckage and the distant siren of an ambulance.

Brilliant, effective co-mingling of divergent scenarios and reactions, and one of several stand-out pieces.

Eckemoff and her band douses “In Hospital” with the despair of a bowed acoustic bass, as Tim learns of his many broken bones, a month-long recuperation, and the resigned, sad realization that he must let his beloved pet Spark go, asking a friendly, kind nurse to release the startled fish into the wild, in a nearby pond.

“Tim imagined how tonight Spark would nervously wiggle at the surface of the water, waiting for his master to show up with a can of food, and when he wouldn’t, Spark would pretend to be dead as usual and lie on his side at the bottom. But when Tim doesn’t show up all the next day, Spark will be seized by a chilling terror, and lonely, hungry, miserable, he’ll thrash around to exhaustion, splashing water from the aquarium and waiting in vain for his master.”

The pianist captures Tim’s worst-case scenario, banging her notes higher and higher, to the brink, to the edge of Spark’s thrashing surface, faster and faster in a mad dash for signs of its master in an empty room. In doing so, Eckemoff embodies both the trumpeter’s growing panic and his imagination gone wild.

“Into the Wild” shows what happens, musically, when the kind nurse goes to Tim’s “old and shabby” house “on the edge of a lovely pond,” with “woods all around,” retrieves his pet Spark, who has gone from pale pink to angry red, and drops the squirming fish into the dark, murky, cold pond.

The musicians pick up and play the turning-point notes of change, inherent in any story: discovery, empathy, shock, distress, and again, aching loneliness of another kind — from the viewpoint of the fish.

Bassist Ben Street takes on the movements of the nurse visiting Tim’s abode, arrestingly, as does percussionist Eric Harland, ushering in a kind of causative, shiny, carpeted tread, while Koga’s Spark fish hauntingly wails in places…always a reminder of where its home truly is and the new home it has grown to love more.

Eckemoff ties the pieces together with fulfilling music, a happy ending to come.

The tune reflects the constant, swirling, sometimes frenetic passing of fish, for survival and plenty, in Eckemoff’s nimble fingers. She’s Spark and the wild fish all around in the pond, but she’s also the strange falling-apart/falling-together music their freedom entails.

Koga joins Eckemoff in an eerie rendition of what it must feel like to live underwater, forced to forage amidst friends and foes for pure survival.

While the band members capture the sorrow of solitude and the ache of separation of Tim and Spark’s unlucky circumstance, they also touch on the inadvertent, natural beauty nevertheless of their surroundings and how they adapt, almost seamlessly within such a ruthless environment.

“This project has been great. One thing I really appreciate about Yelena is that one of the first things that she told me was, ‘I want to work on a project with a Japanese flute, I don’t know why, I wanna try.’ It’s the sense of a kind of a pure curiosity and wonder about how she approaches composition in her projects. It’s almost child-like, not knowing what it is going to be like, but kind of going with just instinct and intuition, and at the same time, allowing the musicians to partake and be creative. She’s open to suggestions…I feel like we’re creating this project together. I play shakuhachi and flute in ways that are untraditional.” — Masaru Koga

“Life in the Pond” kicks off the second disc, continuing to swirl around and around with increasing intensity, Spark getting his footing in the deep, murky pond, learning to survive near-misses on the fly. A clear melody adheres and hinges to the little fish, his furtive, dancing anthem, as Eckemoff keeps rotating the forward floral movement, skirting skirmishes in the “maze of vegetation,” as well as all potential bottomless monsters lurking in the shadows.

Koga flits in and out, vibrating his flute, resembling cattails, willow roots, water lilies, and “the sensation of strong vibrations in the water” that Spark senses all around him.

“Survivor” serves as both a stand-alone song, lyrically brimming over with the promise of tomorrow, searching for a vocal crescendo, and the next chapter in Spark’s life, one of adjusting and adapting to his new environment…becoming more of himself, a fish in the wild, one with nature.

“Imagining the nurse throwing Spark out of that bucket into the pond, Tim groaned in pity for his poor pet and, raising the trumpet to his lips, began to play, pouring out his sorrow in quiet, hopeless at first, and then with increasingly heated and insistent sounds.” Illustration by Yelena Eckemoff

Koga and Eckemoff, Eckemoff and Koga…their flute and piano lyric traces Spark’s involuntary boundaries within and without, as he shifts from comfort to loss, a pet to a wild creature; a musical-becoming that is as wondrous as it is heartbreaking, because both instruments have the innate capability of exuding loneliness to the nth degree.

“Empty House” compounds that loneliness, as Tim returns home, sorting through the debris of once-found happiness, what remains of his life, with Spark gone.

Piano waterfalling, bowed and picked bass clean…Tim’s — and by default, Knuffke’s — horn cuts through the chasm with torn, effusive yearning.

In Eckemoff’s subsequent solo-bridge, a blossoming floral reverence — harbinger of the good times between Lonely Man and His Fish — there manifests the sudden decisive turnaround, as Tim grabs his horn and heads for the pond, hoping against hope to somehow find Spark there and coax him back home.

“Tim played with selfless inspiration, his trumpet blazing in the glow of the setting sun, and everything around him seemed to stand still, listening to this strange and passionate music.”

In the album’s complex climax, “Song for Spark,” Eckemoff infuses her piano notes with brightness that seems incongruous to the lost cause, giving way to Koga’s weeping willow, floating in a gentle breeze, Knuffke playing what Tim feels — anguish, shame, desperation, then release — seemingly composing on the spot in a real-time process of laying all his signature cards on the table, from one fond memory to another.

His horn crumbles, blazes, crying out in a near-human voice — broken by time, misfortune — and makes inverted, ungodly stifled shrieking sounds that tear away at the heart…sounds of grief a horn, and a human, rarely make, but should. Award-winning sound.

What a memorable “Song for Spark,” it is.

The entire band plunges head-long into an uneasy, tension-filled marriage of dynamic, dizzying sonic and free-form jazz, harkening the merger of two golden ages (straight-head and experimental)… closer and closer to Eckemoff’s happy, fulfilled musical ending — the reunion — which the pianist teases as a major counterpoint to the stark terror of Knuffke’s beacon search.

In gracious spaces, Eckemoff expands on the piano repertoire, encompassing her own set of bass-drums and treacly rainforest storms, climbing terra-cotta terraced steps towards some higher purpose, while giving depth and breadth to a composition about the rewards of taking a leap of faith for love.

“Every album I do is conceptual. 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.”

