Songs About Enviable People
“Music has surrounded me since my very beginning, as my mother was a professional pianist and teacher. I started to play piano by ear around four years of age and made up my own little pieces about things like fishes in the pond, birds in the forest, and squirrel cracking nuts, which my mother wrote down (and dated) in a music notebook that I still have in my possession.” — “15-YEARS ANNIVERSARY in 2025,” Yelena Eckemoff, website
Flying Steps traces the tender care of a mother, the aching absence of a grown son, the devotion of a husband — the essence of the special people in Yelena Eckemoff’s life — as only music can.
Her music.
The Dec. 14, 2010 Bandcamp self-release — the third of that year — featuring the classically, Moscow-trained pianist and composer, with critically acclaimed double-bassist Darek “Oles” Olezskiewitz (Ravi Coltrane, Art Farmer, Lee Konitz) and Grammy-Award-winning percussionist Peter Erskine (Weather Report, WDR Big Band, Steely Dan) — captures what it feels like to be in the presence of the ones the artist holds most dear.
The multi-faceted artist turns intention and vision into a time-traveling, immersive experience, wrapping the notes, bridges, and solos around her fingers, letting the music of the 11 original tracks fly.
All About Jazz’s Karl Ackermann extoled Eckemoff’s virtues, her ability to press forward “with conviction,” within a sculpting genre quite unlike her classical origins, and with a strong, yet intuitive band, recognizing who among a sea of jazz talent can and should tag along with the incomparable likes of her.
“…In truth, it is the presence of Oleszkiewicz and Erskine that more firmly root ‘Flying Steps’ in the jazz genre. Eckemoff’s natural style leans closer to classical, as may be expected given her Moscow State Conservatory training in form, theory and composing. Yet, at an early age, she began exploring and honing her skills as a jazz composer while incorporating her classical influences. The resulting compositions are jazz of a more pastoral texture and tone with her rhythm section adding embellishments through intricate and complementary patterns….”
Yelena Eckemoff comes fully prepared, months, if not years ahead of her recording time. She knows where every note goes and how it should be played, leaving space for other musicians to expand on her soulful repertoire.
She can’t wing it, not with studio dates locked in and personnel on board. Besides, she comes from a classically trained background, from which other, more playful genres springboard, like prog rock and jazz.
With everything meticulously planned to the letter, or chord, Eckemoff’s music could easily go hands’ off, arm’s length seated upright on velvet cushions in designer finery mode, sterile and incomplete. Yet, to her credit, it never does; themes and crescendos overlap, crest, and tumble, as scripted, in fine technical form, but with the natural feel of a spontaneous moment.
Magic, really.
Jazz is all about technique and feel — head and heart — coming together, but the technique and feel of letting the listener decide for herself, not telling her what to hear, the equivalent of laying out the pages then setting fire to them in real time.
Eckemoff understands this well. All of her pieces are well thought-out, a kind of arch storytelling, but overflowing with character…what it looks like to remember your loving mom, along with what it feels like, to be touched by her weathered, tender hands.
A glimpse…
“Promise” instantly sends the listener back in time to those tender moments, where they were touched by another living soul, someone who got them, who never needed over-explaining, who didn’t mind sitting with them in quiet solitude, watching grassy fields sway in the unseen breeze. Just from the kind way Eckemoff, Erskine, and Oles touch their keys, following a specific playbook but feeling the enormity of the journey just the same.
The beauty of each pristine note makes the listener forget to pay attention to the wheres and wherefores and just enjoy how Eckemoff can make her piano sing.
She gives wide berth to Oles’ rising tides on string-pulling bass, as Erskine sinks down in a swirling, shuffling, springy engulfment, as if smitten.
“A Smile” rides a contemplative wave of a piano-bass ballad over what sounds like a percussive-rumbling cha-cha-cha tempo going up and over a slow-moving roller coaster, stopping at breathtaking places while Oles has his say almost vocally, Eckemoff setting off a last-call jazz night, and Erskine giving them both plenty of room to spread their wings. It has the feel of musicians taking in the view, seeing what their hands in movement can do.
“Good Morning” sounds exactly like the song title. It is here where the listener realizes she’s in someone else’s life, back in time, waking up to all the people in the past who’ve come back to spend breakfast, gardening, field trips, and campfire nights with…an expansive, musical time to be alive.
Eckemoff’s bright keys signify blooming hope, stunned gratitude, and eagerness to see what the day has in store. In those keys, she also holds the bright friendships and family ties forged through the years, glimpses of the people she adores most in their glory.
It’s the second act of “It’s Your Life,” tuning into your favorite radio station in your grandparents’ kitchen, sunlight streaming in, cats swatting at balls of yarn underfoot, mom laughing softly over a pot of oatmeal, dad whistling in the other room.
“For Harry” is devoted to Eckemoff’s husband and manager, the man who’s been with her through thick and thin, always on her side, her biggest fan, the one who delights in her happiness and cries when she suffers.
A melody, as if bubbling up mid-conversation, opens up halfway along with the bass in response. It’s as if she put together this piece from that give-and-take, probably about something innocuous, like what to have for dinner and, Isn’t this a nice batch of petunias from the garden?, a passing thought that churns into this moving tribute.
The tempo of the tune goes from serenely atmospheric, classical in nature, to bustling swanky, lifted from an intense jazz interaction, Eckemoff giving as good as she gets — a kind of defiant rebuttal to All About Jazz’s Karl Ackermann’s assessment that she leans more toward the classical pastoral.
