Tyran Grillo

Tyran Grillo for All About Jazz

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A garden is one of civilization’s gentlest fictions, a piece of earth coaxed into pattern while still permitted to breathe beyond the gardener’s intentions. That tension between cultivation and freedom animates Rosendals Garden, pianist and composer Yelena Eckemoff’s 23rd album since 2010. The project, animated as always by a vivid personal concept, distills her travels through Sweden into something more elusive than an itinerary. Each destination enters as a physical place and emerges as a chamber of consciousness, steeped in Scandinavian light and the long afterimage of history.

Svante Henryson and Morgan Ågren are ideal companions for this unstable terrain. Henryson alternates between cello and acoustic or electric bass, changing the emotional temperature through shifts in grain. Ågren’s drums and percussion supply momentum while quietly disturbing the ground beneath it. Their improvisations enter Eckemoff’s written forms so naturally that authorship comes into question. All the while, her restrained synthesizer accents send narrow streams of color through the acoustic fabric.

Buried Rooms

Stockholm’s Old Town sharpened Eckemoff’s sense that modern life merely passes over a history still dreaming beneath the cobblestones. “Gamla Stan” turns that intuition into musical form. Distant arpeggios illuminate closed rooms, while Henryson’s bow gives the buried past a body. “Ruins of Älvsborg” descends deeper. The titular fortress stands enclosed within a former sugar mill, its ancient stones sheltered by later walls. Medieval inflections sway inside a rough modern shell, and Eckemoff’s gentle soloing carries a banked fire that Henryson answers with gritty cello. Each era becomes the room in which another wanders at night.

That historical consciousness reaches its stateliest form in “Gripsholm Castle.” Duke Karl’s Chamber held royal prisoners and witnessed children being born; the preserved 18th-century theater harbors another haunting. Eckemoff renders its imagined figures one dance at a time without softening what the rooms have witnessed.

Private Museums

“ABBA Museum” enters through a public attraction before turning inward. Eckemoff’s visit recalled her Moscow youth, when bootleg recordings and an annual television broadcast offered rare access to Western pop. ABBA’s melodic intelligence helped loosen the boundaries of her classical training. Buoyant hooks revisit that early breach in the wall, while Henryson’s arco lines breathe freely over a robust groove.

“Country Orchard Café” discovers an archive inside a stranger. At a village café among apple trees, Eckemoff noticed an elderly woman sitting alone, smiling inwardly at some private happiness. Malleted drums lend delicate playfulness to the scene, and pointillist piano phrases arrange bright details around an unknowable center. The woman’s smile becomes a sealed book that no longer needs to be opened.

Taste serves as curator in “Skansen Park,” where gooseberries and currants carried Eckemoff back to childhood visits with her grandparents. Her displaced left hand creates a breathless equilibrium, while Henryson and Ågren build rhythmic dwellings only to dismantle them. “Sunrise in Rimbo” widens this private archaeology. Eckemoff’s crystalline melody peels layers from the present until the new day reveals the fossil of every morning before it. Even the freshest hour arrives covered in fingerprints.

Cultivated Earth

The title track inhabits nature brought into human syntax. Lush chords unfurl across Henryson’s fluid bass as Ågren’s cymbals scatter radiance. When Eckemoff’s piano takes flight, the rhythm section follows as a second consciousness. Yet the deeper subject may be the bouquet: beauty severed from its source, becoming memory as soon as it is gathered. The music belongs to her precisely because she cannot keep it.

“Storanden Nature Reserve” offers the counterargument, as Eckemoff feels tolerated rather than welcomed within a world complete without her. The arrangement proceeds cautiously, each measure reconsidering its right to advance. Nature retains its sovereign indifference. If Rosendals invites admiration for what human hands have arranged, Storanden questions the assumption that anyone was invited.

Crossings

“Öresund Bridge” transforms a difficult drive into an exhilarating one. The trio seizes the music at the wrist, propelling it from fog into sunlight as rhythm becomes appetite. The bridge connects two shores, though Eckemoff is drawn to the impossible country suspended between them, where the traveler has already left but has not yet arrived.

“Strandvägen Pier” approaches that threshold from stillness. Flowing piano lines emerge from the crowded marina and gather cinematic breadth, carrying Eckemoff’s longing to disappear toward an unknown shore. The pier becomes a sentence ending in an unwritten verb. Departure begins inside the mind before the body moves.

Across Rosendals Garden, places become methods of remembering, and memory becomes a contested form of possession. Cultivation determines what receives light, while every choice creates its patch of darkness. Beneath the flowers lies the old violence of naming, the presumption that a place becomes ours once we give it shape in language. Eckemoff leaves a quieter question: What have we mistaken for our own memory merely because we inherited the room in which it echoes? She places a seed there and permits its roots to interrogate the foundations.