In her own words, tunes come to her unbidden, and sometimes, it’s too much. In the 12th composition — her strongest, and yet, most difficult to pin down — Eckemoff masterfully juggles a tricky overflow of narrative, scene setting, movement, characterization, and mood with the laser mindset of a conductor and the feel of inspired musicians locking into all of it with specificity and collective generosity.

Once Tim miraculously draws out his Spark, the two reunite in a “Call of Friendship,” an S.O.S. in electronica, keyboard, flute form.

Eckemoff and Koga make their instruments swim in the rippling, deep blue, maneuvering tone and texture to evoke the rippling presence of willow roots, assorted other fish, and Spark making his quick-silver way to Tim, spinning in confusion, bouncing up and over the water’s surface, following his heart.

The dangling instrumental ripples could easily apply to the joy in seeing one another again in the darkness of night, as every pet and pet parent knows.

Tim and Spark triumphantly return home, settle in for the night, and fall asleep, “Dreaming Together,” for the last track.

In Koga’s flute, there is the comfort of home — a warm, silky thread felt by Spark, the fish, and reverberatingly influencing Tim, overwhelming him with relief and gratefulness.

Knuffke responds in kind, growing warmer and silkier by association.

Encircling them both, Eckemoff acts like a fairy godmother waving a magic wand, but also inhabits the spirit of Spark basking in the glow of finding his place in the big blue world, here with his horn-playing friend.

Her twinkling piano notes say good night and good dreams, where Spark swims with Tim, a human-turned-fish, in a cross between reality and fantasy, melody and harmony, logic and technique meeting beauty and touch.

In the fade, Koga’s anthropomorphic flute assumes the wave-like rhythm of Spark’s S-shaped tail and unique voice if voiced aloud, a most appropriate goodbye.

“It turns out that there is no glass at all, and the aquarium is an immense space filled with warm, air-bubbling water. It’s so easy and pleasant for Spark to swim side-by-side with his master, picking up sunken insects on the way, and he’s not at all afraid of the whiskered predators scurrying around, because he knows that his master will protect him from any danger.”

The last two tracks especially reveal Eckemoff’s predilection for pairing classical music with jazz (Dave Brubeck) and progressive rock (Pink Floyd) faves, the kind of point-to-counterpoint, or good-to-bad-to-good, if you will, found in life’s everyday stories.

Average listeners could play the double-album every minute of every single day and always find something new and inventive tucked in between the storytelling lines. This is, after all, her God-given gift.

Lonely Man and His Fish (L & H Production) is Yelena Eckemoff’s 18th release.

Artists’ quotes from an EPK and liner notes.

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Carol Banks Weber for Substack.com

Title: Book of Psalms: Intimate Prayer Set to Wondrous, Mystical, Righteous Music
Let the trumpet sound and the stringed instruments make merry for pianist Yelena Eckemoff’s ‘I Am a Stranger in This World’

“I am a stranger on earth;
do not hide your commands from me.”
—Psalm 119:19

Classically trained Russian pianist Yelena Eckemoff fits more musical styles into one place than most jazz artists. She also hears music in the most unlikely places: a pane of glass, a lioness feeding her cubs, the bud of a wildflower in the throes of early spring, and, in her latest two-disc album, I Am a Stranger in This World, musical Scripture from the “Book of Psalms” in the “Old Testament.”

I Am a Stranger in This World (L&H Production) revisits her 2018 instrumental/vocal recording, Better Than Gold and Silver, with a continuation of three flow-over tracks, as well as new pieces just for the occasion.

The May 20, 2022 double-album on her own label features 10 instrumentals from two recording sessions: 2016 in Brooklyn for Better Than Gold and Silver and 2020 in NYC for I Am a Stranger in This World. Three recorded tracks from the 2016 session, including two of the longest (“Like Rain Upon the Mown Grass” and “Every Beast of the Field”), are previously unreleased flow-overs from her 2018 record. The title track is the third.

“I may only add that these three flow-over tracks were also recorded with vocals (Tomas Cruz,) while eight [additional] new tracks have not found the proper singer(s) yet, even though the scores for vocal versions are ready,” Eckemoff explained. “I plan to release three psalms with Cruz later on digitally — as singles. The leftover ‘I Am a Stranger in This World’ psalm was a perfect name for the new installment, so I gladly used it.”
On her current release, trumpet and guitar take over a great many melodic landscapes — in broad, expansive swaths, while also hiding, tucked away in burgeoning compartments, waiting to fly out, messianic messages burying the lead, both cinematic in scope and ridiculously, jaw-droppingly diverse…classically elegant against rim-riot abstract — the essence of free jazz — over continually changing movements and tones, and starkly re-shifting styles..

“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 expressed in a press release. “And I think it’s because there’s a power in those words…. You can feel the power that God channels through that music.”
Rhapsodic waves, verging on opera, vibratory resonance, and instrumental multiplicity characterize I Am a Stranger in This World, connecting the mystical, enigmatic strangeness of Old Testament religion with down-to-earth familiarity, melded and forged into everyday music we might turn up on the radio or tune into at a symphony concert with friends.

It is Michelangelo’s Italian Renaissance painting, “Creation of Adam” — where the Almighty reaches out to touch humankind’s hand — come to musical life in another mortal’s hands. Divinity gleaned…realized in windsong.

This album benefits from the many trumpet voices in one musician, Ralph Alessi, and his ability to embody myriad states of being and feeling, from highs and lows to squalls in between, two metallurgy-minded electric guitarists (Adam Rogers, Ben Monder), and their varying, dynamic points of view, the innate mimicry-soundtrack of drummers and their second skin (Nasheet Waits, Joey Baron), and violinist Christian Howes’ gospel-to-rock totem majesty every repeat offender can get behind.
 
One moment, wild and woolly, pop-rock fancy…1960s “Hair” and “Tommy,” ushered into a modern-era sophistication, buttressed up against the faintest whiff of charismatic Baptist gospel. The next, a Haydn, Mozart ballet of sweetness and light, plié-ing and pirouetting around a linen-starched musical theme that enfolds, arches, and repeats reverently around a series of hymnal-reborn inspiration.

Rather than list the tracks by arm’s-length citation, i.e. “Open your Bibles to ‘Psalm 119:19,’” Eckemoff personally draws on the intrigue of specific, convicting verses for her instrumental settings.

The songs themselves run long, between six and 18 minutes, as is her all-encompassing nature.

