Selected QUOTES FROM MUSICIANS/COLLABORATORS
“Very rarely am I surprised like I am with Yelena – somebody that comes out of nowhere with this much maturity, and experience, and musicality.” – Billy Hart
“She has her own thing – it is not a copy of another person’s music work like you run into almost all the time. It’s very personal – her own stuff, which is always nice.” – George Mraz
“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.” – Gerald Cleaver
“Yelena is very creative and she has a strong visual, or like a memory that is associated with everything; and you can feel that in the way she writes and the music itself that it kind of awakens a feeling, and that seems to be the center of where she is approaching music from, which I like a lot.” – Chris Potter
“She has a very romantic sense of harmony, which is unique and personal to her.” – Ben Monder
“Yelena has a really beautiful sound on the piano, and I wouldn’t describe it as being a classical slash jazz, like she’s assimilated these influences and is expressing them in a very processed way; processed in a really good way.” – Adam Rogers
“Her music always has a strong mood, and the melodies are kind of slowly evolving. And the forms are interesting; it’s not the usual AABA stuff, it’s more like flowing forward all the time.” – Verneri Pohjola
“Yelena is very special; I don’t think I ever met a piano player like that. She has a different idea of composing, it’s a balance between classical and jazz, and just that blending, which not many people have been able to do, gets her is a special situation.” – Arild Andersen
“The way [Yelena’s music] has been written, as an entity, makes it very unique and original.” – Manu Katche
“It’s a new kind of music, and very high-level music.” – Peter Erskine
“Yelena follows her own muse and seems to be uninfluenced by current trends in the music scene writ large. She is an organically grown original. That the music she makes reflects her true self was, and is inevitable. She is making her heart’s music that is deeply meaningful for her. When artists do that, they connect with listeners, and each other, in a deep way, as there is a mutual recognition of each other’s humanity. Each project of hers illuminates another facet of her world, and affords me the opportunity to do what it is I do in new ways… whether that be providing underpinnings of contrapuntal design, cushioning rich organ pads with lush bottom, or contributing unexpected chatterbox funkiness to a landscape of quite a different character. She creates her own new worlds… and as an improviser, you have the chance to learn from her, from that world, and from yourself once an inhabitant.” – Drew Gress
“Intense music, very particular, in which you have to search; things also have to be earned a little. But the result is very, very interesting and, I would say, very original in the economy of today’s pianism. It has a very particular character, which is heard both from the compositional point of view and from the point of view of the organization of the music.” – Paolo Fresu
Selected QUOTES FROM MUSIC CRITICS
“…music is so refined, versatile, rich and demanding that you just discover, marvel and enjoy.”- Silvano Luca Gerosa (Jazz’n’ More, Austria)
“No recordings, it seems, are more informed by their creator’s personality than pianist Yelena Eckemoff’s. While every album is very much part of a continuum, each also stands apart when the concept and personnel change from one to the next. Common to all, however, are compositions written by the pianist, the paintings she creates for each project, and the texts, be they poems or stories, she writes that function as creative impetuses for her and her guests. Add to that her distinctive approach to the piano and the directing hand she brings to the recording sessions and the result can’t help but be an Eckemoff product in the fullest sense.
Eckemoff is a truly remarkable artist, one possessing a seemingly bottomless well of energy and ideas. She’s no maximalist intent on overwhelming the listener with a barrage of notes, but neither is she a minimalist. Her playing appears as an imaginative stream of invention that gives her partners ample material to respond to.
Every new Eckemoff album feels like an invitation into the warm embrace of her music and world. There’s great comfort to be derived from the annual regularity with which a release by her appears and when it promises another satisfying set of personalized expression by the pianist and inspired contributions from her partners.” – Ron Schepper (Texura, Canada)
“Pianist, composer and producer Yelena Eckemoff is a virtuoso of emotional expression in music. In the world of contemporary jazz, few artists have managed to capture the hearts of listeners and critics like Yelena Eckemoff. Eckemoff brilliantly showed that she still knows how to look for new means of expression for her compositions and original sound, while not having to go into any exaggerated experiments. She is able to respect the jazz tradition and move it into other contexts and shades.
