Festival Peak

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 Peak

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Yelena Eckemoff’s Desert goes beyond the tired tropes of camels, shifting sands, and that fabled oasis into the fevered imagination of a fictional man’s mind after all is lost.

Again using her own prose and artwork, the classically trained Russian jazz pianist and composer brings together a core group of musicians and her densely complicated supernatural stories for an 11-track score.

Peter Erskine gamely goes along for the ride, percussively highlighting the journey of a man who has lost everything. Double-bassist Arild Andersen, who has played on numerous Eckemoff concept albums, returns. And Paul McCandless is a one-man band of special sound effects and mood enhancements on oboe, soprano sax, bass clarinet, and English horn. His desert touch is everywhere on this record.

Prolific beyond imagination, Eckemoff churns out a record or two a year, mostly centered around the beauty of nature and its humanizing effects.

Lately, she’s fascinated listeners with her take on the supernatural earthly effects over the human spirit. She imagined herself inhabiting the soul of a lion in her 2015 album, Lions — complete with poetry, artwork, and an original classical-jazz instrumental score.

Each one of her multi-media albums could easily become an independent movie.

She carefully thinks about the words and the images to go with her music. They are one and the same, meant to enliven the listening experience beyond a mere concept album into an immersive one.

L.A. jazz pianist/composer Josh Nelson does the same with his forays into a whole other world entirely: Mars and beyond.

On Desert, Eckemoff goes one step beyond poetry, lyricism, and jazz free style to tell the story of a man saved by the unexpected kindness of an Arabian family, and the stark, unconditional beauty of a sandy wasteland. She wrote a novella, a screenplay of sorts following the tragic life of this British man who lost his wife and daughter and goes on a safari to work himself to death out there in the desert.

From the opening track of “Bedouins”: “Living in such a harsh environment and enduring hours of heavy labor each day should bring my life to an end pretty quickly, I figured. The perfect solution!”

This British man imagines dying in a Saudi Arabian desert in order to end the pain he feels. His idea of the desert is a cliché that soon becomes an unexpected adventure, a paradox. Like Eckemoff’s music, the writing is a blend of the novelist’s patient character-development — you grow to care about this man in a hurry — and the short story writer’s desire to get to the point.

An Arabian family takes the man in, and everything changes. They take him on their journey through the desert, but it is beyond what he ever imagined of a “cloudless sky; omnipresent blazing sun; severe, inhospitable environment…” It is, instead, an oasis of serenity and stark beauty, offering surprising moments of warm, hospitable, human companionship.

Another gift of Eckemoff’s multi-tiered jazz is her ability to capture a duality of spirit in her stories. Not only does this man hope to experience the barrenness of his existence in the desert, but he already experiences it in his soul. In time, he realizes that he’s got both assumptions — of the desert and the desert of his mind — wrong.

The desert shows him that his life is worth living, after all.

Take that, O. Henry!

Eckemoff’s writing reflects her music: descriptive in places, with pockets of mesmerizing interest… unrushed, yet never boring.

She and her band shy within a hairbreadth away from the cliché sounds of a desert. Oh some of it’s there. McCandless’ oboe mimicking the snakey feel of the sand dunes, the endless vast reaches of the “cloudless sky… blazing sun.”

But they build those moments of interest, human interest, in what the man and his desert family must be feeling and thinking, what they must have seen in their travels together, joking, sharing “a drink of aromatic tea or coffee brewed over the campfire,… a hot meal, surrounded by dear friends [‘Garden Of Eden’],” memories and wisdom.

The Yelena Eckemoff Quartet’s Desert is a milky, floral, blossoming experience of soft, slow discovery for this listener — more of a score than a lyrical album.

Eckemoff does insert those pockets of lyrical interest, combining a vague sense of anticipation and conflict, as if mirroring the sound a sudden wind might make, causing mini-hurricanes of dust and sand before all is calm again. “Mirages” plays like a perfect desert soundtrack, with humanizing lyrical notes within.

“Mirages” is also quite avant-garde in its bilious sound at times, piano and woodwind, a clash of cymbals, the tip-toeing bass … rising up in a flurry, each demanding supremacy, attention, clamoring and chaotic. It’s a great interpretation of the “restless wind” that “blows and blows in its monotonous mischief, shifting the dry sand.”

You have to be in the right frame of mind to listen to Desert, or any of Eckemoff’s masterpieces.