In disc one:

The musical undercurrent driving the first track, “As Chaff Before the Wind” (Psalm 35), imitates literal wheat stalks blowing in the wind, hither and yon, as the bandleader pianist holds down the quizzical, dramatic melody that spins around in tiny swirling rivulets.

One by one, the translucent, innocent bud of first breath or consciousness — an almost smooth-jazz-like prism with which life is seen, experienced, and understood — becomes shaped and augmented by ringlet amulets of stronger and stronger voices encapsulated on jazz trumpet (Alessi) and bass (Gress), then rock-star guitar (Rogers), backed by scintillating drum crashes (Waits) in the distance.

The slinky, bluesy piano notes of a late-night jazz seduction in “Lighten My Eyes” (Psalm 13) seem almost incongruous, considering the source. But if you consider the deeply sacred, intimate love note that is “Psalms,” at once beseeching, yearning, desperate, and all-consuming in focus throughout — as in one believer to his G-d — you’d get the drift.
 
“Make Haste to Help Me” (Psalm 70) repeats off a distinctive, simple blues riff ages ago. Eckemoff complicates matters, harmonically going this way and that, without straying that far off. Alessi lifts, separates, and illuminates that long, dark night of the soul with snazzy, zig-zag difference, as Rogers flickers beatnik daydreams, Waits splashes in the deep end, and Gress furtively makes off with the silvery spoils. The riff may be recognizable, but what the band individually does with the pieces claimed for themselves is something else.

It’s as close to traditional blues/jazz as Eckemoff’s ever gotten.

The title track (Psalm 119 Gimel) has classical chamber music all over it, trembly and true, as if approaching the altar with nothing but rags, faith, hope, and love. That’s all Christian Howes, playing his broken heart on his violin, playing it whole again. Eckemoff slips into a little bass-bottom, along with her evocative pianoforte cues, leading the prodigal son home again.

“Truth in His Heart” (Psalm 15) falls like rain on desert fields — Eckemoff’s piano turning into synth, followed vibrantly by Rogers pulling electrified strings, taunting the skies to upturn. Alessi cradles a loosening spirit on horns, allowing notes to sink, waiver, and drop like stones, heavy and war-torn.
 
The most beautifully rendered piece of art rests in the triple combo of trumpet, piano, and guitar coursing through “Like Rain Upon the Mown Grass” (Psalm 72). In tandem, the musicians seek to groove out the poetry and the rewards of waiting on the Lord, opening up worlds within worlds, when flesh is conquered and spirit glows. The trumpet melody buries itself on downward, bended knee, as once again, Howes reminds us what salvation feels like, as his bowed passage embodies the crackling force of humility and enlightenment.

If you know Howes’ personal story of salvation, you’ll appreciate his human touches all the more.

Disc 2 morphs into the esoteric and unfathomable:

“Keep Not Your Silence” (Psalm 83) bounces around like a projected red ball going over a particular brand of Scripture — at first light, in the first meeting of the minds of a self-help group or Youth for Christ rally — as the Word, the Bread of Life feeds another broken soul, and rote grows into internal, imaginative dialogue… One can easily picture a parishioner sitting in the back of the pew, called to come forward, and the succinct-to-chaotic war battling furiously in his head in Eckemoff’s prancing piano beats and Alessi’s softly punctuated aerials.

Absent religious context, “The Wine of Astonishment” (Psalm 60) could very well be from the next ruminative rock album, with Eckemoff sweetening the mood and Alessi trying to find meaning in between the curling, topsy-turvy notes of a lost arc of a tune, buried in the trenches…before everything seems to go awry, slipping away into madness, then nothing.

The music returns out of the blackness and the disarray, trumpet sounding strong and surer than ever, faith restored, the absence of G-d filled with an outpouring, closer to unified, resounding, as Eckemoff’s piano outreach splits the cosmic-fantastic in starry-starry-night twinkles.
 
This one was the hardest to get into, with so much going on, and this tiny kernel of a melody, guitar  on top of trumpet on top of piano — stretched across 12 minutes and seven seconds of ideas and moods — seeking shelter, refuge…escape.

Although, Eckemoff provides a bit of resplendent jazz in a fruitful solo halfway in, and Adam Rogers absolutely slays, cycling his electronic fissure of a guitar into a filtering device for every poignant memory for every lifetime; the equivalent of that brilliant “Greatest Hits” flash medley before the lights go out.

“I Shall Not Want” (Psalm 23) is a lazy-river, blues-drenched Sunday afternoon, after church service, laying around in the backyard with family and friends, enjoying the view and each other, over a tasty repast. Guitar flecks gleaning pictures of sunsets through maple trees, birds circling overhead. Decidedly in the hot, humid warmth of the South…before co-mingling with a slower ballad, piecemealed by Alessi on trumpet, stringing several styles of play together.

If any tune deserves vocals and a front pew, it’s “At Midnight I Will Rise” (Psalm 119 Cheth). Eckemoff leaves plenty of room for a thoughtful, roaming intro, and a vocalization of the highs and lows of a believer sorting through the debris of forsaken temptation. In the middle of the roaming, the pianist inserts four familiar chords of Beethoven’s 5th. The familiar disintegrates into three or four varying trains of thought on a parallel course toward destiny…trumpet snip-snip-snipping away, agitating drums and piano, guitar making concentrated spiral descents.

Three-fourths of the way in, “At Midnight…” slips into a frilly canopy bed, silk taffeta debutante ball, and a young girl’s candy-coated music box, the one with the twirling pink ballerina inside, lulling you to sleep.
 
“Every Beast of the Field” (Psalm 104) wants to break into a generational anthem, one we’ve heard before. But Eckemoff drops the melodic participles before they become a cover, lasso’ing instrumental divergence in a loosely fitting circular motion around multiple styles and silhouettes — R&B bluegrass, gritty Southern rock, a military march, post-Baroque British period pieces.

Yelena Eckemoff converted to Christianity before emigrating to the U.S. from Moscow during tumultuous political times. This is her prayer and her worship, which she gladly shares with listeners of all faiths.

Much like the Bible itself, I Am a Stranger in This World | Original settings of Biblical Psalms, instrumental version, takes some time and getting used to, as well as frequent run-throughs. She and her able, willing band present the “Book of Psalms” with a strong, confident sense of melody, loose, open sense of time, and a willingness to let it all go to serve a stirring, oftentimes, haywire mood.

“There is some higher power. 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.”