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Tyran Grillo for All About Jazz

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Pianist Yelena Eckemoff, a melodic marvel whose gift for atmosphere has been apparent from the beginning, has never felt comfortable settling into a single definition. Rooted in classicalism yet never bound by its strictures, she has carved a singular path through the world of jazz, guided by a restless imagination that treats genre as porous terrain rather than fenced land. Her music arises from a place where labels dissolve and instinct takes over, a place recognized immediately by tender-minded musicians who understand that sound is older than taxonomy. In this sense, Lions stands as one of her most unbound creations to date. Though released in 2015, it still oversees the pride with variegated authority, a work whose presence has not dimmed with time but ripened.

Alongside bassist Arild Andersen and drummer Billy Hart, whose contributions never overshadow but instead honor the material, Eckemoff leads us into a landscape that unfolds patiently, deliberately. The journey begins with the richly hued title track, a nine-and-a-half-minute declaration that establishes the album’s domain. We are ushered into a world painted in deep oranges, burnished yellows, and sun-scorched golds, colors that seem to radiate from the piano itself. Moving from one scene to the next, the music behaves as a sonic film, its narrative carried by texture and motion. Here, human intention and animal instinct coexist, sharing the same dust, the same heat, the same unspoken laws that govern survival and wonder.

Among these unfolding mysteries, few are as beguiling as the track that follows. “Migrating Birds” reveals Eckemoff’s adventurous spirit, one that knows precisely when to surge forward and when to pull back into silence. In moments of restraint, she opens vast savanna for Hart to roam freely, his rhythmic commentary scattered with fresh detail and fertile gatherings. Andersen anchors the music with a sense of gravity, reminding us of the earth beneath our feet and the ancient pull that keeps flight from becoming escape. Elsewhere in this expansive two- disc travel diary, moments of enchantment continue to surface. “Stars Bathing in Shallow Waters” shimmers with descriptive lucidity, its light refracted through gentle currents, while other passages feel etched by wind and time rather than sound alone.

As expected, and as nature itself insists, not everything here is cloaked in comfort. Threaded through these lyrical visions is Eckemoff’s clear-eyed contemplation of a lion’s life in all its visceral immediacy. There is the unbridled joy of “Young at Play,” the tightening focus of “Pursuit,” the stark trials of “Surviving the Famine,” and the communal rite of passage marked by “Joining the Pride.” Each piece captures a distinct phase of becoming, not as a metaphor alone but as a lived experience translated into sound. The latter track’s grounded vamp sparks especially vital playing from all three musicians, moving effortlessly from abstraction into swing, from uncertainty into cohesion, always knowing where the ground lies.

If one composition embodies the album spirit in its fullest form, it is “Sphinx.” Seated in quiet command, it understands that authority is earned through endurance rather than spectacle. Its sense of stillness carries the weight of long memory, of battles faced and lessons absorbed. Andersen’s solo work here is profoundly evocative, unfolding against Eckemoff and Hart’s subtle colorations with a sense of earned grace. What emerges is a feeling of calm accomplishment that feels both personal and archetypal. The music breathes with possibility despite its age, gazing forward without abandoning the ground already claimed. Close behind is “Simple Pleasures,” a piece of introspective honesty in which Eckemoff’s piano seems to rise from the soil itself, each note emerging patiently until the full instrument stands revealed. Its beauty is quiet yet astonishing, the sort that lingers long after sound fades.

Lions closes with “Ode to Innocence” and “Ode to Strength,” a paired benediction that distills the album’s deeper truths. From airy lyricism to modal finality, these pieces reflect what it means to endure within an unrelenting world. They speak of resilience without bravado, of grace sharpened by necessity. With hope coursing through its veins and skill resting in its claws, this music continues its measured walk across open land, carrying memory, instinct, and vision together. It does not seek dominion so much as belonging, and in doing so, it claims a quiet majesty that refuses to fade. 

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Tyran Grillo for All About Jazz

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Yelena Eckemoff has long composed as though mapping weather rather than terrain, tracing pressure systems of mood and atmosphere while leaving strict pulse to others. Her music often moves with purpose yet refuses the easy certainties of groove, circling rhythm instead of kneeling before it. This has never felt like abstinence or austerity. It feels more like rhetoric. She addresses rhythm, engages with it, but rarely submits for the mere sake of doing so. That is why “Pilgrims,” the opening track of Scenes from the Dark Ages, arrives as a minor shock. The door is not merely opened. It is unbarred. A groove steps forward plainly and without disguise, sturdy as a traveling cloak, and it carries no whiff of irony. Eckemoff allows it to walk in under its own banner, and the welcome is sincere.

From that moment, the album establishes itself as less a suite of scenes than a guided passage through a contested era. Eckemoff does not romanticize the medieval world so much as occupy it, peopling it with craft, labor, belief, and unease. She has assembled a company fit for such an undertaking. Riccardo Bertuzzi on electric guitar, Carlo Nicita on soprano, alto, and bass flutes, Eloisa Manera on acoustic and electric violin, Riccardo Oliva on electric bass, and Trilok Gurtu on drums and percussion form a court of specialists rather than a band in the modern sense. Each plays a role, each knows when to speak and when to stand at attention. Eckemoff herself broadens her instrumental reach with organ, clavichord, celesta, and synthesizers, choosing timbres that feel architectural by choice.