Yelena Eckemoff has created a unique place on the contemporary jazz scene thanks to her evocative and richly structured, creative work.” – Peter Dobšinský (SK Jazz, Slovakia)
“A veritable renaissance artist of contemporary jazz.” – Doug Collette (All About Jazz)
“No matter which musicians Yelena Eckemoff has recorded her respective records with, the music always bears her personal signature.” – Wolfgang Giese (Musik an Sich, Germany)
“Her approach progresses her improvised universes, spiced up by her judicious sound combinations that take us into many different rhythmics; her way to approach her themes offers a unique phrasing combined with this freedom to sublimate her melodies through many inventive and particular techniques.” – Alain Dupeux(Radio•REC 103.7FM, France)
“Yelena Eckemoff’s music is beautiful, soulful and at the same time precise and perfect in its execution.
Her unique, sophisticated and expressive music continues to receive support and creative energy from the best musicians in the world.” – Jacek Brun (Jazz Fun, Germany)
“Yelena Eckemoff is far from a household name but those who know, know that she makes some of the most melodic, imaginative music of any composer.”- Jim Hynes (Making a Scene)
“Eckemoff continues to amaze and thrill with her music, between jazz and classical, improvisation and composition, made together with musicians who capture the essence of her writing, original in form and ideas. She has always something new to say, and from one album to the next her musical ideas are constantly evolving, which also benefits the contemporary jazz scene.”- Vittorio Lo Conte (Music Zoom, Germany)
“Yelena Eckemoff is one of the most interesting composers currently, with a classical background, her universe is jazz, but always with a deep intellectual reasoning. It is impossible to ignore the romanticism and the poetry of Yelena Eckemoff’s compositions, who, with her style, manages to renew herself with each album.”- Thierry De Clemensat (Paris-Move, France)
“Eckemoff combines her classically based piano technique with poetic sound images to create her own jazz language. – Christoph Giese (Jazz Thing, Germany)
“Eckemoff is a special pianist and composer, a special artist. Her freshly conceived and most thoughtful recordings, as diversely lyrical and atmospheric as they are rhythmically and harmonically enticing, are distinguished by a changing and imaginative employment of musicians, selected from some of the world’s finest. I never tire of Eckemoff’s imagistic and essentially poetic world, rendered as it is with such literate yet open-minded pianism and group sensitivity.
Eckemoff is very much her own musician. Her lyrical touch and very particular approach to what one might call the “weight” of phrasing, dynamics and rhythm are set in service of compositions which precipitate an unerringly characterful blend of poetically wrought beauty and a distilled yet expansive improvisational verve. I first heard this classically trained, Russian-born but American-domiciled polymath (a captivating painter and touching poet as well as top-order pianist) on her 2013 Glass Song with Andersen and Peter Erskine (d). Impressed, I have since come to relish a good many of Eckemoff’s releases on her L & H label.” – Michael Tucker (Jazz Journal UK)
“Yelena Eckemoff is a singular musical voice. With every new performance in the studio or on stage Eckemoff puts a greater distance between herself from virtually all other musicians – pianists or otherwise. Eckemoff has just enough of the ‘changeling’ in her to constantly elude you in every sense of the term: she is from the realm of the fays who comes to life just long enough to make a tantalizingly beautiful record. Yet it is a performance, the like of which will never be the same the next time around because – well – that’s just how things are with Yelena Eckemoff.
While others like her are said to “blur the (artificial) lines between the two musical styles, Miss Eckemoff actually blurs the musics themselves – as if in an agitating beaker containing both in liquefied form. And it is this ceaseless agitating action that Yelena Eckemoff creates music that is quite singular unto herself and no other musician. Yelena Eckemoff appeared full formed, ever since her very first recording; a creative time-bomb, primed and awaiting activation as if by the first bars of each of her compositions that she plays.
Ms Eckemoff remains the principal character in all her narratives who – in turn – galvanizes her musicians to create the intensity of a live concert.” – Raul Da Gama (Jazz Da Gama)
“Having immersed myself in Yelena’s music for the past decade-and-a-half, I can honestly observe that I don’t believe there has ever been an album of hers which felt in any way redundant, or even derivative of that which preceded it. Yelena seeks originality: both in her ever-evolving roster of co-contributors and in her prolific, always fresh cascade of jazz compositions.