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Carol Banks Weber for Festival Peak / Medium

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Title: Yelena Eckemoff Digs Into Another Language in the Muse Between Classical Jazz and the Arts

‘Adventures of the Wildflower’ traces the life of Columbine, connecting the human and plant species in this grand, subconscious collective
Moscow-born pianist-composer Yelena Eckemoff stretches her multi-media disciplines to better understand and translate in free-form longhand the world of Columbine, a wildflower who discovers — much like the human species above her — what it means to be alive, to reach out for the light, to make friends, and ultimately, make the ultimate sacrifice for her budding children. For “Adventures of the Wildflower” Columbine, Eckemoff joins with Finnish ensemble, vibraphonist Panu Savolainen, percussionist Olavi Louhivuori, soprano/tenor saxophonist Jukka Perko, guitarist Jarmo Saari, and double-bassist Antti Lötjönen. Savolainen, Lötjönen and Louhivuori appeared on her 2017 album “Blooming Tall Phlox.” Cover art: Yelena Eckemoff | Photography: Janne Nykänen (group), Lianna Slaughter (Eckemoff)
“I was moved to make this record as my answer to our turbulent times. 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 co-exist together on the same plot of land.”
Russian pianist and composer Yelena Eckemoff brilliantly, painstakingly, and bravely tells the story of wildflower Columbine, from birth to death and rebirth, in a language we all understand — and it’s not her music. To get there, she has to make some broad, daring leaps and bounds, with an arsenal of other tools at her disposal, art, her secondary language and our first.
In the upcoming two-disc, 18-track, plant-based concept album (you read that right, 18 tracks), Adventures of the Wildflower (L&H Production) delves deeper than any of Eckemoff’s previous recordings to accurately, comprehensively capture in free-form longhand what it must truly be like as a plant initially mistaken for a weed, to grow among a living, breathing community of other plants, fungi, hummingbirds, and bees — much like the human species — and to die and regenerate nobly.
More now than ever, the multi-talented, Moscow-born artist needs her original paintings and plain-spoken, tender poetry to illustrate/translate in the human language what is going on in the plant world’s music. The music itself is involved, complex, alien at times — Finnish multi-instrumentalist Jarmo Saari shines in this regard on theremin, glass harp, and guitars — and definitely challenging (lengthy) for the average, pop-loving, straight-ahead jazz listener.
It has to be. Flowers, trees, and weeds do not speak to each other in English, or Russian. They have their own code, patterns, vibration, with which to communicate danger or togetherness. We, the listeners, must learn it, flipping back and forth from the music playing in our ears to the page showing us what is going on.
For the first time, arguably, Eckemoff steps off her lofty perch, gets down in the dirt, and releases some of her iron-clad-grip on the written material to really broaden her musical horizons, going from a few to myriad band members, to accommodate more diverse styles, sounds, and sensations with her five-piece Finnish ensemble (Saari, saxophonist Jukka Perko, vibraphonist Panu Savolainen, double-bassist Antti Lötjönen, percussionist Olavi Louhivuori). All to depict the Adventures of the Wildflower as accurately as her imagination and knowledge of plant science can carry her. And that is far.
“They were fearless in approaching my extensive lead sheets,” extols Eckemoff.
The tracks themselves carry on for quite some time, from four to nine minutes. Too long? That depends on how curious and interested, even obsessed, you tend to be about nature and our place in it.
What does it feel like to be born, to die, staring up at the light? What does being reborn mean? What happens to a soul when it no longer has company, family, a life to cling to? How does one learn courage, sacrifice, love?
Adventures of the Wildflower definitely takes its sweet time to answer, each well-thought-out track fragrant with crystalline sound-shapes, hints of rotating, revolving seasons…a sprinkling of spritely piano, the still vibration of Saari’s theremin, spreading, searching, Perko often taking lead on soprano/tenor sax to tell this microscopic, grandiose story.
“I was moved to make this record as my answer to our turbulent times,” Eckemoff explains. “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.”
Columbine may be a wildflower, but her life mirrors that of every human on this earth. She’s born, she learns from those around her, including the kind and wise Rosemary, her best friend, she makes more friends with the joking mushrooms that pop up now and then, and the shy, whispery weeds, she gets lonely, she find courage within to press on and encourage those around her, she dies, she lives (Columbines are perennial, if taken care of) on for her newborn buds.
The inclusion of Saari’s glass harp and theremin really distinguishes Columbine’s world within worlds — and this album — giving her an ethereal, magical, alien glow intrinsic to that complex plant language.
Columbine’s story is presented basically in two parts, or two discs. The first nine tracks play more as sound effects, as the baby wildflower begins to learn about the world around her through impressions, indescribable feeling. The last nine in the second disc give off a more musical, coherent vibe, with lots of hard-hitting, gnarly jazz interaction threaded in and out of avant-garde chaos.
On the opening track, “In the Ground,” where we meet Columbine as she awakens, the theremin makes itself very clear, imparting the willowy, ivy-growing sound of her growing out the first of her “tiny, white roots,” as well as signifying mystery in this universe, reminding you of a sci-fi alien flick. Perhaps, “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” But offset, softened into dizzying, romantic classical-jazz by Eckemoff on piano, and echoed at points by double-bassist Lötjönen.
Eckemoff goes this way and that, swaying throughout the eerie, alien-scape that Columbine must navigate — breathing in life at first sight. Savolainen lifts the heaviness with his heavenly touch, symbolizing Columbine’s tender, beautiful spirit, quite literally awakening her, and brought forth up into the light by Eckemoff’s coaxing, almost hypnotic tones.
We know this, too, because Eckemoff supplants most of her concept albums with her original art and prose-poetry. She wrote a story in poetic parts, one for each track. “In the Ground” aptly describes Columbine’s birth, what we all go through when we are born — in lyrical words and succulent music.
“Then the Seed noticed that
Through the cracks above its bed
Glowed a faint, barely visible light.
A few times the light went away and appeared again,
Brighter with each return.
Sensing the pleasant warmth coming from the light,
The Seed began to swell with curious longing.”
Accordingly, Eckemoff and her ensemble play the notes of Baby Columbine’s literal experiences — sight, sound, movement — with nuances, shading, a light, light touch. They play the light in the darkness, the newness of life and all its strange, alluring wonders.
That is why the listener must be patient, and curious, as a bird watcher, or gardener, enraptured by nature’s slowly evolving awakening, discoveries.
“Germination” follows, as Eckemoff repeatedly draws upon an insistent cadence, notes marching forward, curiosity leading to action, and the growth of the first “strong pale-green shoot” piercing through to that light, and the “beautiful world…outside!” The insistence reappears after a time of dramatic extension that nearly sounds like a song. Very avant-garde, forcing you to follow the stirrings, lapses, and startling changes in sonic color — a fade to greying knock on wood — from a soundtrack of sound effects to a song dying to slip out of Eckemoff’s purposely loosening, trembling fingers, sleeking the jazz imprint.
There’s a strange, stirring ghost-voice rising up from the ground in “Weeding the Garden.” At first, you could swear it’s someone humming. Maybe the sound Baby Columbine hears as The Mistress comes around to pull her from the earth and throw her aside. But then, it sounds more like possibly, an intimation from the glass harp, wavering into and out of human understanding, as guitar and vibes begin niche-ing out melodic pieces that are woven together in Eckemoff’s hands. The third track feels more like the band members working out an improvisational jam session over a dismembered backbeat at a typical jazz show, the last Wow number to properly introduce each musician — front to back, from illuminating, pointedly-jazz bassist and wizening guitarist to drummer, vibist, and whatever unearthly treasures Saari digs up on his theremin and glass harp.
In between huge milestones are quiet, playful moments. “Dog Chasing a Mouse” frolics and rushes around in a sax-piano-vibe motif, as close to a jazz through-line as possible.
“Rain” provides a call-and-response, catch-and-release sensation, with pianist Eckemoff and vibist Savolainen repeating phrases off each other. Until, Eckemoff branches off into an all-too-brief bit of serendipity that is at once serious and flighty, skirting a bit of swanky jazz progression, befitting the drops of “jolly, bubbly-bouncy rain” that nourishes Baby Columbine, giving her a second chance at life.
“Chickens” is a bizarre piece of avant-garde literature, transcribed in janky chords, pieced off-kilter together to give you a sense of the characters living in the chicken coop, noisy and daft: “old Fussy Hen…trying to peck at Master’s hand when he came to collect the eggs,” “Another Mean Hen often snuck up on an unguarded egg, cracked and ate it,” “Hens…screaming at the top of their lungs” to avoid an Opossum. Perko’s supernatural soprano verbiage gets a workout here.
“Drought” wants to be a haunting, lyrical ballad, tripping cavalierly over itself into this fertile ballet, piano majestic rolling waterlilies in imaginary rolling tides, drifting, drifting, as the bassist floats in, trying to drum up a battalion on arid wastelands.
Lest you forget, Eckemoff masterfully melds her classical training with jazz lucidity in “Waking Up in the Spring,” the second tune off the second disc, pairing seamlessly with Perko on sax and Saari’s snaring, sizzling guitar riffs for a true awakening.
A bit of Columbine’s theme arises in “Butterflies,” as the wildflower blooms, realizing she is more than a discarded weed her Mistress plucked and tossed aside. She attracts her share of butterfly suitors, who ply her with compliments and “tickling…tender kisses.” Saari plays her blossoming into womanhood on glass harp/theremin, playing off that intrinsic vibrational frequency beautifully, making him and his unconventional abstraction feel right at home in Eckemoff’s magnified plant world.
An odd departure for the “Hummingbirds’” image, Eckemoff inserts a rush of them circling, floating, and bobbing around Columbine in the vibist’s bubbly notes. But then Saari enters with a bluesy series on electric guitar. This only serves to intrigue you even more, as Savolainen blows up the bubbly notes with something bigger, more concrete, as Eckemoff lays out a jazz current beneath it all, undercut and snazzy in latter spaces.
“Another Winter,” the second to last track on the second disc, gives us an intimate glimpse of what it must be like for all living things on the ground to fall into a hibernating slumber in the winter. You can hear icicles crackling with the sunlight making its morning appearance in the instruments, striking chords and memories…making for a nice, peaceful lullaby to bye-bye to.
The music, triumphant and pure, pure jazz, comes bursting through on the final track, “Baby Columbines,” wrapped around Perko’s saxophone-playing fingers, wrapping around these little wildflowers receiving the gift of life and giving their mother Columbine a renewed reason to go on for one more season.
Yes, Yelena Eckemoff’s new, two-disc recording takes some getting used to, takes some time to get through, and takes a different, intensive/extensive approach to the jazz/classical curriculum, broadening the spectrum of an immersive, concept album that refuses to skim the surface. One that might try most listeners’ patience, most of whom would simply walk on by for another round of Billboard’s Top 40 — dumbed-down, mantra-spouting eye candy.
But stay awhile. Take a seat, relax, sip some Earl Grey, and look, really look at the world within worlds, where we are not so different from Columbine and her earthly friends.
Adventures of the Wildflower comes out March 19, 2021.