Calm. Open. Still.

She’s quietly commanding, able to rustle up emotional storms in her music, then aching emptiness as her piano steps away from the cumulus madness of an uncontrollable world out there. “Desert’s Cry” depicts this contrast of classical beauty and jazz difference, with drops of bedouin themes in McCandless’ woodwind and brass arsenal.

If you think the music of “Desert’s Cry” is vast and searching, try reading the prose accompanying it. A perfect description of the desert, and Eckemoff’s poetic, storytelling power:

“I am vast. I am majestic. I am free from pretense. I am indestructible.

Give me some water, but not too much, because I like to be arid,

So that my dunes can sing in the wind.

Give me your steps, because I like to be walked on, but not by too many,

For I would not have all my gazelles hunted down by the greedy.

… Give me your bodies — to cherish and preserve forever,

But not so many that I would be labeled a merciless killer…”

In “Dance,” Eckemoff gives us something close to the lyrical, themes you can hum along to, a pleasing semblance of a melody, and the musical embodiment of what went on when the sun became night and the caravan settled in around the fire to watch the women dance under the “thin smile of a crescent moon.”

Yelena Eckemoff’s Desert will change your mind about checking out if you let it.

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Carol Banks Weber for Festival Peak

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Title: Yelena Eckemoff discovers time travel ‘In The Shadow Of A Cloud’

“In The Shadow Of A Cloud” is the third in a string of memories-based jazz-classical music, and the 11th concept album from prolific Russian pianist and composer Yelena Eckemoff.

Classically trained, Moscow-born pianist Yelena Eckemoff records her most polished jazz album to date, threading an undeniably mystical and melodic spirit throughout her Aug. 4, 2017 release, In The Shadow Of A Cloud on her own L&H Production label.

She gathered together a brand new batch of sidemen to flesh out fond memories made back in Russia, where she is originally from: Chris Potter (tenor/soprano sax, flute, bass clarinet), Adam Rogers (electric guitar), Drew Gress (double bass), and Gerald Cleaver (drums). This is their first time playing together.

The 14-track, original double-album continues where Eckemoff last left off in a series of instrumentals that tries to capture the feeling of her childhood and her loving Russian family through classical-jazz music.

As with her previous releases, Eckemoff augments her original compositions with her poetry (28-page track list) and her art (the bucolic album cover), plus black and white family photos.

In The Shadow Of A Cloud features Eckemoff’s classically enhanced lyricism and nimble, oftentimes surprising jazz gravitas woven in layered, high-brow, high-standards interplay.

Following Eckemoff’s train of thought — a mixture of womanly intuition, exquisite sensitivity, keen attention to detail, a bit of mysticism, and an intrepid sense of adventure — can be challenging, even for the best sidemen in New York. Musicians must follow her charts as written, invoking her truest intentions while subtly infusing their own signature. The four men on In The Shadow Of A Cloud definitely achieve that objective in spades.

“The session went extremely well. Yelena has some very idiosyncratic music, very evocative, and it was a real pleasure to play it, especially with her and these other fine musicians,” Cleaver described.

Potter added that the “music itself awakens a feeling, and that seems to be the center of where she is approaching music from, which I like a lot.”

“Yelena’s music is quite beautiful and really unique. It’s different from a normal jazz record because it’s more through-composed,” Rogers elaborated. “But I wouldn’t describe it as being a ‘classical-jazz’ hybrid record, because it sounds more like she’s assimilated these influences and is expressing them in an already very processed way; processed in a really good way.”

Together, the quintet plays some of the most jazzy music of her classically steeped career. There’s more jazz in this album than all of her others combined.

Usually, Eckemoff sounds as if she’s tucking in bits of jazz here and there, as will fit — an arch classical motif is suddenly cut through with a brilliant counterpoint that almost mirrors something in a nifty hard bop without going all the way, riding the line between straight-ahead and experimental.

But In The Shadow Of A Cloud pulsates with in-your-face jazz, jazz solos, jazz elaborations, Chris Potter’s strong jazz vigor, Drew Gress and Gerald Cleaver’s bass/drum reiteration, Adam Rogers’ contemporary jazz fusion — with classical fringes.