Nicita emerges as the album’s chief chronicler. This two-disc work fulfills Eckemoff’s stated aim of crafting a “Medieval Symphony,” and his flutes function as illuminated script, curling through the margins and occasionally stealing the eye from the main text. He plays with a traveler’s curiosity and a monk’s discipline, decorating the music without gilding it. In “Village Tavern” and “Masquerade,” he leans into playfulness, letting melody drink, stumble, and recover. Manera’s violin takes particular advantage of the latter, trading courtly grace for masked mischief. In “Chivalry,” Nicita restrains himself, allowing space to do its quiet moral work. His most elaborate statement comes in “Quest,” where his lines twist and turn with scholarly confidence, ornamented yet purposeful, never lost in their own calligraphy.

If Nicita provides the ink, Bertuzzi supplies the iron. His guitar work feels less concerned with flourish than with placement. He understands weight. In “Legends of the Castle” and “Tournament,” his tone smolders rather than burns, a controlled fire banked for long nights. In “From the Life of the Lords,” he allows abstraction to creep in, blurring rank and ritual with a knowing restraint. He is present without presiding, audible without dominance. It is a rare and valuable instinct, and he exercises it with admirable clarity.

The album’s great achievement lies in its refusal to varnish history. Beneath the pageantry and processions runs a current of strain and severity. “Spell-Bound Fortress” strikes with punitive force, Bertuzzi’s guitar landing hard and often while Gurtu’s cymbals scatter sparks across the mix. “Adventures of a Knight” and “Battle” reject triumphalism. Their momentum carries anxiety rather than glory, forward motion fueled by obligation instead of desire. These are not songs of victory but of survival. Even moments of apparent refuge resist comfort. “Monks in Scriptorium” and “Cathedral” glow with reverence, yet their stillness feels earned rather than granted. Prayer here is work. Silence is labor. Faith offers structure but no guarantees.

What Eckemoff ultimately constructs is not a museum of medieval tropes but a living settlement, complete with its pleasures, violences, devotions, and doubts. The record breathes with human traffic. You hear footsteps in corridors, arguments in chambers, coins changing hands, and candles being lit with care because there may not be another. 

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Tyran Grillo for All About Jazz

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With Romance of the Moon, Yelena Eckemoff descends further into the symbolic night, carrying Federico García Lorca’s poetry as a living grammar in her heart. This suite of 13 compositions does not illustrate the poems so much as converse with them, answering their obsessions with music that listens as intently as it speaks. Lorca’s moons, bells, animals, and silences find a second life here, translated into pulse and pause.

Eckemoff assembles a band whose collective intelligence feels instinctive rather than arranged. Guitarist Riccardo Bertuzzi, bassist Luca Bulgarelli, drummer Stefano Bagnoli, and the luminous presence of Paolo Fresu on trumpet and flugelhorn form an ensemble that moves with shared intention. Fresu, in particular, becomes a guiding spirit throughout the album. His tone carries both fragility and resolve, shaping melodies with a sensitivity that recalls Lorca’s gift for saying the unbearable with elegance. On the opening “Bells,” his voice emerges from a lattice of linear motion and reverberant shadows, aided by subtle multitracking that suggests echoes chasing themselves through stone corridors. By the time “August” arrives, a muted trumpet sets off on a quiet pilgrimage, each phrase marked by distance and heat, by the ache of time passing.

Across the album, Fresu proves essential to its emotional architecture. “Ballad of the Sea Water” glows with a restrained lyricism, its surface calm concealing undercurrents of longing. “Memento” unfolds with a cinematic patience, each note placed as if it were a memory choosing when to surface. Even when he retreats into silence, his earlier phrases linger, shaping the air the band moves through. Stefano Amerio’s mixing plays a crucial role here, granting the music space to breathe and allowing its textures to rise with startling immediacy.

The rhythm section provides a quietly formidable foundation. Bulgarelli and Bagnoli never impose momentum but cultivate it, giving pieces like “Diamond” and “Adventurous Snail” a sense of narrative inevitability. Their interplay feels programmatic in the best sense, attentive to detail and alert to the versification beneath the structure. They anchor the album without dulling its edges, offering gravity without weight.

When Fresu steps aside, Bertuzzi’s electric guitar assumes the melodic center with grace and authority. His first statement, aptly titled “Guitar,” feels like an invocation. On the title track, he introduces a finely calibrated swing that nudges the music forward without breaking its spell. His dialoguing with Eckemoff’s Fender Rhodes is one of the album’s great pleasures, a meeting of currents that generates sparks. In these moments, the music feels especially alive, charged by mutual provocation.

Eckemoff herself remains the album’s quiet architect. Her harmonic imagination continues to expand, guided by curiosity rather than habit. On “Barren Orange Tree,” her touch is spare and luminous, each chord allowed its full resonance. Elsewhere, her compositional acuity reveals itself in concise vignettes that linger far beyond their duration. “About Cats” carries a mournful wit, while “Thirsty for New Songs” wears its irony lightly, aware of desire’s endless appetite. Her Fender Rhodes work on pieces like “Old Lizard” radiates invention and delight, the lines coiling and uncoiling with playful authority. There is joy here, but it is a knowing joy, one that has passed through shadow and returned with a smile that understands what it has seen.

