Classics: Mingus Ah Um

| Tyran Grillo

Charles Mingus bass and voice
John Handy alto saxophone, tenor on “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat” and clarinet on “Pussy Cat Dues”
Booker Ervin tenor saxophone
Shafi Hadi alto and tenor saxophones
Jimmy Knepper trombone (May 5, except “Bird Calls”)
Willie Dennis trombone (May 12, except “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat”)
Horace Parlan piano
Dannie Richmond drums
All compositions by Charles Mingus
Recorded May 5 and 12, 1959, at Columbia 30th Street Studio, New York
Engineered by Ray Moore and Fred Plaut
Produced by Teo Macero
Cover painting by S. Neil Fujita
Released in 1959 by Columbia Records (CL 1370 mono, CS 8171 stereo)

John Handy recalls being on the bandstand at New York’s Half Note one night in March 1959 when word came that Lester Young had died. Charles Mingus took up a slow blues in C minor and gave Handy the first solo, urging him on until the tune had taken considerably longer to tell than the news itself. By May he had written “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat,” a quiet centerpiece of the album at hand.

Mingus began recording Mingus Ah Um, his first Columbia record, on May 5 at 30th Street Studio, where Miles Davis had finished Kind of Blue just thirteen days prior. Teo Macero, who had played saxophone with Mingus in the Jazz Composers Workshop, produced the sessions. The leader brought in his working band and called on musicians who already knew how to fit into his puzzle. As quoted in Diane Dorr-Dorynek’s liner notes, he describes laying out the framework at the piano, part by part, and giving each player a different set of notes to draw from over a chord.

In the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, Mingus’s stepmother Mamie used to take him to Holiness services, where an answer to the preacher could come from anywhere, and this spirit is alive and well in the congregational sound of the band. There’s a lovely slink to the bass at the opening of “Better Git It in Your Soul,” and when Dannie Richmond gets hold of the six-eight, the whole ensemble seems to land on the upstroke of Mingus’s hand. His cries rise through the horn voicings as an introductory catharsis. The first saxophone solo pushes away from Richmond’s accents and gets its bearing from them, while a recurring moan in the arrangement comes, as Dorr-Dorynek tells it, from something Horace Parlan played in a solo. In the stretch of Booker Ervin’s tenoring where the handclaps carry the beat, all the distance from the pulpit to the last pew fits between two palms. The words in the title travel in the other direction, all the way to the person lowering the needle.

Handy and Ervin open “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat” in unison on tenor, the instrument Young played with Count Basie, and their intimacy is easy to mistake for solitude. On the second pass through the tune, restored on later issues, the two horns separate by an octave and for a minute the melody has an upstairs and a downstairs. There’s extraordinary patience in Handy’s solo, in the time he gives even a single note to show its grain as he works the tip of his tongue against the reed to make a tremolo, a motion he thought of in terms of bowing a string. Mingus answers with his fingers on the bass, and for a few bars the vibration seems to pass between them without crossing the air.

In At the Vanguard of Vinyl, Darren Mueller counts just over eleven minutes cut from six performances for the 1959 LP. Five of the uncut takes appeared on Columbia’s Nostalgia in Times Square in 1979, and Mosaic issued the complete elegy in 1993. The 1998 Columbia/Legacy CD gathered all nine at full length, in the original order. By the time the Library of Congress added the album to the National Recording Registry in 2003, two different accounts of 1959 could be bought under the same title. The opening riff of “Boogie Stop Shuffle” comes from down from on high, and Mingus and Richmond are so exactly in each other’s time that not even a sheet of paper could be slipped between them. The horns throw their accents against Ervin without his disturbing its footing, and Parlan’s turn at the piano rubs a little ochre into the spectrum. Handy’s alto solo, excised from the LP, takes such tight corners in that minor blues that the room seems to go out of square. Toward the end Richmond gives the ensemble figures a new edge each time they come around.