 

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Carol Banks Weber interview for Festival Peak

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Title: The ‘Little Bells’ in Yelena Eckemoff’s Jazz, Art, Poetry Multiverse

“Once upon a time, there was a tiny Seed lying in the ground.
It did not know what it was or how it got there.
It thought it had always been there,
Peacefully resting in its dry, cool bed.
One day the bed became moist,
And the Seed awoke feeling thirsty.
It started to swell and released tiny white roots… [‘In The Ground’]”

Yelena Eckemoff could easily moonlight as a painting artist, children’s writer, or romantic poet. Her jazz/classical concept albums have become multi-media, multiverse experiences, as she tells her stories from unique points of view: a lioness watching over her cubs, nature’s changing seasons, the scent of Blooming Tall Phlox, a lovely wildflower the Russian artist remembers fondly from childhood.

On March 19, 2021, the pianist/composer will release her lengthiest, “most developed” story yet, a two-disk, 18-track album gently chronicling the Adventures of the Wildflower (L&H Production), the Columbine (Aquilegia) — a favorite perennial of hummingbirds — from birth to renewed life.

Like most of her previous albums, this one is also accompanied by her original artwork and poetry, one poem for each original composition.

“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. 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 describes in a press release.

The feel of this new album will resonate with every listener, as they, too, encounter much of the same ups and downs, memorable moments and thrilling encounters, in their own circle of life.

With her, a talented Finnish group lending unexpected sounds and helping bring the Columbine to life, breath by breath: vibraphonist Panu Savolainen, saxophonist Jukka Perko, multi-instrumentalist Jarmo Saari (guitars, glass harp, theremin), double-bassist Antti Lötjönen, and drummer-percussionist Olavi Louhivuori. Lötjönen, Louhivuori, and Savolainen appeared on Blooming Tall Phlox, her 2017 album.

“They were fearless in approaching my extensive lead sheets,” she adds, recording in Helsinki in the summer of 2019.

