Wild Mercury Rhythm

Title: Yelena Eckemoff  Rosendals Garden VI

“Öresund Bridge” (L & H Productions, 2025)

In October 2024, keyboardist/composer Yelena Eckemoff began rolling out singles in anticipation of her new recording, Rosendals Garden, with the title piece. A park of the same name, which is on Djurgården, an island in Stockholm that belongs to the Swedish royal family, as well as Eckemoff’s rhythm section, bassist Svante Henryson and drummer Morgan Ågren, inspired the eleven tracks suite of songs making up Rosendals Garden album. She followed that release with “Strandvägen Pier,” “Ruins of Älvsborg,” “ABBA Museum,” “Gamla Stan”, and now – “Öresund Bridge.”

This is not a traditional jazz piano trio as Svante Henryson plays both bass and cello … one supercharged with shamefully abundant talent, vision and a twenty-first century zeitgeist. Eckemoff has a solid sight on the horizon, composing music with this rhythm section in mind.

Her sixth single is decidedly autumnal and edgy, maybe even spooky. The song is angular, with sharp, marching edges. The head figure is complex and ancient. Eckemoff’s organ and Henryson’s cello lend a decadent minor-key flavor to the piece, decadent in the sense of supernatural romanticism. The composer plays an extended piano solo, leading back into her baroque broken counterpoint idée fixe. Fragrant with Fall, “Öresund Bridge” could be an early ‘60s Halloween theme. Smart and swinging in an advanced mathematical manner, “Öresund Bridge” begs that more of this music.

Title: Yelena Eckemoff  Rosendals Garden V

“Gamla Stan” (L & H Productions, 2025)

Composer Yelena Eckemoff has turned the release of Rosendals Garden into a living event with her fifth single release from the recording. “Gamla Stan” continues the composer’s creative thought surrounding a vacation to Rosendals Garden, which is on Djurgården, an island in Stockholm belonging to the Swedish royal family.

Gamla Stan (translated, “The Old Town”) was the original establishment of Stockholm. Originating in the 13th century, Gamla Stan consists primarily of the island Stadsholmen. Gamla Stan includes the surrounding islets Riddarholmen, Helgeandsholmen and Strömsborg. It exists today as an example of Swedish architecture, with many of Sweden’s most renowned architects shaping the area; these include figures such as Nicodemus Tessin and Carl Hårleman, who worked on the Stockholm Palace, still in the area.1

Leading her rhythm section of bassist Svante Henryson and drummer Morgan Ågren, Eckemoff recasts the jazz piano trio into a world music juggernaut teeming with creative thought. “Gamla Stan” begins with sonic fits and starts before straightening out with Eckemoff’s busy left hand establishing a circuitous harmonic path. The piece features Henryson on both bass and cello. Eckemoff seasons the song with block chords and mini-figures, adding layer upon layer of complexity to the story. Henryson’s bass solo engages the composition perpendicularly into what sounds like helicopters hovering above a complex exhibition by drummer Morgan Ågren, who injects polyrhythms into the miasma.

Moody and challenging, Eckemoff encourages the listener to actively engage in the listening and hearing of the piece on its own terms, a fractured suite, everything occurring at once, like time as a flat circle.

Previous single releases from Rosendals Garden

• “Rosendals Garden” (L & H Productions, 2025)
• “Strandvägen Pier” (L & H Productions, 2025)
• “Ruins of Älvsborg” (L & H Productions, 2025)
• “ABBA Museum” (L & H Productions, 2025)

Title: Yelena Eckemoff continues her journey toward “Rosendals Garden”

The fourth single release from her soon-to-be-released Rosendals Garden is a special homage to both a building and a band. “ABBA Museum.” It celebrates both the museum building, at Djurgårdsvägen 68, 115 21 Stockholm, Sweden, and the vocal quartet ABBA, whose string of recordings in the 1970s helped to define the Disco Era, and who remain active over 50 years later. “Her” is Yelena Eckemoff, composer of the collection making up Rosendals Garden, soon to be released in March 2026.

Eckemoff calls upon drummer Morgan Ågren to set up a gentle rock beat over which Svante Henryson plays cello, mimicking the phrasing of many ABBA hits. Eckemoff composed her “earworm” to do what earworms do, remain and be remembered. In doing so, she wanted to address the song craft of the groups and her reaction to it. This is a tuneful, progressive, and inviting piece of music that captures the spirit of the late 1970s in brilliant twenty-first century fashion.