After all that motion, “Self-Portrait in Three Colors” angles the light differently. Dorr-Dorynek traces the piece to Mingus’s work on John Cassavetes’s Shadows, and each pass through the theme brings out another line, deepening the image without moving the camera. One feeling passes through several bodies at a pace slow enough to make out where it changes hands, until a brief tenor coda has to carry the shape of the group on its own. That Mingus called this a self-portrait seems entirely natural in a band where trusted allies can bring a feature of your face into focus.

Mingus first heard Duke Ellington on his father’s crystal set and briefly played in the orchestra in 1953. In “Open Letter to Duke,” Ervin’s tenor comes out at full stretch, with the whole band able to turn beneath him, and in the restored alto solo Handy is unhurried. The music then eases into a ballad, its reeds bending enough to fit more than one shade of a pitch into the same syllable while Willie Dennis’s trombone surfaces beneath them. That melody had an earlier life in “Duke’s Choice,” recorded for Bethlehem in 1957 with Shafi Hadi and Richmond already in the room. In 1962, Mingus and Max Roach would make Money Jungle with Ellington. For now, Mingus could address him directly and send a copy home with everybody who bought the record.

The other side begins with cries that overlap in free time, and for a few seconds the ear has to decide how many creatures are speaking. Mingus said he had actual birds in mind for the opening of “Bird Calls,” but the language of bebop it breeds is decidedly human. Ervin’s tenor goes first, with Parlan’s compact piano figures taking over between his flight and the darting turns of Handy on alto. Mueller points out two places in the full take where a horn comes in early with the theme, once as Handy yields to Richmond and again near the end of the drum solo. The original LP cuts both entrances along with the whole drum solo and much of the preceding improvisation.

Once the flock scatters, the low horns of “Fables of Faubus” enter with the pomp of a parade whose route keeps buckling under its feet. An alto briefly appears before Parlan’s piano carries the lurch of the march into a quicker pulse. Under Ervin’s tenor is the satisfying slap of Mingus’s strings against the fingerboard, the sound of a piece of wood being made to testify. The title is one of Mingus’s most loaded, as on September 2, 1957, Orval Faubus interrupted a local broadcast of I Love Lucy to announce that he had called out the Arkansas National Guard, which he used to bar Black students from Little Rock’s Central High School. The Little Rock Nine attended under federal protection, and the following September Faubus closed the city’s four public high schools. On May 5, 1959, the day Mingus recorded the piece, segregationists on the school board voted against renewing the contracts of forty-four school employees they regarded as sympathetic to integration. Mingus later said Columbia had kept the lyrics off the record, and in October 1960 he recorded them for Candid as “Original Faubus Fables,” with Ted Curson and Eric Dolphy in the band.

The slow New Orleans blues of “Pussy Cat Dues” arrives at a sideways amble, with Jimmy Knepper’s trombone the first voice to strut its stuff in style. One cannot fail to notice the elasticity of Mingus’s soloing here, the way he can pull a beat far out of its resting shape and let it come back without leaving a crease. The closing tenor is Ervin’s, and when he leans into double time the slow pulse goes on around him, wide enough now to admit two different speeds of thought.

Knepper is out front again on “Jelly Roll,” sliding into a chorus over the old New Orleans two-beat while Mingus slaps the strings. The tribute to Jelly Roll Morton is said to have taken shape in the studio when Mingus reversed the direction of two lines from his earlier “My Jelly Roll Soul.” You can hear the pleasure of that inversion in the way the trombone goes up through the space the reeds make by coming down. The rhythm opens into four during the alto solo, and Parlan slips a phrase of Sonny Rollins’s “Sonnymoon for Two” into his piano solo. As Mueller notes, a splice on the first LP catches Ervin’s descending tenor line just short of its last note. The full performance gives him his landing and Mingus two choruses. The jouissance of the tag is in the way Mingus counts aloud and comes back at himself on the bass, with Richmond there to keep the two of him talking.