“The story is longer and more developed than the conceptual writings in any of my previous albums.”
Jazz Medium digs a little deeper into Eckemoff’s train of thought in this, perhaps her most ambitious, thoughtful effort to connect us with nature, and each other, as the world deals with the aftermath of an unprecedented, isolating, scary pandemic. Look for a review of her new album soon.

What is Adventures of the Wildflower about?

The two-disc set tells the story of Columbine (named after the flower), from her origins as “a tiny Seed lying in the ground” through her final time on earth. Columbine becomes exposed to the natural wonders around her during her brief time on earth, experiencing both joy and sorrow, adversities and lucky breaks, and learns to communicate with other plants and all living things.

I narrowed my choices down to a Columbine species, because it was one of the plants I was familiar with from my childhood. My grandmother always had pink and blue Columbines in her garden. She called them “little bells,” and when she weeded the soil under the apple trees, she always kept the Columbine clusters intact. I remember that one time I was trying to help her with the weeding and pulled out some Columbine plants, and my grandmother was upset.

After I decided that the heroine of my story will be a Columbine, I studied all I could find about the Aquilegia species, so I would be true to the subject. From my experience with Columbines in my grandmother’s garden, I knew that they were always there, even though no one planted them. I was surprised to learn that Columbines are biennial plants, which means they bloom in their second year and then die. Yet they have such a strong life force that they always manage to seed themselves and continue on living.

[A Google search actually reports that the Columbine is very much perennial. Hmmm…]

I was moved to make this album as my answer to our turbulent times. 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. The characters in my story, such as plants, mushrooms, butterflies, hummingbirds, chickens, insects, and people, may have disagreements with each other, but in the end, they always find a way to co-exist together on the same plot of land.

How did this inspiration come about and how have you made this personally, uniquely yours? (What is your process?)

The album concept was inspired by an article in Scientist magazine that I came across a few years ago. 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. These signals are the universal language understood by all species of plants and insects. Plants alert each other about incoming threats, such as colonies of parasitic insects. They create a united chemical response to thwart such attacks and to help members of their community that were weakened by these attacks already. 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.

“I am modestly proud to have been able — much to my own surprise — to create a story that fits into a space that is neither simply childlike, nor adult, but somehow both, tying an innocence of childhood with the wisdom of ripe age.”
What did you want to say through this music?

I wanted to create peaceful, communal images for these troubled times. I dare to believe that my Adventures of the Wildflower project bears messages of the fullness of life, acceptance, friendship, forgiveness, loyalty, and hope.

How has Covid-19 affected your songwriting and performances? What have you been doing during the lockdowns?

Since I rarely perform, my life stayed pretty much the same as always: I kept working on my musical projects, preparing material for new recordings, overseeing the release of Nocturnal Animals, and going through all stages of preparing my current album, Adventures of the Wildflower, for manufacturing and release. That work included writing the story, painting illustrations, designing the CD insert, etc. In the beginning of March [last year], I flew to Burbank, CA, for a mixing session with my engineer, Rich Breen. What drastically changed in my life is that I had to interrupt my teaching in the spring, and then I decided not to resume lessons at all, because I realized that the running of my small record label and working on my projects is taking more and more time and effort, while my strength is fading as I get older. I realized that if I decide to stop teaching, then not resume lessons after a necessary break inflicted by the pandemic, [then that] presents an opportunity to part with my students in a gentler and more humane way.

What are you most proud of about this album?

It seems like a merging of the three arts — music, literary word, and painting — has become a trademark of my self-expression as a musician. But I never explored this trinity to such an extent as in my Adventures of the Wildflower project. The story is longer and more developed than the conceptual writings in any of my previous albums. The text itself takes up 25 pages of the CD booklet, plus there are nine illustrations I painted in oil on canvas; I felt that the story is asking for more than just a cover art picture. So, I had to extend the size of the booklet to 44 pages. The musical part is also extensive — to support all the twists of the story, which has 18 parts. Moreover, I believe the sonic palette and stylistic flexibility of this album is the widest, broadest, richest yet, compared to all the projects I’ve done before.

I am modestly proud to have been able — much to my own surprise — to create a story that fits into a space that is neither simply childlike, nor adult, but somehow both, tying an innocence of childhood with the wisdom of ripe age.

How are you getting the word out about this new recording?

I will be running marketing PR and radio campaigns in the U.S., Germany, UK, and EU.

Besides, piano, what other instrument(s) speak to you in the music and why?

All instruments are important to me. They are like oils of different hues I paint with. As I compose music, I envision what ensemble of instruments would express some particular ideas of mine the best. For example, for Colors, I’ve chosen the piano/drums duo, because I felt the project would strike as more emotionally raw, as the story suggested. For Nocturnal Animals, I wanted to counter-balance strong piano and bass duo with the equal measure of percussion; that’s why I needed not one, but two drummers. That being said, the Adventures of the Wildflower project came from a spark of meeting Finnish guitarist and multi-instrumentalist, Jarmo Saari, at the jazzahead! convention in Bremen. We talked, and Jarmo told me that he also played theremin and glass harp, which excited me, as I imagined all these extra colors in my music. I looked Jarmo up on YouTube and was really taken by his work with his fellow Finnish saxophonist Jukka Perko. The idea of going back to Finland after the success of the Blooming Tall Phlox album (inspired by nature’s smells and released in 2017) was always present in the back of my mind. But after getting inspired by Jarmo and Jukka’s lyrical playing, all I had to do to assemble a fantastic band, was to mix them with vibraphonist Savolainen, bassist Lötjönen, and drummer Louhivuori, who I so much enjoyed working with on Blooming Tall Phlox.

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Carol Banks Weber for Festival Peak

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Title: The Small and the Quiet of Yelena Eckemoff’s ‘Nocturnal Animals’

“Some hard music to record, fully composed, about 85 pages to read, 14 pieces,” Norwegian double-bassist Arild Andersen described of his Nocturnal Animals recording experience. Lots of pages, lots of notes, pre-destined in Yelena Eckemoff’s structured fashion, and yet, “It was great…somehow we sort of float on top.”

The classically trained, jazz-inclined Russian pianist and composer turned her musical sights to smaller things that go bump in the night in her upcoming Jan. 24, 2020 release on L&H Production. Eckemoff devotes 14 instrumental tracks — split in half, in a double-album — original artwork, and poetry to the dancers and prancers of the night: blooming cicada, tacky-sticky bat, walkingstick, fox, grizzly, rattlesnake, wolf, hedgehog, toad, lynx, scorpion, firefly in mating season, owl, and sea turtle, finding its last sea legs.