With each successive album, Yelena has been the very definition of tasteful and creative jazz explorations. She has rallied the absolute finest musicians anywhere on every single one of her welcome contributions.” – Dr. Bob Weathers (Amazon)
“Refined beauty, coming from a place of deep commitment combined with the foundation of a serious musical education, mixed with spontaneous joy, a relentless searching for the divine and a childlike sense of wonder is what makes Yelena Eckemoff’s music so special, so edge-of-the-seat mesmerizing.
Through her boundless ambition, determination and expansive talent, Eckemoff has turned herself into a major jazz artist with a consistently outstanding discography all on her own L & H Production label. What might be next for the pianist-composer? It is impossible to say; she follows her muse from pride of lions to nocturnal animals, from colors to wildflowers, from the desert to blooming tall phloxes—inspirations from unlikely places transformed into marvelous works of art.” – Dan McClenaghan (All About Jazz)
“Pianist Yelena Eckemoff consistently releases material that is deeply thought provoking and reflective. I have yet to hear an album by pianist/composer Yelena Eckemoff that hasn’t hit me right in my soul.
Her music is intelligent without being pedantic, sophisticated without being sterile, creative without being indulgent, and sensitive without being desultory. Tunes bounce, weave, collide and open up as temperatures and musical barometric pressures change.” – George W. Harris (Jazz Weekly)
“I have been following Yelena Eckemoff’s achievements for years and each of her albums is very important to me. I cannot get over the artist’s creativity and musical imagination, and it is worth mentioning that apart from composing and playing the piano, she is also a poet and painter.
Eckemoff places very strong emphasis onto making melody as attractive to listener as possible and creating a range of kaleidoscopic mood changes. She is able to achieve a unique combination of subtle minimalism with climatic span of her music to obtain a truly captivating sound.” – Robert Ratajczak (Long Play, Poland)
“Eckemoff has developed into a major compositional force in the jazz world as well as bringing exceptional pianistic skill.
At times dissonant, but overwhelmingly melodic, this is current jazz at the highest level of both sophistication and visceral imagery. The seamless mix of all the musical influences in her life makes Eckemoff’s music simply extraordinary.” – Keith Black (Winnipeg Free Press)
“Jazz pianist Yelena Eckemoff is one of the most creative and best representatives of her genre. Her piano playing and playing feeling is unique and always a pleasure.“– Rainer Guerich (inMusic, Germany)
“Yelena’s music is very much composition led. One of her critical characteristics is that her music is so very much her own, her music doesn’t sound like anyone else’s. There is a way in which every one of her albums is always reliably the same and always completely different, as indeed is every track. At the bottom of it all one can say that everything she does is beautiful.” – John Ferngrove (Amazon.co.UK)
“Pianist-composer Yelena Eckemoff is predictably unpredictable.” – Mark Sullivan (All About Jazz)
“Each new Yelena Eckemoff release immediately becomes my favorite.” – Neil Hobkirk (Wall of Sound, Canada)
“Eckemoff’s tunes are complex and multi-dimensional; they reflect her substantial classical training, as well as her love for folk and sacred music, expressed in painstakingly annotated compositions, syncopation, and improvisation.” – Thom Jurek (AllMusic)
“Yelena’s music stimulates the mind, body and soul both through her compositions, artwork and self- penned poetry. Music to be enjoyed beyond the limited trend of streaming. Yelena is a genre defying musician blending her classical roots with jazz influences to create her own sound.” – Stephen Duff (Radio Adelaide, Australia)
“A respectable artist who, as tempted in interpretation or composition, would seem to some, always looking for something else, always changing the theme, the sources of inspiration, and the musicians. Each new title of pianist born in Moscow and established in North Carolina is a deeply personalized and multivalent act.” – Victor Andries (Vic Tim of Jazz)
“Eckemoff’s music can perhaps wryly be described as being amongst the finest recordings that Manfred Eicher never produced.” – Fred Grand (Jazz Journal UK)
“The piano ace continues to take her vision farther afield than you would have guessed when she was starting out. Solid work by all throughout.” – Chris Spector (Midwest Record)
“As a fan dating back to Ms. Eckemoff’s early trio dates, I have enjoyed listening to her steady progression as an artist, with each recording showcasing not just another facet of her diversity, but another layer of her incredible depth. Yelena is a seriously talented artist conceptually, compositionally and mechanically. As with each release, I can only anxiously wonder what’s next?” – James Tremblay (Amazon)
“Yelena Eckemoff is shaped by her Russian soul. With her modern, sometimes revealing approach and the weight and intensity of her music, she and her music are strikingly original.” – Frank Becker (Musenblättern, Germany)
“Yelena Eckemoff is a pianist whose idiosyncratic jazz albums speak to a classical sensibility, a taste for ideas that verge on the cosmic and a remarkable empathy with the musicians with whom she records.” – Carlo Wolf (Downbeat)
“Yelena Eckemoff is clearly on the same wavelength with her partners, and creates music compositions that let the other musician express themselves very naturally. To all of this Eckemoff adds a coherent piano approach, dissonant but very melodic, a bit classical, delicate to the touch and rich in light persistent expressiveness.