There is another roll I find myself thinking about, the one a teacher calls by reading down the left side of a page. When Little Rock’s public high schools reopened in August 1959, Carlotta Walls and Jefferson Thomas went back to Central for their senior year. The box beside a name in an attendance book can be covered with a fingertip. I imagine the teacher’s pencil hovering above it while Walls draws breath to say “here,” a single syllable crossing the space the Arkansas National Guard had once been sent to occupy. This music carries their agency not as tokens but as lights of image-bearers whose lives matter.

Dominic Miller: Diana (ECM 2849)

| Tyran Grillo

Dominic Miller
Diana

Dominic Miller guitar
Santiago Arias bandoneón
Nicolas Fiszman bass
Ziv Ravitz drums
Recorded December 2024
Studios La Buissonne
Engineer: Gérard de Haro
Mastering: Nicolas Baillard
Cover photo: Max Franosch
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: November 20, 2026

Dominic Miller’s guitar seems to remember as it sings. Diana, his fourth album for ECM, takes its name from his mother, who died in February 2026. Following the dedication of Vagabond to his father, it adds another chapter to a musical autobiography whose most revealing passages emerge through the touch of others. The melodies carry a quiet melancholy, each inviting a response that gives its contours further meaning. Those responses come from musicians who know Miller’s language intimately. Bassist Nicolas Fiszman and drummer Ziv Ravitz return from Vagabond, while Santiago Arias brings the bandoneón previously heard on Absinthe into renewed conversation with the guitarist. Fiszman’s supple foundation accommodates the music’s changing directions; Ravitz works through gesture and texture, loosening the hinges of each tune. Around Miller’s plucked strings, Arias draws sustained lines that seem to contain the breath of an unopened letter. Together, they give private commemoration a body others can inhabit.

Recorded at Studios La Buissonne in southern France in December 2024, Diana also reflects the guiding ear of producer Manfred Eicher. His influence reaches into the musicians’ willingness to venture beyond familiar gestures, with the quartet’s trust making such exploration possible: a phrase can change direction because someone is there to receive it. These carefully formed compositions reveal themselves through the particulars of an encounter, each response altering the proportions of the recording space. Eicher’s sequence, which Miller regards as essential to the album’s coherence, extends that responsiveness across the recording, allowing one piece to illuminate an otherwise invisible doorway in another. Miller’s family remembrance becomes something his companions can carry with him, its weight distributed through the small mercies of attention.

Sparkling waves of guitar open the doors of “Jazz Hotel,” where cymbals scatter light across the bass and bellows. The mood is oceanic and supremely inviting, drawing us into its intimate atmosphere without letting the hard work behind it disturb its ease. Years of effort become effortless in music that dances to the tune of its own heart. Miller’s distinctive sound allows for such delicacy of expression that a plucked string can seem to turn the horizon on its axis. He is a master at creating distinct scenes for the mind’s projection screen, a most private cinema for the seekers of this world. Only this piece and the sparse, slow-motion film of “Rita” surpass the five-minute mark. Their images stretch toward the threshold of disappearance, while the shorter vignettes give us just enough detail to craft our own story in passing. The bandoneón’s sustained breath complicates the guitar’s brief illuminations, giving each moment a duration the clock can only misunderstand.

The reflective spaces of “Alta Loma” seem to transport us to a time and place that might never have existed without memory to keep them alive in the heart. Its feeling is somehow Mediterranean, yet cold stone architecture rises from those same waters, windows opening onto the reverse side of sunlight. Miller gives this impossible geography enough substance to shelter us, while leaving its foundations open to the sea. That doubleness carries into the wistful strumming of “Millionaire,” which brings us into blinding sunlight and allows us to see ourselves reflected in the grander scheme of things, even when the world seems to be ignoring us. Wordless vocals accompany the locomotive drums, sustaining the feeling of pressing on one’s own path while others remain content to stand still. Its organic fadeout loosens the allure of wealth suggested by the title, breaking the spell so that we might love ourselves again.