Nocturnal Animals plays small, in quiet, stealthy patter. The choice to go with double-bassist Andersen, who’s appeared on several of her past works, and two drummers, Jon Christensen and Thomas Strønen, blends well with the heartbeat of these animals that humans sense more often than see, and often, with fear and trepidation, if not wonder.

Eckemoff’s poetry feeds into the mythology and the science of each nocturnal creature. Her straightforward, vaguely romanticized descriptions seem factual, which then allows her to elaborate in more fanciful, presumptive language, putting us in the place of these featured night creatures for a spell.

The listener can both readily identify with what a firefly must be feeling during summer mating season, alight with promise, excitement, and hope, along with the biological rituals compelling these truths. How like them we are:

“Myriad attractive males are flickering their songs of passion;
Their chorus is so loud!
But I single out a special light; as it moves closer and closer,
I fix my eyes on the one whose light is of an especially tender hue,
And I fall in love at first sight.
I signal him with a flash of my belly, and I see that my feelings are shared.
Oh, how sweet it is to love and to be loved!
Oh, how fortunate I am to be able to drink the cup of life to the bottom!”
“Firefly” plays off that universal sense of wonder, relief, and first love in Eckemoff’s trickling, gossamer notes, as Andersen’s fluttering, darkened gaze moves the fireflies around in a world within a world out there under the evening gaze. Her touch on piano brightens and lifts, assuming fireflies’ pearlescent glow, swirled in effect under the double-bassist’s dowager gestures and, to a lesser extent, the percussionists’ subtly shimmering luster, stealing a mood.

“It is my prom tonight, my party time. I’ve waited long for this glamorous and exciting night, when I meet my groom and begin to live out my destiny.”
— “Firefly”
Eckemoff and her bass/percussive trio ease off from complete literal interpretation, save the recognizable lumbering of the Grizzly Bear in Andersen’s revved-up, deep and low bass.

Far from a sound effects album, there’s meaning beneath the notes, in the pre-determined pressure and lightness of beings in transit, in flight, trying to connect the natural world of nocturnal savagery under Eckemoff’s humanistic spell — their hissing crawlspaces, their dramatic, silent tension — with secret, noble, humane motivations.

There’s also a faint thread of melody weaving in and out, throughout. Not enough to hum a tune back and forth. But enough to experience what the cicada may upon awakening from gray to “white as a bride!” to “shiny black,” in the ultimate transformation from nothing to “beautiful creature.”

“Cicada’s” beautiful melody is short-term, lapsed, and hidden in satiny folds, captured with controlled tenderness in Eckemoff’s hands, and mirrored, vexed just as gently by bassist Andersen. Together, they stroke a cascading, give-and-take path for the young cicada to outgrow “grim underground tunnels,” out into the vast unknown on “sparkling translucent wings.”

Poignant inevitability underscores the last tune of the mother sea turtle, as she dares look back at the children she’ll leave behind to fend for themselves, and dares look forward to one more chance at spawning more “beautiful melodies, you, my dear offspring, will add much to the wondrous symphony of life.”

Eckemoff’s piano and Andersen’s bass walk along the shore, ripple into engorged waves, falling away in scintillating sheens of moon gloss — expressively refrained with cymbal curves. The piano-bass unite as a force, becoming stronger, leading the listener and the aging sea turtle away from stagnation and death toward one more stop, a “small rocky island” ahead. The journey’s long, and so is this final tune at well over eight minutes, but the small, sturdy ebb and flow, with sparkling piano, remains ever mesmerizing in its gradual ascent.

As Eckemoff lights this gradual ascent from darkness, she touches the eternal and the earthly with renewed purpose.

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Carol Banks Weber for Festival Peaks

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Title: Carousel begins: Yelena Eckemoff synthesizes music and ‘Colors’ for a lifetime
Russian jazz/classical pianist Yelena Eckemoff dipped into fiction to piece together a whole world of music and “Colors,” depicting the arc of a human life, complete with marriage, children, old age, and renewal. 

Russian pianist Yelena Eckemoff turned to a bit of fiction for her next classical/jazz album, Colors [Feb. 22, 2019]. A prolific, meticulous, and imaginative composer, Eckemoff stuck to the bare essentials for her next impressionist work of art: piano composition and poetry, with French drummer Manu Katché quickening the rhythm of life.

The 14-track instrumental album covers the stages of a human life through colors and music, and the feelings and images they evoke. Eckemoff’s fond of humanizing elements outside herself, finding reflections in nature and animals.

But this time around, she stays out of it — other than performing her original pieces on piano with Katché surround-sounding her on drums. Sparked by a bleak period in her own life, Eckemoff went about composing both music and poetry, as well as art for her CD booklet, to depict “Colors as stages of life.”

The “concept came to me when I was considering what to write about white color,” she explained in a recent email. “Instantly, white associated to me with hospital, milk, snow, and a blank canvas. I thought that all these images fit with the birth. But yet, the concept revealed itself to me in full when one night. I went to bed alone, feeling kind of down both physically and mentally, and as I buried myself into the covers and pillows, in complete darkness, seeking a hiding place from my broken heart and sorrows, it came to me that it should be a relief someday just to slip into soothing darkness, away from the burdens of life. And the concept of colors as stages of life between birth and death was complete in my mind.”

Eckemoff informed the compositions with what she did know from her own life — giving birth to children, watching them grow, taking care of her aging parents. But Colors is meant to be universal, so every listener, any listener can see himself/herself in the musical colors.

Colors is more than a contemporary melting pot of fine jazz and classical music, perfect piano pitch, artful, tempestuous variations, impeccable, spacious articulation, seamless transitions — although it is all that.

The album is less about listening for notes and timing, and more about feeling. With the first rendering of the first track “White,” you’ll immediately feel what it’s like to be born, fresh and new.

“Still, I did not want to write about my own life, especially [in] that I have not gone yet through its later stages. Instead, I took some things from my own experience and borrowed other details from my general knowledge of a woman’s life and from my experience with my parents who I took care of in the later stages of their lives.”
Eckemoff introduces that new life against the initial backdrop of an almost Motown-funk backbeat, provided by Katché — buffered by her voluminous one-woman orchestra. You’d think she’d go spare and slow, a barely-there whiff of “White” to match the tiny little human, in delicate, measured strokes.