Potter punches up “On The Motorboat” from the first disk on his straight-ahead-sounding sax, circling the main crux of Eckemoff’s tricky flickering piano asides. Then, Rogers burns through a first-time fusion feel on his electric guitar for the most delicious tease before Eckemoff returns with Cleaver to seemingly blow up the bop for a slight, free jazz detour. The tune contains hefty chunks of straight-ahead jazz, jazz fusion, and free jazz over a barely veiled melody roundabout resting underneath, with that trademark classical flourish-finish.

It’s really kind of clever and cool how each member of Eckemoff’s Shadow Cloud recording band comes in and out of focus, in and out of the spotlight — without taking anything away from the main event, the woman driving the show and telling her stories.

Another welcome aspect is the memorable, almost pop-feel of the musical threads in a lot of these tunes, none better than the opening, title track. Again, Potter leaves an indelible mark on his tenor sax, catching the ear immediately on a catchy melody that traces the opening of almost every romantic introduction in a smooth jazz fusion debut. Eckemoff takes over, her classical influence building stacks of volume and heightened drama. As Potter repeats the melodic refrain, guitarist Rogers and bassist Gress riff off its lingering notes with their own.

The hard-hitting jazz and Eckemoff’s catchy, highly evocative musical themes almost make me forget that there’s a concept here about the North Carolina-based bandleader’s earlier memories of time gone by with her family back in Russia (she and her husband emigrated in 1991).

The song titles and the accompanying track poems remind me of the beloved people in Eckemoff’s life, along with the musical equivalent of a memory montage of how these loved ones made her feel as a young girl. Eckemoff’s able to translate what it felt like to be out there in the “Fishing Village,” trying to be quiet for the fishermen “staring at their floats,” walking trails along the “Waters Of Tsna River,” swimming, making “Acorn Figurines” with Mommy, even traveling in time back to “Tambov Streets On A Summer Night” to be at her grandparents’, the air fragrant with “wild lilies, mixed with the smells of warm asphalt and of potatoes and onions frying on kerosene burners,” only to miss her husband in the here and now, back at their mailbox in North Carolina.

“Waters of Tsna River” (disk 1) showcases Potter on flute, and the band in 5/4 time. If you’re not a fan of flutes, the tune is a bit long-winded. Four minutes or so of flute is, for me, four minutes too long. Although, Potter does a fine job breaking up the flimsy sweet monotony of that tinny instrument in his heartfelt undulations.

More of what I came here for can be found in disk two, especially the piano- and guitar-fabulous “Picnic In The Oaks.” Melodically ripe, atmospherically aglow, the track ebbs and flows from the best jazz cocktail: snazzy pickups, bulbous bass echoes — you know I love my bass — and a cool, loping, straight-ahead rhythm, broken up into tantalizing bits by restrained but loosely fit drummer Cleaver. I like the way the jazz conversation gradually dissipates, like friends reluctantly taking their leave.

“Trail Along The River” brings me up close and personal to Eckemoff’s often dramatically disparate world. Her ease amidst dark and light in musical reflections astounds me. The musical rendition perfectly mirrors what’s going on with her as she remembers walking the trail along a familiar river as night falls and “vacationers get ready to go back to the city. My heart sinks.”

She and the band play the sad loneliness in fond remembrances of the trail along the river and all of the life attracted to it. In the poetry of her words (“The soil here is black as charcoal where wet, and gray as ashes where dry; To my bare feet, it feels smooth and rich, like butter”), as well as her music, she depicts the tension of what was and what never will be, beginnings and endings, the “creeping, glistening” ache of fleeting joy.

While the subsequent tune, “Lament,” meanders for a point, “Trail Along The River” marches inexorably to a hopeless, foregone conclusion. The quartet (minus Potter) chimes in for a kind of farewell — their hop, skip, and jumpy notes, their lingering tones leaning toward the dark, melancholy side with eruptive bursts (in Eckemoff’s mini-jazz piano concertos) of the happiness she recalls.

Again, it’s a totally immersive experience, beyond multi-media sight and sound — into the supernatural. Eckemoff draws you in completely — until you are almost inside her head as she walks the trail along the river, seeing what she’s seeing, feeling what she’s feeling, hearing what she hears as fantastic music until the day she is able to share the soundtrack of her life.

Eckemoff achieves a kind of literal time travel, not just for herself, but for any listener open to the experience.

“All of those places and people are lost for me. So I write about them, even in this short way. I want a longer life for them than just in my memory,” Eckemoff said.

In The Shadow Of A Cloud is Yelena Eckemoff’s 11th recording — and the most jazz-worthy score of her early life in Russia.

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