Miller has a flair for simple yet powerfully evocative titles, and the desert of “Vegas Dreaming” opens beneath stars quietly competing with the city lights. Beyond the bright facades, darkness gathers without needing to announce itself, deep enough to absorb the city’s insistence on being seen. Just when we feel settled, the band picks up its gear and moves on. The crisp turns of “Al Dente” carry the brittle radiance of fall foliage, though its haunting bandoneón draws us toward the roots beneath that brightness. Such endings reveal how much of a composition can reside in the space it leaves unoccupied.

Through the effortless changes of “Only You,” sentiment becomes a form of motion, its tenderness reaching into the dreamlike “Pigalle.” From its moving images, figures step into the audience and occupy the seat beside us. The bass-inflected groove of “Timeless” gives these realm crossings a physical footing, reminding us how readily the body enters territory the mind has yet to name. Miller covers a wide expanse of emotional and textural ground without allowing any scene to harden into a destination. In “Iguazu,” a subtly high spirit gathers those movements into a sun-kissed blanket of comfort.

Miller has never sounded so sparkling and beautiful. The production gives every exchange a tactile immediacy, revealing how much warmth a melody can bear without losing its shape. That warmth acquires a different gravity when we remember that these performances preceded the loss commemorated by their title. A dedication can reach backward, changing the meaning of something already given. The music carries its earlier life within the name of someone who can no longer hear it, and our attention begins to travel in both directions. All that’s left is to ensure there is still a future for retrospection.

Classics: A Love Supreme

| Tyran Grillo

John Coltrane tenor saxophone
McCoy Tyner piano
Jimmy Garrison bass
Elvin Jones drums
Recorded December 9, 1964, at Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey
Engineer: Rudy Van Gelder
Cover photo: Bob Thiele
Produced by Bob Thiele
Release date: January 1965

Of all the words John Coltrane put inside the gatefold of A Love Supreme, the one my ear keeps returning to is our. He wanted to thank God “through our work,” and in that little possessive the other musicians enter a story that began in the spring of 1957, when Miles Davis fired the saxophonist amid his struggles with heroin and alcohol. After quitting the hard stuff, Coltrane spent part of the year with Thelonious Monk at New York’s Five Spot. He returned to Davis the following January and played on Kind of Blue in 1959. Writing about 1957, Coltrane remembered a “spiritual awakening” and asking God to let him make other people happy through music. He also wrote of “a period of irresolution” in which he strayed from his pledge. The letter has room for that difficult tension on which all self-professions rest, and the long interval required to keep them.

In High Point, North Carolina, Coltrane was twelve when his father and the Reverend William Blair, his maternal grandfather, died within months of each other. Blair preached in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, so a voice the boy knew from the house also belonged to Sunday. It was a painful reminder that a child’s sense of time can reside in knowing when a particular person will next be heard. The Christian language Coltrane grew up with remained available to him as his reading took him farther afield. He had encountered Islam as a young man, and his first wife, Naima, was Muslim. By the time he spoke to Nat Hentoff for Meditations, he could say, “I believe in all religions.” In the gatefold poem he speaks to God with the intimacy of someone alone in a room and imagines that everybody has a way there. He names his dependence on God in the same letter that thanks the band, and I hear an unusual peace in someone willing to say publicly how much of his life is in other hands.

Steve Kuhn, who spent about eight weeks in Coltrane’s first working quartet in 1960, took up “Crescent” on Mostly Coltrane, the 2009 album with Joe Lovano that I reviewed here. There’s an odd continuity in Kuhn’s choosing a piece Coltrane recorded with the band that came together after he left. McCoy Tyner took the piano chair that year and was on the October session for “My Favorite Things” with Elvin Jones. Jimmy Garrison played with them at the Village Vanguard the following year, on his way to becoming the regular bassist. By March 1963 the four were at Van Gelder’s with Johnny Hartman, who could keep a vowel in Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life” open all the way to closing time. The tenor answers in the spaces Hartman has left between phrases, and that particular courtesy returns in “Psalm,” where the voice the quartet attends to has its language inside the horn.