In honoring Lorca, Eckemoff avoids reverence in favor of intimacy. This is music that shares his fascination with the night, with symbols that refuse to settle into single meanings. As the album draws to a close, the listener is left in a suspended darkness where sound thins into suggestion. The moon remains, watchful and unresolved. Silence gathers its nerve. Somewhere between the last chord, poetry keeps breathing, and the night writes its final line in the traces that remain.

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Tyran Grillo for All About Jazz

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After a run of emotionally expansive albums, pianist and composer Yelena Eckemoff once again pivots without losing her center. Reinvention has become part of her artistic language, and here it arrives with a new cast and a story told in patient detail. Kirk Knuffke appears on cornet, Masaru Koga on a flute modified with a shakuhachi mouthpiece, Ben Street on double and electric bass, and Eric Harland on drums and percussion. Together they inhabit a two-disc narrative that follows the quiet days of Tim, a retired orchestral trumpet player, and his only companion, Spark the fish. Solitude is not treated as absence, but as a space in which sound can breathe, wander, and eventually open toward something unexpected.

From the first moments, the album draws the listener into the contemplative world suggested by Eckemoff’s own cover art. Tim stands at a threshold, looking backward and forward at once, while the small life beside him offers a focus he did not know he needed. This inward gaze shapes the music’s pacing and tone. Each piece feels carefully observed, attentive to small shifts of feeling, allowing the story to unfold without haste. The result is a palette of colors that remains vivid even at its most restrained.

Knuffke’s cornet gives voice to Tim with a clarity that carries both discipline and vulnerability. His sound cuts cleanly through the ensemble without ever dominating it. In pieces like “First Evening at Home,” he speaks with a quiet resolve, as though testing the air of an unfamiliar room. Elsewhere, his lines carry the weight of memory without sinking under it, suggesting a man learning how to listen again. Eckemoff places him in settings that feel deliberately chosen, each one offering a different emotional contour for reflection.

The inclusion of Koga proves inspired. His playing introduces a visceral presence, grounding the narrative while pushing it into unfamiliar terrain. Spark is no novelty here. The fish becomes a presence, rendered through a tone that carries both fragility and calm authority. On “Breakfast for Two” and the title track, Koga’s phrasing moves with fluid assurance, shaping the album’s very spirit. Eckemoff enhances this world further with celeste and Fender Rhodes on “Man and His Fish,” creating a gently shimmering environment that feels suspended between interior thought and outward wonder.

Ben Street remains an anchor throughout, adjusting instinctively to each turn in the story. His bass work listens as much as it speaks, offering warmth and gravity when the music darkens, as on “In Hospital,” and lifting the ensemble with a lighter touch on moments of affirmation like “Song for Spark.” Harland, ever alert to nuance, brings motion and tension where needed. His drumming adds urgency to the album’s more dramatic passages, particularly “Accident,” while allowing space to settle into reflection on pieces such as “Into the Wild.” His contributions never draw attention away from the narrative, yet they subtly guide its emotional flow.

The second disc widens the frame while remaining faithful to the album’s inward focus. “Life in the Pond” glimmers with surface detail, suggesting a world that feels complete within its own small boundaries. As the music progresses, the ensemble finds new modes of interaction, less concerned with statement and more attuned to shared presence. “Survivor” carries a gentle firmness, a recognition that endurance does not always announce itself loudly. By the time the album reaches its closing chapter, the musicians sound fully at ease within this shared solitude.

“Dreaming Together” closes the journey. Tim and Spark remain apart from the rush of the outside world, yet they are no longer defined by what they lack. Their connection, modest and profound, offers a form of belonging that resists explanation. Eckemoff leaves us with a rare kind of consolation, one shaped by long hours of listening and looking inward. It is the comfort of learning that even in a quiet life, meaning can surface, settle, and stay. 

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Tyran Grillo for All About Jazz

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Colors is less a suite than a life in motion, and in this solo performance at KITO Bremen, Yelena Eckemoff allows that life to unfold with an unguarded clarity that feels both intimate and elemental. What began as a duo project with drummer Manu Katché becomes, through circumstance and choice, a meditation stripped of all counterweights. When Katché was unable to appear, Eckemoff declined substitution, understanding that absence itself could become a generative force. Nearly 15 years since her last solo performance, she stepped onto the stage alone, trusting the piano to bear the full weight of time.

The original album sequence is preserved, and with it the implicit arc from first breath to final silence. Yet in this setting, the colors feel less illustrative and more existential, like stations along an interior pilgrimage. The journey begins with “White,” not as purity but as arrival. Its hesitant openness mirrors the fragile awareness of birth, the moment before memory, when everything is possible and nothing is known. Eckemoff’s touch lingers in suspended spaces, allowing uncertainty to glow rather than recede. The chromatic inflections suggest that even at the beginning, nothing is truly blank.

