Peter Bacon

Peter Bacon for London Jazz News

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The Russian classical pianist, Yelena Eckemoff, now living in the U.S. and dedicating herself to jazz continues to forge a singular musical path – and a generous one, too, this being her 10th jazz release since 2010.

I have always found her approach intriguing because although she surrounds herself with jazz musicians and improvises herself, her way of structuring her music and indeed her own playing sounds much more aligned – at least to my under-educated ears – with classical composition than the Afro-American jazz conventions.

There has been increasing assuredness in this approach over those ten releases but its development is not quite so easy to articulate or illustrate because none has shared exactly the same personnel. The earlier albums were trio affairs, latterly the groups have expanded and diversified in instrumentation. Eckemoff’s choice in musicians is impeccable: Mats Vinding and Peter Erskine on her first jazz disc, Cold Sun, for example, with subsequent line-ups including, from this side of the pond, Morten Lund, Mats Eilertsen, Arild Andersen, Tore Brunborg and Jon Christensen; from the U.S. Billy Hart, Mark Turner and Joe Locke.

Last year’s Leaving Everything Behind was a deeply moving collection of pieces many of which were linked by loss – of childhood, of family, of homeland – all eloquently explored by Eckemoff with an all-American band of Mark Feldman on violin, Ben Street on double bass and Billy Hart on drums.

Blooming Tall Phlox – it’s hard to tell whether there is a joke there, whether the phlox are “bloody tall” as well as in bloom – changes the personnel again. It was recorded in 2013 in Finland with Eckemoff on piano and compositions, Verneri Pohjola on trumpet and flugehorn, Panu Savolainen on vibraphone, Antti Lötjönen on double bass and Olavi Louhivuori on drums and percussion.

There are two discs, the first subtitled Summer Smells, the latter Winter Smells, and the contrast between them is subtle but discernible.

Eckemoff always brings strong stories and imagery to amplify her instrumental music by including her own poems and paintings. And again, these poems link the world around her – flowers, smells, domestic life experiences – with memories, of an old world, a previous life, so giving them history along with the currency, and a certain poignancy is thus never far beneath the surface.

Titles include Smoke From The House Chimneys In Frosty Air, Pine Needles Warmed By The Sun, Talks Over Hot Tea, Grandpa Lera’s Bookcase, Aunt Galya’s Perfume and Apples Laid Out On The Floor. The youthful Finns help the pianist/composer to realise these scenarios in sound, the music flowing in an out of the solos, the rhythms ebbing and flowing from laid back to restrained intensity. Some of it feels programmatic – the chilly tinkle of vibes and piano underneath the flugelhorn perfectly evokes smoke from chimneys and frosty air – while at other times Eckemoff is more oblique in her references.

A thoroughly absorbing couple of hours of beautifully conceived and sensitively played music. Do check this out and also Yelena Eckemoff’s back catalogue.

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Peter Bacon for Jazz Breakfast

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This is the Russian-born, U.S.-resident pianist and composer’s ninth jazz release since 2009. And its follow-up is all ready to go early in 2017. So, prolific Yelena Eckemoff certainly is! You might expect therefore that she would make “quick” music, needing little preparation, perhaps loads of live performances… But you’d be wrong. Her albums, with a variety of top-notch players, sound meticulously planned and produced. And their quality is consistently high.

This one has a regular collaborator, Billy Hart, who followed on from Peter Erskine as her U.S. drummer of choice, and he is joined by two new faces on Eckemoff recordings, Mark Feldman on violin and Ben Street on double bass.

Feldman is a particularly inspired choice. While Yelena’s background is in classical music, Mark’s is in both country and classical music, and so they both bring to their jazz and improvisation vast, broader musical hinterlands that feed into their creations. And Eckemoff’s music truly merits that expanded horizon. There are strong jazz elements in it – lithe rhythms, a loosening of the imagination, a flexing of the improvisational wings – but at the same time it avoids many jazz conventions and feels completely free of jazz cliche. That is surely down to the writing which is more classical in its impressionism and sense of development; you won’t find any head/solos/head stuff here! Yet its openess, its flexibility and freedom is definitely true to jazz.

Yelena Eckemoff’s marvelous generosity of spirit can be felt most deeply in her music, but it also extends beyond its sounds – she has taken to including a written poem for each of her compositions and her paintings adorn the covers. The poems are especially helpful in providing ways into the music for the listener: images, thoughts and especially feelings which are there in heightened form in the melodies, harmonies and rhythms of the band’s performance.

The themes Yelena explores on Leaving Everything Behind are deeply personal and in many cases deeply sad – the loss of childhood, leaving one’s family behind, the bittersweet Tears Of Tenderness that flow as one confronts one’s parents frailties – but the music is never maudlin, rather it embraces the richness of these feelings in spite of their sadness. And there are lighter touches too in the form of erupting volcanoes, Mushroom Rain and the train which linked her home in Moscow to that of her grandparents in Tambov – the Love Train as she recalls it.

A deeply enriching album.

Peter Bacon for The Jazz Breakfast

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This is the sixth album by the classical pianist from the Soviet Union who moved to the U.S. in the ’90s and turned to jazz. Down the years Yelena has always had a fine ear for collaborators – in her trio they have included Peter Erskine, Marilyn Mazur and Arild Andersen – and this time around she expands the personnel to a quintet.

And what a quintet! Mark Turner is on tenor saxophone, Joe Locke on vibraphone, George Mraz on double bass and Billy Hart on drums.

All the music is composed by Eckemoff and she has started to link the tunes to poems in the CD booklet. As she explained to me: “since my music is based on my feelings, thoughts, experiences and imagination… I think reading these notes helps to understand what my music is about and what I try to express.”