Alice Coltrane remembered John coming downstairs after days of work in their Dix Hills house and thought of Moses descending the mountain. What she recalled of his face was the joy and peace in it. I think of the rest of that descent ending under the dimmed lights at Van Gelder’s, where Tyner remembered how little had to be said as the band took up music it had begun to explore in clubs. When Jones strikes the tam-tam at the start of “Acknowledgement,” there’s an instant when the color of the tenor seems to be already in the metal. The fanfare is in E major, and it gives way to Garrison’s bass in F minor. He plays F, A-flat, F, and B-flat, drawing breath at the same place in each circuit while Jones puts an Afro-Cuban lilt into the pulse. Tyner’s chords, built in fourths, occupy the edge of our attention the way movement can register in peripheral vision while the eyes stay fixed.

The longer Coltrane ranges over that figure, the more I hear an affinity with what he admired in Ravi Shankar’s music, the freedom to travel melodically with so little change in the harmony. At the end of the solo he moves the figure through all twelve keys, then meets Garrison back in F. Lewis Porter hears a declaration of divine omnipresence in that passage and reads the four movements as the course of Coltrane’s search for the Divine. The sound that has stuck with me for years comes when Coltrane chants the title along with the bass, overdubbed so that he’s there twice. What I took for four notes had been four syllables all along, and the record makes my ear remember words it has yet to hear. I recognize the order in which a difficult admission comes, with the body several minutes ahead of the man who has to give it words.

Garrison lets two strings ring together at the opening of “Resolution,” feeling his way into E-flat minor. The full quartet enters hard, and the tenor has the breadth of a hymn against the blunt attack of those downbeats. In Tyner’s solo I keep attending to his left hand, which puts chords into the spaces his right hand has just opened. There’s the urgency of call and response within a single body. Coltrane comes in with a sound that keeps finding a rougher edge, until the tenor and the drums seem close to acquiring the same grain. I think of the irresolution he admitted to in his letter, and how a decision can be perfectly clear on the day it’s made and have to be made again in a body that remembers an older form of relief. When the head returns, I can still hear in its long notes what the tenor has been through since first stating it.

The pause for turning the original LP is long enough to imagine what another player might have heard in that small figure. Coltrane was back at Van Gelder’s the day after the quartet session with tenor saxophonist Archie Shepp and a second bassist, Art Davis. All six sextet takes of “Acknowledgement,” down to a false start, can be heard on 2015’s A Love Supreme: The Complete Masters. The quartet brought the suite to the Antibes festival in July 1965, and three months later a larger band that included Pharoah Sanders played it at Seattle’s Penthouse. The performance Joe Brazil taped that night, released in 2021, runs about seventy-five minutes.

Jones opens “Pursuance” alone, and in the intervals between his blows I begin to count in a time he keeps finding ways to displace. He lets a roll gather, then drives an accent through it at an angle to the beat I’ve supplied. The quartet comes in on a fast twelve-bar blues in B-flat minor, and the tempo suddenly has a frame. Tyner can push a pentatonic figure far enough outside the changes to make the home key strange, then hit an answering chord with his left hand that tells us how securely he has the form under him. Coltrane takes over with a hoarseness that survives even at his highest speed, and some of his runs seem to come out of one held note the reed has split open. Pursuance has the duration of an activity that outlasts the feeling that first set it in motion. Every time the blues comes around, Coltrane is already in the middle of another attempt. After Jones has another brief say, Garrison is left with the woody sound of his strings and all the time the tenor seemed to be using up. He lets a string ring long enough for its decay to become part of the phrase, and by then I’m listening for the moment when wood goes quiet.

The timpani under “Psalm” have an enormous softness, and it takes me a moment to hear Tyner’s low tremolo sustaining C minor through the sound. Garrison moves quietly beneath the tenor while Coltrane lets the cadence of his poem set the measure for this song of praise. Follow the gatefold with a finger and the printed syllables fall under the notes, with the recurring “Thank you God” coming to rest on C. He raises his pitch with preacherly emphasis, and at the crest of a phrase there is a rasp that belongs equally to the reed and to the man asking it to speak.