Eckemoff confirms being not only an excellent composer and excellent arranger of music, but also a pianist of the highest level, able to move on multiple levels, now lyric, now more abstract, now the protagonist, now supporting the first voices.” – Neri Pollastri (All About Jazz Italy)
“Eckemoff seems to encourage interpretive freedom in her talented sidemen. As a pianist, Eckemoff’s feathery right hand and independent left manifest as a compendium of modern players. Her melodic sense is strong, completing phrases that always sound pretty, in spite of adventuresome harmonic choices.”– James Rozzi(Jazziz)
“Yelena Eckemoff a transplanted Russian composer and pianist who, it seems, has independently discovered jazz. She through-composes a good part of her music, which nevertheless absorbs and expresses the fundamental quality of jazz, its harmonic and melodic idiom as well as its feeling of spontaneity.”- Fritz Balwit(Audiophile Audition)
“You really have to hand it to Eckemoff. She’s quickly managed to create an enviable body of work that blends post-modern abstraction, classical thought, and jazz language into a seamless whole. There’s a fearlessness in her art that’s not always addressed in discussions of her work. It’s not so easy to just dive into jazz when you’re further down life’s road, it’s certainly a challenge to try to match forces with some of the music’s giants shortly after taking the initial plunge, and it’s quite difficult to create original music that offers intelligent thought and surprise when you’re working under the aforementioned realities. Kudos to her for overcoming those obstacles.
Eckemoff shows no signs of slowing down. The music continues to flow, and her well clearly runs deep.” – Dan Bilawsky (All About Jazz)
“Eckemoff’s music truly merits an 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 cliché. 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 openness, its flexibility and freedom is definitely true to jazz.
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.
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. This is music with that quiet depth that comes from a really rich musical hinterland.” – Peter Bacon (Jazz Breakfast, UK)
“Effortlessly modern, with nothing to prove beyond total involvement in the moment, Eckemoff presents the listener with a thoroughly modern, yet intimate and highly personal sound-world. – Dave Wayne (All About Jazz)
“In America, Yelena Eckemoff is the new kid on the block. But the Russian pianist and composer plays as if she was born to the role of a jazz veteran. She touches on the jazz-classical-avant-garde, art and poetry, and a narrative that sees the human connection in every leaf, the passing flutter of butterflies, and a snowy day in the summer — radiant.
Yelena Eckemoff forces you to listen with every new album she leaves behind. Hers is an original, unusual multi-media campaign — designed solely to immerse listeners in a world where every sense is engaged, coming alive with immeasurable empathy, and thus, understanding.” – Carol Banks Weber (Substack)
“Yelena is a lovely and supremely talented pianist and composer, who writes a kind of hybrid jazz and classical music that’s impossible to pigeonhole and impossible to ignore…Seek her out if multi-layered harmonically and melodically rich yet spacious and recognizably northern European piano music is your thing.” – Chris Foden (Amazon.co.UK)
“Eckemoff’s classical background is audible in the intricacy and proportion and refinement of each song’s design, and in the measured caution of her improvisations. But she is more romantic impressionist than academic. Her forms, for all their order and precision, are heartfelt.