From there, the music advances through the early calibrations of being. “Pink” carries the gentle astonishment of learning how to stand within the world, while “Orange” brims with kinetic excess, the joyful disorder of a self discovering its own momentum. These pieces do not rush forward; they accumulate experience the way a child does, through repetition, friction, and sudden leaps of insight. Eckemoff plays them with a looseness that feels earned.

As the palette deepens, so does the inquiry. The middle movements mark the long apprenticeship of identity, where desire, curiosity, and resistance begin to braid together. In this live rendering, pairings take on renewed meaning. “Violet” and “Indigo” unfold as twin forces of devotion and defiance, suggesting that love often teaches rebellion and that rebellion, in turn, breeds its own strange loyalties. “Blue” and “Red” press against one another, exposing the volatility of intimacy, how tenderness and urgency can share the same pulse. Eckemoff’s phrasing here feels conversational, even argumentative, as though the piano were thinking aloud.

Maturity arrives not as resolution but as depth. “Brown” and “Bordeaux” settle into a richer gravity, their warmth tinged with knowledge gained through endurance. These are the colors of weathered choices and sustained commitments, of pleasures that no longer need announcement. Eckemoff allows space for resonance to linger, trusting silence to complete the thought. It is music that understands the dignity of having lived long enough to listen differently.

Among the most affecting passages are “Yellow” and “Aquamarine,” where form loosens without dissolving. These pieces hover between structure and release, their brightness tempered by restraint. They suggest moments of clarity that arrive late, when one no longer confuses intensity with meaning. The notes disperse gently, like insights that refuse to be held but still leave their trace.

The cycle closes with “Grey” and “Black,” and here the performance reaches its quiet culmination. There is no dramatization of endings, no insistence on finality. Instead, Eckemoff lets the music recede with humility, as though regret itself has grown tired and stepped aside. What remains is not loss but gratitude, a calm recognition of life as something received rather than mastered. The final tones fade without resistance, completing the arc with acceptance.

For long-time listeners, this performance offers a distilled vision of Eckemoff’s art, one that favors presence over display. Stripped of accompaniment, Colors becomes a solitary reflection on time, change, and the courage required to move through both. It is a reminder that every life, like every color, is shaped as much by what surrounds it as by what it contains.

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Tyran Grillo for All About Jazz

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To feel estranged from one’s own mind is among the quiet terrors of modern life. It is this condition, ancient yet urgently contemporary, that Yelena Eckemoff confronts on I Am a Stranger in This World, a double album that treats the Psalms of David not as scripture to be recited but as psychic terrain to be crossed. Following 2018’s Better Than Gold and Silver (L&H Productions), Eckemoff returns to these texts with renewed gravity. Where the earlier album relied on vocalists to carry the charge, this one trusts the wordless eloquence of sound, as though language itself has reached a breaking point and must give way to vibration, breath, and pulse.

The core quintet remains intact, with trumpeter Ralph Alessi, guitarist Ben Monder, violinist Christian Howes, bassist Drew Gress, and drummer Joey Baron once again inhabiting Eckemoff’s meticulously shaped world. The additions of guitarist Adam Rogers and drummer Nasheet Waits expand the palette without diluting its focus. Rather than creating density for its own sake, the ensemble behaves like a nervous system, responsive and alert, each player sensitive to the slightest shift in pressure. There is no hierarchy here, only shared intention. Even at its most layered, the music breathes.

That sensitivity is evident from the outset. “As Chaff Before the Wind” sets the album’s emotional compass, its grounded momentum carrying a sense of impermanence rather than triumph. The groove moves forward, yet something inside it frays. This tension becomes a recurring motif, the push between motion and unease that defines dissociation itself. Eckemoff’s writing never resolves this conflict too quickly. She allows ambiguity to remain, trusting the listener to inhabit it rather than flee from it.

As the album unfolds, it becomes clear that this is not a collection of individual statements but a slow immersion. In pieces like “Lighten My Eyes” and “Make Hate to Help Me,” solos emerge as private reckonings, each voice circling the same unanswerable questions. Elsewhere, the music turns inward through atmosphere rather than articulation. “Truth in His Heart” and “Like Rain Upon the Mown Grass” unfold with hushed luminosity, their resonance suggesting moments when anxiety loosens its grip through gentleness.

Psalm 119 becomes a focal point for the album’s darker introspection. The title track moves with restrained sorrow, its minor hues carried by the aching solidarity of arco bass and violin. Here, the feeling of estrangement becomes almost physical, as if the music itself were searching for footing. “At Midnight I Will Rise” intensifies this unease. Eckemoff’s use of Fender Rhodes introduces a restless circularity, a mind pacing itself in the early hours, unable to settle. Though the rhythm swings, it never relaxes. The groove feels suspended, caught between vigilance and fatigue.

The second disc does not abandon this inner world but approaches it with firmer resolve. The propulsion of “Keep Not Your Silence” and “I Shall Not Want” suggests motion with purpose, a decision to move through fear rather than remain pinned beneath it. In both, Alessi’s trumpet gleams without dominating. “The Wine of Astonishment” stands among Eckemoff’s most profound achievements, its shifting textures engaging with disorientation itself, not as an enemy to be defeated but as a truth to be faced honestly.