In his handwritten outline, now at the Smithsonian, Coltrane asks for the final chord to recall “Alabama.” He recorded that piece two months after the Ku Klux Klan bombed Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. His son Ravi made his ECM debut on Jack DeJohnette’s In Movement in 2016 and returned to the label for Ralph Alessi’s Imaginary Friends three years later. “Alabama” opens the former, with the electric bass of Jimmy Garrison’s son Matthew rolling under Ravi’s tenor. DeJohnette had sat in with both fathers, and his cymbals now move around two sons whose surnames already share the sleeve of A Love Supreme. When I wrote about the trio, their reading struck me as a prayer. The C-minor drone John used in both pieces lets me follow a single interval from the lament into said prayer, where grief takes its place in the sound of thanks.

Just above that note in the sketch Coltrane crossed out his instruction for the bass to say the final “Amen.”* The tenor stretches the word over an extra note, and Coltrane’s overdubbed horn rises out of the ensuing flourish with Garrison’s bass still underneath. I keep looking at the word under the stroke he drew through it. Coltrane could imagine coming all that way toward God and leaving the last word to a man with four strings.

*In his essay for the Library of Congress, Lewis Porter traces the recurring “Thank you God” to C. In his reading of Coltrane’s sketch for WBGO, he notes the C-minor drone “Psalm” shares with “Alabama” and the crossed-out instruction for the bass to say the final “Amen.”

Classics: Kind of Blue

| Tyran Grillo

Miles Davis trumpet
Julian “Cannonball” Adderley alto saxophone
John Coltrane tenor saxophone
Wynton Kelly piano (“Freddie Freeloader”)
Bill Evans piano (all other tracks)
Paul Chambers bass
Jimmy Cobb drums
Recorded March 2 and April 22, 1959, at Columbia 30th Street Studio, New York
Engineer: Fred Plaut
Cover photo: Jay Maisel
Produced by Irving Townsend
Release date: August 17, 1959

I learned to love jazz on ECM records. I heard Jan Garbarek before I heard John Coltrane, and Tomasz Stanko before Miles Davis. I liked the way a bass line could change the harmony under a note the lead was still holding. Sometimes a drummer would answer a phrase with a mere tap of a cymbal, and I’d replay the track just to catch what he’d picked up on. After years of writing about the label, I’ve decided to swim upstream back through the canon and dive into the records my favorite players have taken to heart. And so it is that I come to Kind of Blue with a fondness for musicians who have demonstrated the value of listening.

Even now, decades after he put down the trumpet and left this mortal coil, Davis is still finding out what he can do with a stretch of time. On the title track of Milestones in 1958, he let a scale stand long enough for a soloist to double back on an idea. That same year, Gil Evans gave him a single scale to improvise from on “I Loves You, Porgy” for Porgy and Bess. A player could return to the same pitch and give it a different life by letting it fall elsewhere against the beat. When Davis recorded Kind of Blue in a converted Manhattan church on March 2 and April 22, 1959, he made that freedom part of the arrangement. In his original liner notes, pianist Bill Evans writes about Japanese ink painting, in which the brush leaves a mark the painter has to live with. In a band setting, somebody else is already reaching for the paper while your ink is still wet.

I cannot help but encounter that reach in the opening of “So What,” where Chambers takes a few delicate steps and Evans sets down chords with enough space inside them for the bass to move through. Once the tempo gathers, Chambers asks the question outright and the piano and horns give it a two-syllable answer. The bridge lifts the exchange a semitone, and for eight bars I can feel the floor slide upward through my shoes. Cobb’s great crash at the start of the trumpet solo frays so slowly that the burr in Davis’s sound seems to belong to the same vibration. Coltrane winds a figure so tightly around the beat that the empty middle of it starts spinning. Adderley puts his speaking voice into the way he leans on a note, and a single lengthened vowel can change the subject. Evans opens up the intervals again, and when Chambers brings the theme back, his question has acquired the warmth of a greeting.