“Within the walls of the ABBA museum, we noticed just how widely and enthusiastically ABBA’s music is still accepted, not only by die-hard fans, but by the younger generations, too. Its rhythm still beats and its life still breathes, like a musical giant benevolently faced toward the future.”

How can one knock that spirit?

Title: Anticipating the full release of “Rosendals Garden.”

Old Älvsborg was a medieval castle on the rocky outcrop known as Klippan, on the south bank of the Göta Älv river within the urban area of the modern city of Gothenburg. During the 1300s, the Göta Älv was Sweden’s sole point of access to the North Sea. The river mouth, and by extension the heights at Klippan overlooking it, therefore had immense strategic and military significance. While largely dismantled in the late 1600s, ruins remain just this side of the southern pylon of the Älvsborg Bridge. Sacred places like these keep the echoes of their pasts that can still resonate…

…in the faint militant march established by drummer Morgan Ågren in the opening moments of Yelena Eckemoff’s “Ruins of Älvsborg,” the newest single counting down to the release of Rosendals Garden. The march is faint as we are far from the Danish conflicts like the Northern Seven Years’ War in 1563 and the Kalmar War of 1612. It underpins the intelligence that rises from Eckemoff’s play of percussion against melody, a drama held together by Svante Henryson’s woody bass and cello playing. The piece evolves to a brief interlude where melody wins out and Eckemoff solos freely allowing Henryson the same room for cello. Much of the music-making recalls the composer’s excellent Scenes From The Dark Ages.

Leading up to this point, Eckemoff has released “Rosendals Garden” and “Strandvägen Pier,” promising more singles before the release of the entire album.

Title: Yelena Eckemoff continues her journey to Rosendals Garden

“Strandvägen Pier” is the third of a projected seven singles released in anticipation of composer Yelena Eckemoff’s album Rosendals Garden1 in March 2026. “Rosendals Garden” and “Öresund Bridge” preceded the new single.

The song subject is a very long, straight marina, packed with boats from near and far. It is a destination for walking, both with intent and in luxury. This busy walking contrasts with the otherwise blissfully unhurried personality of dock life. The two exist equally and oppositely of one another. There is a partition dividing these two worlds, one that beckons from both sides. It is this dichotomy that Eckemoff and her rhythm section, bassist Svante Henryson and drummer Morgan Ågren, address in harmony and tempo.

The trio migrates from the autumnal images of “Öresund Bridge” to the schizoid frantic/relaxed environs of “Strandvägen Pier.” Tempo and complexity was and wane as the boats at the pier rise and drop with the movement of the water. Eckemoff confidently leads her trio from the rapid pace of downtown to the more sedate rhythm of the pier. Her opening figures are anxious and moving against their volition, seeking a new equilibrium, a comfortable one of accent and nuance. Ågren performs most sensitively in this evolution. Eckemoff and Ågren join Henryson in the solo space, leading to an extended Eckemoff exposition that continues into the calm coda.

This is a focused, thematically driven composition showing Eckemoff with no intention of creatively slowing down.

Scenes From The Dark Ages (L & H Productions, 2025) is an evolutionary pinnacle in Yelena Eckemoff’s 22-album discography. Never content with remaining in a single stylistic place long, Eckemoff moves into new sonic areas with Rosendals Garden. Over the next few months, the composer will release singles from the recording, beginning with the title composition.

The trio performance features pianist/ keyboardist Eckemoff with bassist Svante Henryson and drummer Morgan Ågren. The inspiration for the piece is Rosendals Garden, which is on Djurgården, an island in Stockholm belonging to the Swedish royal family. It is a sprawling park with trails for horseback riding and paths for walking. It also hosts a vast selection of trees native to Sweden, vegetable and herbal gardens, and an enormous fruit orchard. What enamored Eckemoff was the impressive flower garden showing off its beauty at the end of August.

The vision gave way to a nine-minute suite featuring a variety of mood vistas and enchantments. Like the gardens, the composition is overwhelming with colors, textures, and assorted tonal devices intended to capture the disparate, yet related, parts of the garden. The piece begins with an airy trilogy that dissolves into a rhythmically complex section that features Henryson sparring with the composer while Ågren keeps things polite. If “Rosendals Garden” is any sign, the rest of the recording will be exceptional.