The album’s culmination, “Every Beast of the Field,” gathers all that has come before without summarizing it. Stretching across nearly 19 minutes, it unfolds like a life in sound, attentive to beginnings, reckonings, and eventual release. Violin and trumpet emerge as narrative voices in dialogue, tracing a path shaped by loss, wonder, and acceptance. The music does not strain toward transcendence. It earns its calm through patience, through listening, through the courage to remain present until presence becomes peace.

In the end, I Am a Stranger in This World offers no easy consolations. Its healing lies elsewhere, in its refusal to rush the listener toward answers. Eckemoff understands that music cannot erase dissociation or silence anxiety outright. What it can do is create a place where fractured thoughts may gather without shame, where unease can be held long enough to soften, where meaning is not imposed but discovered. The album closes with a widening horizon, one that suggests that even in estrangement, there remains a deeper belonging.

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Tyran Grillo for All About Jazz

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There is something quietly revelatory about music that chooses the night not as a backdrop but as a mode of thought. With Nocturnal Animals, pianist and composer Yelena Eckemoff enters this liminal terrain with rare attentiveness, offering an album that does not describe animals so much as think alongside them. This is music that crouches, listens, waits, and then moves with purpose.

For this journey, Eckemoff has assembled a dream team within a discography already rich with inspired collaborations. Arild Andersen on bass, joined by the complementary forces of Jon Christensen and Thomas Strønen on drums, forms an ensemble that breathes as a single organism. Together, they bring forth a robust concept album. Beginning with “Cicada,” Eckemoff introduces a world under the cover of night where creatures stir, hidden thoughts gain voice, and melodic impulses unfold in the moon’s patient glow. The piece hums with latent energy, as though sound itself were emerging from bark, soil, and warm air. With fortitude, Eckemoff opens a window onto a landscape of vast slumber and even vaster potential.

Andersen’s bass assumes a central role early on, establishing a vital red thread that winds through the album with quiet authority. It flexes its wings in “Bat,” where motion feels guided by echo and intuition rather than sight. It lumbers with deliberate weight in “Grizzly Bear,” carrying a sense of ancient balance between power and restraint. In “Wolf,” it asserts itself with an unspoken command, not through aggression, but through presence. Around this anchoring force, the twin drummers shade and contour the music with remarkable sensitivity. Christensen and Strønen do not merely keep time. They add black and white charcoal to Eckemoff’s pastel configurations, sketching movement, texture, and negative space in evocative standouts such as “Walkingstick,” “Fox,” and “Rattlesnake.” Their interplay suggests shifting terrain and alert awareness, the sound of the ground listening back.

As the album progresses, Nocturnal Animals reveals an increasingly playful intelligence. The latter half leans into whimsy without surrendering depth. In the light-footed inflections of “Hedgehog” and the gentle, measured motion of “Sea Turtle,” Eckemoff delights in her gift for storytelling without words. These pieces feel less like portraits and more like encounters, moments of shared time rather than observation from a distance. Between them lie some of the album’s most memorable turns. The chromatic abstractions of “Toad” unfold with an odd tenderness, their contours bending expectation into something quietly moving. “Firefly,” built from careful pointillism, gathers small blips of light into a field of recollection, touching on the half-remembered freedom of childhood nights. “Scorpion” stands as another masterstroke, transforming what is typically framed as a poisonous threat into an off-kilter lullaby, unsettling and soothing in equal measure.

What ultimately distinguishes Nocturnal Animals is its refusal to impose meaning where presence will suffice. Eckemoff allows each piece to exist as a parallel consciousness, reminding the listener that human thought is only one among many ways of inhabiting the world. The album ends not with resolution but with a sense of withdrawal, as though the creatures have returned to their dens, nests, and hovels, leaving us with the imprint of their passage.

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Tyran Grillo for All About Jazz

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There is a particular kind of courage in naming an album Colors. Not because the idea is simple, but because it is vast. To invoke color is to invoke perception itself, the mind’s habit of sorting the world into tones and meanings, the heart’s insistence that even the subtlest shade has a moral weight. With Colors, pianist and composer Yelena Eckemoff steps into that vastness alongside drummer Manu Katche, and together they build a two-person prism. After Eckemoff’s recent runs with larger ensembles, this duo setting feels like a return to essentials. Fewer voices, sharper edges.

The first thing you hear is not a melody, not even a groove, but definition. Gérard de Haro’s engineering at Studios La Buissonne offers a kind of lucidity that carries philosophy in its very air. Each drum surface has its own tone and texture. Each piano register has its own light. There is separation without isolation, proximity without blur. In a record about color, this matters. Clarity becomes the first hue.

“White” opens the sequence with Katché in motion, not merely keeping time but composing with touch: a drummer who paints with rhythm, who shades silence, who understands that a kit can sing without asking permission. Eckemoff meets him with lines that feel simultaneously deliberate and unbound. Midway through, the pulse loosens and splinters. The music does not break; it refracts. White is the whole spectrum hidden in plain sight, a bright paradox, and this track honors it by holding many emotional truths at once. It begins with a certain confidence and then admits complexity, like a clean page that reveals its grain when held up to the sun.