The poems are as evocative as the music. Take Reminiscence, for example. Yelena sets a mood with her introductory chords, and Turner and Locke take it up. The melody and harmony feel simultaneously of a past era – perhaps a Romantic classical one? – and also thoroughly present. And the poem begins seemingly in the present with a description of a room but soon becomes a memory from Yelena’s childhood.

The way in which the pianist and composer feeds her classical music heritage into a modern jazz situation is fascinating, and it gives her compositions a really solid structure, while also expanding the musical elements the soloists have to work with. Written interludes come and go within the freer sections, with the transitions marvelously smooth. I suspect it moves these jazz players slightly out of their comfort zone, and the results really do sound most original.

Each piece has a single word title – Inspiration, Exuberance, Pep, Affection, Tranquility, Imagination… The one that I think best exemplifies Yelena Eckemoff’s music is the final one, which also forms part of the album title: Radiance. The poem that accompanies it is a light and dark tale of a moth attracted to the danger of a night light, but it then becomes about the coming of dawn, the moth replaced by a butterfly. The music has a steady development to it, with both dark and light sonorities.

Like the rest of the album, it has an internal gleam which draws – and warms – both the players and the listener.

  1. Festive 50 – Numbers 40-31 | thejazzbreakfast #36
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Peter Bacon for Jazz Breakfast

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Born in Moscow and a classical pianist from her early years, Yelena Eckemoff trained under [teacher of] Evgeny Kissin and ended up teaching piano and giving concerts. But even then, she was also attending courses at the Moscow Jazz Studio and playing in an experimental jazz-rock band while also composing music both for herself and others. Having moved with her family to the US in 1991, she has been able to develop her career as a teacher, as a classical composer and player – she has an on-going project setting Psalms to music – and, increasing, as a jazz player. In 2010 alone she released three piano trio records, including Cold Sun, with Mads Vinding on bass and Peter Erskine on drums, reviewed here. Now she has a new trio album, recorded this time in Copenhagen with Mats Eilertsen on double bass and Marilyn Mazur on drums and percussion. It’s a magical mix. Yelena Eckemoff writes music which is rich in broader atmospheres than is usual in jazz. She moves easily between composed music with something of a modern, impressionistic classical feel to it, and grooves which are thoroughly jazzy, and there is also that feeling of freshness that comes from different cultures mixing together in the music, just as they do in the musician. Mazur, with her broad palette of sounds is particularly useful, therefore, sometimes playing standard kit, sometimes adding all kinds of exotic percussion sounds, often mixing the two. And Eilertsen, too, with his evocative arco playing as well as original take on plucked walking bass, has just the wide-ranging arsenal of bass sounds Eckemoff needs. Cold Sun had a really icy feel to it, whereas Forget-Me-Not feels springlike – although that may be because as I listen to it the daffodils wave in the breeze outside my window. And spring can be something of a struggle as well as a time of new life – a complex season! The long opener, Resurrection Of A Dream, does indeed start dreamily and semi-connected, as if slowly coming to life. It eventually settles into a quiet driver and sets up the rest of the album really well. Eilertsen is particularly expressive in Maybe before Eckemoff and Mazur enter with a mood not dissimilar to that created by Eilertsen’s other bandleader, Tord Gustavsen. Sand-Glass has a dancing feel to it, somewhere near tango but perhaps much farther north in origin, while Five has all three players intertwining their instruments in an increasingly complex and knotty way, while still maintaining a stately and unified emotional progression. Schubert’s Code builds up a real intensity before shimmering into stillness with a Mazur cymbal and regrouping in free time, while the closer, Welcome A New Day, has a gorgeously subtle underlying swing to it, a kind of cushion on which all three can interact freely, and ends up in a place which you really didn’t expect: dramatic, quite dark, but perfectly logically reached. This is music with that quiet depth that comes from a really rich musical hinterland. Yelena Eckemoff creates a musical environment in which the possibilities for collaborators must seem endless, and all three musicians dig deep to do the music justice. A very fine album indeed.

 

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Peter Bacon for The Jazz Breakfast

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On a day when the sky is blue and crisp and the sun is reflecting off snow, what better album to listen to than this piano trio disc by the Russian, now US resident, Yelena Eckemoff with Danish bassist Mads Vinding and American drummer Peter Erskine.

Is suppose it was Erskine’s name that first drew me to this disc. He is such a versatile percussionist, one minute driving a big band, the next grooving in the Diana Krall band, and then, especially when left to his own devices, as on his ECM trio discs with John Taylor and Palle Danielsson, a highly melodic colourist, minimal and letting the silences speak as strongly as the cymbal splashes.

There is an amazing moment nearly five minutes into the second track here, After Blizzard, when Eckemoff and Erskine sound like splintering, shattering, skidding and tinkling ice, yet not in a twee, delicate way but in a strong and slightly scary, elemental way.

This long disc (over 70 minutes) is filled with such amazing moments, as Eckemoff brings her strong classical background and her impeccable technique to bear upon highly creative, and sometimes quite jazzy, compositions. It sounds like a lot of the music is through composed but there is clearly still instinctive improvisation going on all the way through, too.

Vinding is one of those Scandinavian bassists who seems to channel folk melodies along with a muscular and musical tone and highly adaptive style.

The titles of the pieces say a lot about the music: Silence, Stubborn, Freezing Point, Snow Bliss, White Magic, but in amongst these white vistas there are also Scents of Christmas and Romance by the Fireplace.

I have been reading The True Deceiver, by Tove Jansson, the Finnish writer and philosopher best known for her Moomin stories for children, and this disc feels like the musical equivalent of Jansson’s prose: crisp, clean, concise in expression, full of space, and suggesting even greater depths of wisdom, and subtlety both of emotion and thought, beneath the surface.

 

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