Did he hear right?
The lyrically sweet ballet intro seems to last forever before Eckemoff turns up the heat, challenging the other band members to do the same, adding in swatches of jazz-blues-funk, heavily bass in nature, flourishing off the harmonic beats, on another level.
“Isolated” can’t take its eyes off what could’ve been, love and loss and longing bedecked in Eckemoff’s fingers’ next move, and in our succumbing hearts, staring out a cold window into an even colder world that has moved merrily on, a flurry of careless people pushing and shoving toward an unseen, pointless destination, but an echo of where they wish they could be — all in the depths the lady maestro plays on her piano…the way she touches the keys, how far she’s willing to go.
It is her personal satellite call, the one she sends out to others who feel as she does. It is one of the most lovely send-offs.
Eckemoff is a mother. You can hear it in, “Where Is Maxim?,” about a son who is grown and off living his own life — something many mothers can relate to. The best part contains both the good and bad, pensive and yearning and ever-hopeful for the best in your children, in her compelling back and forth on the piano, glancing at notes that depict major and minor chords in a rainfall caught hovering before the deluge.
You can hear her as a mother wishing her missing son well, even though she cannot be with him as before. The melancholy, torn and piecing itself together.
“Tears Will Come,” all six minutes and 28 seconds, arrives in piano steps, tread with bass and symbolic drums (hissing elaboration), the tempo, tone, and tumult coming in like a drunken man at midnight, finding his way to the bed by other means — bumping into jutting furniture, playing those juts and bumps and “excuse mes,” staring uncomprehending at a night light in the corner of the sunken tub, blinking back the emptiness of what once was a home.
Eckemoff plays her piano in a scattered beacon, heading for land, through a moss of pain that will eventually turn to helpless human salt water, proof that we are real…experience over the overwhelm. The tune isn’t sad, per se, but it’s getting there — together with the sense that crying is okay, let it out.
“Insomnia” opens like the opening of a horror movie, anticipatory, unresolved, unsettling — that flickering light above the sink, did you turn it off before going to bed? — before playing out in a hefty jazz toll, bass and percussion adhering neatly, where the singularity of thought isn’t the sum of its parts.
This tune enables the musicians to explore the notes on the page, interact brilliantly, and leave space for each other — especially Erskine hustle-booming on drums — to drive meaning home. Consider “Insomnia” an open-ended encore finale, where jazz can go wonderfully off-set, giving everyone the freedom to let loose creatively.
Eckemoff loved her “Mama,” fiercely.
This was a woman who poured everything into her child, made sure little Yelena was happy, making sacrifices, making the everyday, the toil of it all, burgeoning hopes and dreams and try again fun and full of the kind of possibility the artist embraces to this day…the ideal mother all mothers want to be.
In turn, the artist pours her everything into a song about her mama, the loving, kind gestures, extra helpings, hugs after boo-boos, a better life ahead. Eckemoff plays her piano with pride, consideration, and a miraculous showmanship appropriating an orchestral work of two to three pianists.
It is a calming, light rain, soothing dark rain clouds — the “Both Sides” now that Joni Mitchell sang about, twice, but with the undercurrent of understanding and empathy that only Eckemoff seems to exude in her conceptual albums humanizing every element on earth.
It is the cool touch of a mother’s hand after a fevered pitch that every child remembers through the hard times after the harsh words. It is the regret of many summer moons, the warm soup after Christmas sledding, the smiles and laughter of birthday wishes, the smell of home.
It is Eckemoff staying in her mother Olga’s presence, musically, without wanting to go anywhere or be anyone other than her daughter.
It is six minutes and 47 seconds of pure, unconditional love.
What does forgiveness feel like? Perhaps, the gradual dissolvement of “Steps.” Here, the piano is spare, wooden, alone and writing out the beginning of a glorious sonnet in a three-movement sonata, then more and more until the listener sits back and basks in a shimmering masterpiece caught between the Renaissance and this post-modern era, constantly aglow.
Eckemoff oscillates between piano steps, shedding skin, the narrative of a Shakespearean play before fairies descend on “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” to an enhanced, Gregorian chant, but with Beethoven/Bach and a little Coltrane by her side, pushing her forward — do more, shank the folds — unfolding in an ebullient mass of volcanic piano, oh my! bass, and encroaching drums sync’d up to the high heavens.
“Steps,” the longest instrumental on the album at 12:26, serves as the jazz anchor, a lead-up to “Tomorrow’s” end, back down to earth in a hybrid of classical-jazz thoughtfulness, spelled out and going in on itself — a tune regarding the unresolved notes of its past, with the other instruments gently, compellingly encouraging the pianist to look up and out, into the future.
Just when the listener thinks it’s over, Oles turns up the heat in a quietude bass solo in about the span of waking up from a vivid dream to tripping out of bed, to reaching for the bifocal light.
Flying Steps is Yelena Eckemoff’s jazz-classical answer to the age-old questions, What would my family and friends sound like, if I were to write songs about them?
Would they be sound and fury? Bass and harp? Funk in the acoustic edges?
Her answer? Yes.
She pondered, sat with her people in the theater of her mind, with nothing but high regard, and then wrote and wrote and wrote out her heart and soul, bringing them to chord-fire-and-anchor life, and it is as profound and heartwarming as any fan of hers would think it would be.
But, it is also surprisingly jazz impressive, woven in the fabric of her technique-to-feel ratios and thematic, conceptual grand designs.