“Freddie Freeloader” gets its particular bounce from Wynton Kelly, who had taken over the piano chair in Davis’s band. Evans came back for four pieces, and this blues is where we get to hear what Kelly can do with the bench to himself. He tucks quick replies into the gaps in the horn theme, then carries that good humor into the first solo, where a little extra weight at the end of a phrase can tip the whole bar toward him. On the session tape, Davis whistles the band to a stop during Kelly’s solo and asks him to leave out the chord going into A-flat. On the issued take, I wait for a chord that has already been crossed out of the future, and somehow the expectation begins to swing. There’s a delicious bit of proportion in the distance between Davis’s repeated high notes and the length of the line Coltrane sends across the bar. Adderley puts an entire cry into the last inch of a phrase, and when Chambers steps out on his own, Kelly’s clipped replies keep the blues swinging at the level of a private joke.

The mute on “Blue in Green” gives the trumpet a light so concentrated it seems to illuminate only the inside of the bell. The melody makes its way around a ten-bar circuit, and when Evans lets the chords go by at a quicker rate, I get the feeling of standing in the same room under a clock with a different number of hands. Adderley sits this one out, and against the sweep of Cobb’s brushes I can hear something close to a human throat in Coltrane’s tenor. It leaves some of its warmth in the folds of the muted sound that follows. With Davis still in my ear, I ache for the moment Chambers takes up the bow under Evans’s last statement. The friction of hair against string makes the melody seem close enough to touch.

The band gives that intimacy a larger body on “All Blues,” with Chambers holding the rolling figure in six while Evans’s tremolo stirs between pulses. The saxophones move in harmony above them, and Davis threads his muted melody through the openings their riff keeps making. When Davis takes the mute out and Cobb switches to sticks, the first open trumpet tone goes straight to the sternum and stays there, warm enough to make the bone seem hollow. Cobb gives the beat a hinge with those taps against the rim, and Adderley swings it wide. Coltrane crowds the turn with notes, and somehow Chambers’s pace seems even more deliberate for all the commotion above it. Evans has been reworking the saxophone figure behind the horns, and as he begins his own solo I keep listening to his left hand for some trace of what they’ve put there.

In “Flamenco Sketches,” the players share a sequence of five scales, and each soloist decides how long to stay with any one of them. Cobb’s timekeeping now includes the less measurable business of hearing when it’s time. Coltrane’s solo is among the tenderest things I know from him, especially when the fourth scale darkens the line and he lets that color work its way through. Adderley can put the richness of a whole register into a handful of pitches. In the gaps Evans leaves, a single pluck from Chambers makes a chord seem to enter the piece from a different direction. When Davis comes back, he needs little breath to make himself heard.

Columbia released Kind of Blue that August, and it went on to sell in numbers few jazz records have approached. Some of the distance it traveled is easier to measure in the grooves of other records. The following year, Coltrane took up the soprano for “My Favorite Things” and gave a Broadway melody nearly fourteen minutes to transform itself. Each turn of the vamp makes it stranger to think that such a tune once had to give way to the next event in a predetermined plot sequence. The route from Davis’s studio to ECM ran through Dave Holland and Jack DeJohnette, who played on Bitches Brew and made Gateway with John Abercrombie in 1975. Holland has described the way Davis set a direction and gave his players room to find their own ideas. I hear that latitude when Holland shifts an accent he’s picked up from Abercrombie and DeJohnette gives it the weight of a downbeat while the guitarist is still in the middle of the line.

Nils Petter Molvær traces his interest in combining acoustic and electronic sound to the electric Davis of Bitches Brew through Agharta. On “Tløn,” from 1997’s Khmer, a rhythm built from a Coldcut sample gathers momentum while Eivind Aarset’s guitar makes its edges porous. When Molvær comes in softly over that beat, I hear a vast animal breathing through a hole the size of a trumpet bell. ECM’s club remixes, a first for the label, gave other ears a say in the shape of the piece around that horn. I think of the chord Davis whistled out of “Freddie Freeloader” when I hear what a remixer can move around after the players have gone home.