From that opening glare, the album begins its slow separation into distinct bands of feeling. “Pink” arrives with softened edges, not sentimental, simply attentive, as if listening for the quieter human motives that hide beneath our bravado. “Black” follows with gravity, and it never mistakes heaviness for emptiness. Here, it is not absence but concentration. It is the refusal to dilute what must be faced. You can hear Eckemoff and Katché negotiating the borders between restraint and confession, their interplay suggesting that depth is a choice, not a mood.

Colors on this record behave like states of mind, and the sequencing has the logic of a day lived honestly. “Violet” carries a nervous intelligence, an alertness that feels almost ethical. “Indigo” is determination without theatrics, purpose with a steady spine. “Red” refuses to whisper; it has nerve, heat, and forward motion, but it is not reckless. It knows the difference between intensity and noise. “Brown” falters most humanly, not as failure, but as a moment when certainty gets earth on its shoes. Even that stumble has value.

What makes Colors so enchanting is its penchant for turning the familiar inside out. Just when you think you have a track’s intention pinned down, it changes its mind, and the shift feels earned rather than clever. “Orange” is the prime example. Funk is present, sure, but it is not treated as a checkbox groove. The track has the body to move and the mind to pause. It knows how to be juicy without being sticky, how to keep the backbeat honest, how to keep brightness from becoming glare. It is orange as attitude: bold enough to stand out, grounded enough to avoid being loud for its own sake. In the arc of the album, it also offers a reminder: warmth can be discipline, too.

“Green” begins in an off-kilter blues posture, then retools itself into something more intricate, almost mechanical in its precision, before opening into a reflective space where the earlier activity becomes memory. This is one of Eckemoff’s great gifts as a composer: she does not merely write themes, she writes metamorphoses. Katché responds with drumming that feels both textural and articulate, never overeager, never ornamental. Together, they achieve a kind of ecological balance. The music grows, prunes, and grows again. Green is often coded as harmony, but here it becomes process: renewal as labor, equilibrium as ongoing negotiation. It is not easy being green, and the duo does not pretend otherwise.

“Blue” begins with tenderness that avoids the trap of prettiness. There is a quiet dignity in how Eckemoff lets the notes stand, how Katché supports without smothering. Then the piece gathers force. Rhythms become more propulsive, punctuations more dramatic, yet the emotional temperature stays measured. Blue is not simply melancholy; it is spaciousness. It is the color of thought that deepens rather than darkens, carrying sorrow while still making room for wonder.

The album’s range is not limited to the common crayon-box names. “Yellow” arrives as a balladic treasure, luminous without posing as sunshine. Yellow can be fragile when it tries too hard, but Eckemoff treats it as something steadier: clarity, alertness, an intelligence that does not need to shout. “Grey,” by contrast, rides with brushed drums into the night, and it does so without calling the darkness a problem. It becomes a place of transitions, the in-between hour when decisions soften, and the mind stops insisting on absolutes; a reminder that not every truth needs a primary color to be true.

Then there are the deeper, more specific pigments, the ones that feel like private vocabulary. “Bordeaux” and “Aquamarine” arrive with more geometric inflection, pieces that seem to measure space even as they invite freedom. They waver between thickness and thinness, between density and air, yet a quiet equilibrium frames their motion. These tracks also underline a subtle thesis of the record: color is not just what you see, it is how you structure attention. Bordeaux is not “dark red,” it is a particular kind of depth, the difference between intensity and maturity. Aquamarine is not “blue-green,” it is the sensation of translucence made musical, a shade that suggests both distance and immediacy.

Throughout, Eckemoff and Katché demonstrate a rare ability to be spontaneous without being random, precise without being stiff. Their interplay is a study in boundaries that breathe. Each track feels like a new argument for freedom with a frame. The drum kit becomes a spectrum of touch, the piano one of intention. They keep finding ways to remix the listener’s expectations. You can hear it in the way a groove suddenly de-saturates into open space, or how a quiet figure gains intensity through repetition and variation until it becomes a statement.

By the time the album closes, the lingering sensation may be less of something heard and more of experiencing a set of pieces that have been walked through, a gallery where the artwork keeps repainting itself. Colors begs repeat listening because it keeps changing the angle of approach.

The final impression is strangely liberating, with the realization that the record’s real subject is not color as a palette but as a choice. The world looks slightly different, not brighter, not darker, simply more intentional. Then the last note fades, leaving you holding the brush.

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Tyran Grillo for All About Jazz

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Some albums attempt to explain sacred text. Others adorn, elevate, or dramatize it. Better Than Gold and Silver does something rarer. It listens. It waits. It receives. Yelena Eckemoff does not set the Psalms of David to music so much as she attends to them, as though all that remains is to hear what still trembles in their wake. The result is not doctrine rendered audible, but scripture softened by silence, memory, and breath. Belief here is not asserted. It is inhabited.