As a jazz pianist and composer, Eckemoff retains a classical sensibility in her precise touch and in her systematic, refined, orderly forms. She writes minimalist études of romantic impressionism. The badasses she brings in to help her play them thrive in her measured yet open environments.” – Thomas Conrad (Jazz Times)
“Eckemoff’s music blurs the line between melody and improvisation, and between individual solos and ensemble interplay.” – Scott Yanow (Downbeat)
“Certainly, jazz has never had a character like Yelena Eckemoff. If you have some prejudices, please put them aside: Yelena is an excellent jazz musician with all the trimmings that underline, song by song, the art of creating expectations or tensions.” – Giuseppe Piacentino (Musica Jazz, Italy)
“Pianist Yelena Eckemoff is a major jazz talent yet to receive the critical attention she deserves.” – Tom Greenland (New York Jazz Record)
“In a music scene that seems to privilege musicians who fit into easily definable categories, identifiable genres, when that rare artist comes along who defies easy categorization, that artist might well find herself on the outside looking in. If it’s too difficult to define what she’s doing; the easy way out is simply to ignore her. And what is going on is a programmatic description of the composer’s emotional journey in a soundscape transfused with the varied elements of her musical vocabulary – jazz and classical.” – Jack Goodstein (Block Critics)
“Pianist Yelena Eckemoff inhabits the eerie netherworld somewhere between jazz, classical and film music. Russian-born, classically trained, jazz-inclined, she’s one of this era’s most individualistic and instantly recognizable artists.” – Delarue (New York Music Daily)
“Eckemoff’s music has always been about melody and composition over self-indulgent flame throwing and bombast, and maintains consistently high compositional standards, first-rate musical craftsmanship, and an inspired level of creativity. A careful listen will reveal elegantly complex music.” – Greg Simmons (All About Jazz)
“Labeling Yelena Eckemoff a musician would be too limiting. The immensely gifted pianist not only composed music. She also paints the stunning landscapes for the c its covers, and she writes poems to accompany each track. With a piano style that gracefully combines beautiful touch with aggressive bite, Eckemoff embraces the role of the searcher.“ – Bobby Reed (Downbeat)
“The gifted and versatile pianist Yelena Eckemoff bridges different worlds, musically and attitudinally. The immediate point of contextual reference and departure is linked to the ECM Records tradition. On the other hand, she carves her own way, cross-talking between genres while keeping her ear on the impressionistic endgame, with ample help from her collaborators.” – Joe Woodard (Jazz Times)
“Pianist Yelena Eckemoff is refreshing. She has carved a niche for herself with an eye constantly trained to still newer paths. This is not jazz about technicality, but rather about soul.” – Tyran Grillo (All About Jazz)
“Russian-born Yelena Eckemoff is a classically trained concert pianist who has more recently in her career taken on jazz, but has done so strictly on her terms. Her terms means she brings a European styled chamber approach to the idiom that doesn’t eschew using their chops, but does eschew showing off chops just for the sake of doing so. This means she isn’t giving us a not-so genuine take of over-tread standards aping Bill Evans or Brad Mehldau, but offers a refreshing break from those styles as she maintains a high level of musicianship.” – S. Victor Aaron (Something Else!)
“Eckemoff’s talents are walking the artistic tightrope of her personal experience in Moscow and that of the form and function of the more traditional western improvisational forms of jazz in the United States. Eckemoff is the type of artist to drive a critic and most major label executives to the nearest ledge as her prolific talents sidestep the more standard categorization with ease.” – Brent Black (Critical Jazz)
“With a vast discography, that includes some of the leading figures in jazz today, Eckemoff has clearly established herself as a top ranking composer. The question is no longer whether she can be considered in the ranks of top composers; it is now how far her musical journey will take her.” – H. Allen Williams (Jazz Times)
“Pianist and composer Yelena Eckemoff undoubtedly turns heads (and raises many eyebrows) when listeners hear her rare blend of classical chamber music and progressive jazz.” – Maria Miaoulis (Celebrity Café)
“Eckemoff weaves her different influences into her improvisations with seamless ease. An exciting composer and improviser, Yelena Eckemoff has produces thought provoking and engaging records that fuse multiple musical currents into a unique whole.” – Hrayr Attarian (All About Jazz)
“What more need to be said about Yelena Eckemoff? Besides the fact that she is an exceptional pianist/composer who has released numerous recordings that attests to it.” – Esther Callens (The Birmingham Times)
“Pianist/composer Yelena Eckemoff works in that rarified area between modern classical chamber music and progressive jazz. The line between the melodies themselves and the improvisation is often hard to distinguish, but they’re both clearly defined. Individual solos are fairly brief, and the result is that the nuances and personality of each musician shines out at almost any given point, lending tremendous nuance and tenderness. Eckemoff has both the ability to let a moment of silence stretch time between her phrases and the appreciation to let her sidemen ornament the quiet in their own way.” – Warren Allen (All About Jazz)