Instead, she opens up a world of music from the very beginning — a bountiful, full-bodied welcome into the world — while keeping the newness and wonder tucked inside crevices here and there, in Katché’s Butoh-post-modern style drumming, and tempered by her own diminishing, flourishing notes.

Katché introduces himself quite memorably on “White,” the beginning of life in the eyes of a newborn, where everything is clean and fresh and, well, white:

“White ceiling, white walls,

White scrubs of the nurses,

White swaddling clothes;

Buzzing fluorescent lights inside the room,

And silent snow flurries outside;

Creamy milk — your first food,

An elixir of life…”

Any drummer can bring the heat. Dance rhythm comes naturally to the instrument. It’s tempting to go there, play to the crowd. Eckemoff opens up “White” immediately, walking her newborn’s curiosity in the tentative selections on her piano, as Katché slides into an easy crowd-pleasing R&B groove. But then, he begins to match her free jazz over the halfway point, closing in on the notes, fusing some of them together for a jarring effect, seemingly going off-script, a whirling, ponderous mass, defying gravity as the roles reverse and the musicians switch places, Eckemoff keeping her own mood-ovulating time.

In keeping with Eckemoff’s auditory impressions, here are a few more of mine:

“Blue” opens with traces of Sara Bareilles’ adult contemporary hit, “Gravity,” operating on a fragility almost too much to bear, understandably endearing, a musical lighthouse adrift at sea. But all traces of Bareilles’ “Gravity” disappears when Eckemoff slams on the Turkish mosaic in boisterous tones, then examines a few remaining notes at her disposal — before melting them away in esoteric terms…a private recipe of child’s play, referring possibly to her poem, where a mother imagines her child’s delighted outburst over her own “favorite childhood toy, a metal humming-top, causing it to spin | At full tilt as it loudly sings the expanded C-major triad.”

“Red” churns with what sounds almost like a fully formed melody from one of those adult contemporary pop tunes everybody’s raving about from Lady Gaga. In fact, Eckemoff does it better. She pours so much life into every punctuated note, soft and sharp, feminine and masculine, effervescent and angular, perhaps mirroring the love and lust of a young couple out on the town, a woman who gave birth, yet still finds herself attractive and vibrant to the world, attracted lustily to the father of her child.

“Red” is a composition steeped in the laws of attraction, and about feeling cherished, pregnant with possibility.

Halfway through, Eckemoff catches the listener’s ear with this bit of rolling thunder in a kind of seductive display, a mating ritual. The drummer can be heard underneath Eckemoff’s elaborate grandstanding, grinding out a rhythmically intoxicating beat — keeping time yet keeping company. Alone, this part would sound fine, a solo of adventuresome, restless movement, time out of mind. But with Katché stoking the fires, the movement sounds complete, branching off from the exclusivity of a starched-white classical, sit-up-straight listening jazz situation, to anything-goes street dance.

For “Yellow,” the pianist ruminates on fully-formed notes that are loaded with context, in a cavalcade of ideas the way yellowed leaves bend and fall from grace, the setting for this composition. Eckemoff mimics the falling, fallen leaves on her piano (and her Walt Whitman-worthy poem), equating them with a person’s “sluggish steps,” the lethargy of advancing middle age:

“Your sluggish steps produce crunchy sounds, even though, strangely,
 You feel as if you are shuffling through yellow water.

One by one, or several at a time, dead leaves detach themselves

From the branches and start falling. Their lethargic, uneven

Descent to the ground has a hypnotic power over you.

Your eyes follow each leaf’s first and final journey

From the mother tree down to the ground.”

“Yellow” rests between the spaces, conjuring up snippets of spicy funk in rolling, lazy piano, snatching up momentary anticipation that seems to permeate the album, leaving plenty of room to play around in a deceptively improvisational manner, where anything could happen at any moment. 
 
 The leisurely, browsing stops and starts match an elderly person’s walk through a park in the poem, moving slowly, deliberately, with sudden moments of bewilderment, even clarity, as she matches memories of her youthful past to the future ahead in the “dry yellow leaves” she thinks of putting “between the pages of her books” just like her mother used to. The pace also matches the falling dead leaves abandoning their youthful promise.

“Aquamarine” rises and falls on anticipation, very classical, very tender at times, gingerly probing, yet going nowhere. The composition builds on the power of memory, as a mother returns to the ocean, where she once took her children (now presumably grown) and confuses the past with the present in the “elated squeals and chatter” of little boys not her own.

It is a blissful, yet wretched confusion, as depicted in the haunting illusion of melody buttressing up against harmonic, tempo changes.

“A sharp desire to jump up and run to them pierces you like a needle.

‘Wait — I can’t run at my age, so they can’t be my children, you old fool,’

You admit to yourself and chuckle. Involuntarily, your eyes fill

With sentimental tears as you recollect how excited your kids were

When you brought them to the beach for the first time.

Every shell, even a broken one, was a treasure to them…”

“Brown” ushers in more of a sweeping R&B jazz feel, like a bat spreading its wings before landing; she pushes harder on the notes for a banquet effect, letting the echoes spray and spread out in a dramatic flourish. Lots more contrasting, cranky notes that resound with a metallic clash.

“Black” starts off dark, running in a loose circular pattern we recognize intrinsically as a part of the human race. We can feel Eckemoff taking stock in the way she runs her hands through a certain set of keys, the way we run through our stock mental photos of good and bad times, while holding onto the ones we love very much. Her fingers fly in bursts of explosive energy, then linger on a few notes, sitting very still.

Her accompanying poem hints at the inevitable ebb and flow in this circle of life:

“Out of the blackness

Vivid dreams will come,

Dreams that will bring back the good times of your life,

The very memories of which escape you now…

Another pink morning will light up;

It will dawn through your veiled eyelids;

And then will descend upon you,

Sparkling with diamonds,

White Day”

Eckemoff plays a musical version of those memories, the hope of another chance to see the “pink morning,” “sparkling with diamonds,” the juxtaposition of white and black, light and dark.

Before any return to “White’s” renewal of life, one must endure the pain of death. Many people who’ve had near-death experiences, or who’ve been a bedside witness to them, report that they’ve seen flashbacks of a life well-lived — the highs and lows, loved ones left behind. Eckemoff captures those flashbacks in the arc of her poetic instrumental. She ebbs and flows, rushes and weans, stirs the pot until there is nothing but a memory of the music and the feelings left behind.

This album kept me company on many restless nights, thinking about my own life and death. It is another thoughtful, kind, and imaginative play on music, poetry, and art — one rarely visited.

 

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