The Psalms have always been both communal and intimate, sung aloud yet born in solitude. Eckemoff approaches them obliquely, honoring that duality. The text remains intact, carried with luminous restraint by vocalists Tomas Cruz and Kim Mayo, yet the real narrative unfolds beneath the syllables. This is music that traces the emotional terrain lingering behind each verse, the unspoken ache and assurance that remain once language has done its work. Jazz becomes an act of inner hearing, melody unfolding like sustained attention, harmony behaving like conscience, rhythm shaped by patience rather than momentum.

Across the album’s generous span, the compositions reveal themselves as carefully architected yet quietly alive. Themes surface, fracture, and return with an altered understanding. Instruments take turns stepping forward, speaking, confessing, bearing the melodic thread for a time before releasing it back into the collective. Nothing is decorative.

Eckemoff’s piano rests at the center of this gathering with gravity. Her touch suggests both rigor and mercy, a mind that knows where it is going and a spirit willing to pause or yield. Improvisations rise and dissolve into moments of near stillness, where time loosens and sound becomes a form of attention. Surrounding her is a band chosen not for spectacle but for discernment. Ralph Alessi‘s trumpet speaks with clarity and restraint. Ben Monder‘s electric guitar offers texture and tenderness. Christian Howes‘s violin brings a singing grain to the ensemble. Drew Gress‘s double bass grounds the music with quiet resolve. Joey Baron‘s drums shape space as much as movement.

“Psalm 131” unfolds in slow motion, cultivating humility with deliberate care. The psalmist’s refusal of pride becomes a musical posture rather than a declaration. Lush without excess, flowing without self-indulgence, the piece embodies a faith that does not shout its certainty but rests within it. The music gives thanks without spectacle, praise without conquest, offering an unwavering trust shaped by restraint over triumph.

Several pieces draw from Psalm 119, the longest and most intricately structured of the Psalms. Eckemoff selects from it individual meditations, each one a facet of devotion examined under a different light. “Teth” delights in God’s law with reverent curiosity. “Lamed” becomes a dialogue, faith spoken and answered in real time. “Jod” clings to tender mercies with quiet persistence. “Zain” praises the perfection of divine precepts without turning them into abstraction. These are not theological arguments but lived interpretations, the personal and the universal held together without strain.

It is in “Nun” that the album’s heart opens most fully. Here, the chambers of the music fill with breath, righteousness, and deference. Cruz’s voice carries the scripture with gentility and grace, neither dramatizing nor diminishing its weight. Beneath him, Eckemoff’s piano moves in chromatic waves. Baron’s cymbals shimmer at the edges of hearing. Gress’ bass punctuates the sky with steady light. Monder weaves a tender cradle of sound, while Howes’s violin lifts the harmony into shared prayer. The famous line “Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path” becomes more than a quotation. It describes the music itself. The verse reveals a difficult and enduring truth: that God illumines only what is necessary. Not the distant future, not the full terrain, but the next faithful step. Enough to walk. Enough to trust.

Mayo’s presence introduces another aspect of David’s voice, one marked by assurance rather than quiet submission. In “Psalm 110,” her delivery carries confidence and resolve, giving space for Alessi’s trumpet to blaze through modal strength. “Psalm 58,” darker and more inward, confronts poisonous adversaries with controlled intensity, faith sharpened rather than shaken by opposition. These moments remind us that devotion in the Psalms is not passive. It wrestles. It insists. It endures.

“Psalm 128” glows with warmth and gratitude. Its music feels consecrated, as though shaped by the memory of sacrifice and release. The theme of liberation resonates here, not only as a historical movement but as a spiritual awakening. The band moves as one organism, paying reverence to the sheer act of being alive under divine order.

The album closes with “Psalm 147,” a song of restoration and praise. Cruz’s voice becomes liquid and radiant, bearing witness to promises remembered, fulfilled, and sealed beyond time. Jerusalem is restored not only as a place, but as an idea of wholeness, a symbol of what faith seeks when it seeks anything at all.

Better Than Gold and Silver stands among Eckemoff’s finest achievements, remarkable not only for its compositional strength and musicianship, but for its atmosphere of reverence. Such depth is rare within jazz, a tradition often driven toward assertion. Eckemoff has carved a quieter path, one that leads toward the same ocean that unites all creative practice, yet refuses to rush its arrival.

There is a quiet irony in how naturally this music inhabits the space between worlds. Sacred and secular, composed and spontaneous, ancient and immediate, all coexist without conflict. The album belongs to a lineage that values depth over display, allowing proclamation to arise from spirit rather than volume. This intention is made explicit in the second disc, which presents instrumental versions of the same pieces. With the voices removed, Alessi and Howes assume melodic leadership, inviting the listener into personal meditation. Life itself becomes the text.

This is not an album that demands belief. It asks for attention, patience, and willingness. It works slowly, the way wisdom does, shaping the listener through presence. By the end, the title no longer feels metaphorical. Gold and silver fade in significance. What remains is faith refined by listening, devotion stripped of ornament, and praise offered as surrender.

A hymnal jazz, radiant with the wonders of creation, and anchored in the enduring truth that faith is not something we master, but something that holds us.

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