Ralph Towner and Paolo Fresu bring me back to “Blue in Green” on 2009’s Chiaroscuro. Fresu had already made his own Porgy and Bess, and Towner had long wanted to play this tune with a trumpeter. The harmony thins quickly on the guitar, and Fresu can decide with the timing of a breath how much of the chord will still be there to meet him. On 2017’s Tangents, Gary Peacock took up the tune with Marc Copland at the piano and Joey Baron on drums. Peacock had recorded Trio 64 with Evans and counted Chambers among the bassists who shaped his playing. There’s particular pleasure in following Peacock’s hands through a melody I’ve long associated with the trumpet.

The name of Molvær’s “Tløn” sends me to the planet Borges imagined, where two people can go looking for the same lost pencil and each come back with one. That second instrument comes into the world courtesy of the person expecting to find it. I can mark the place on the 1959 tape where Chambers draws the bow, and some of the sound I hear there has traveled backward from Tangents. What a wonderful indignity to the calendar that somebody can arrive too late to meet you and still be in time to put something in your hand.

Stephan Micus: Traces in the Sand (ECM 2871)

| Tyran Grillo

Stephan Micus
Traces in the Sand

Stephan Micus hang, kalimba, shakuhachi, duduk, Indian crane flutes, sapeh, Bavarian zither, bodhran, genbri, dilruba, shō, chord zither
Recorded 2023-25 at MCM Studios
Cover: Sara Micus
An ECM Production
Release date: November 13, 2026

At the edge of the sea, Stephan Micus lets the horizon undo the small enclosure of composition. Months spent on a few minutes of music require a concentration that his almost daily swims in Mallorca open outward again, returning the body to dimensions no studio can delineate. That exchange runs through Traces in the Sand, his 27th solo album for ECM, dedicated to the sea as the bearer of all music. Having lived on the island for more than three decades, the Bavarian-born musician approaches its expanse with the seclusion of someone whose teacher has never needed to speak.

A dozen instruments gathered across the world enter this relationship, carrying the grain of their origins into unprecedented encounters. Among them, African kalimbas, whose metal tongues are attached to resonators, furnish an especially tactile vocabulary, each syllable opening a pore in the music’s skin.

Out of that interior, the resonance of three hang drums and the buzzing of four kalimbas establish the gorgeously sunlit vista of “The First Light,” mists of night still clinging to the fields and hills. Just when we think there might be no other life, shakuhachi and duduk raise their breathy heads, two deer craning their necks toward the horizon in search of a traveler’s path. The Japanese flute’s higher register parts the air above the Armenian reed, yet neither claims the other’s territory. Their melodies frolic with the grace of a river’s flow, while the continuously shifting accompaniment occasionally rises into the foreground, granting the ground itself a turn to wander.

A single kalimba supports the footsteps of two Indian cane flutes through “Dancing Cranes,” concentrating the opening’s animal blood into an even deeper circulation. Caught in the wonder of their own existence in space and time, the flutes alternate until each finds its continuation in the other. Such crossings take on a fable’s flesh in “The Pearldiver And The Mermaid,” where a plucked sapeh, the five-stringed Bornean lute carved from a single piece of wood, duets with duduk. A Bavarian zither adds another watery layer, guiding the soul into reflections within reflections, where each image carries a depth the eye cannot settle. The reed that walked on hooves now spreads wings, a mighty crane in flight above the submerged body of its song.

The flashes of light crossing the surface of “Another Day At Sea” bring us nearer to the kalimba’s smallest gestures, with Irish bodhran and plucked Moroccan genbri softly adding a touch of bass. A whole expanse balances on the tip of an unspoken word, its apparent weightlessness anchored in the pulse beneath it. Against that buoyancy, the four plucked sapeh and single bowed dilruba of “For Layla And Majnun” give the titular ill-fated lovers of Middle Eastern legend unequal bodies. The latter’s robust voice speaks of unrequited pain, drawing a filament through the strings’ scattered brightness. Here, longing becomes a disagreement about how time should move, the bow sustaining what the plucked notes must continually surrender. Separation acquires a texture one might touch, although every attempt to grasp it only lengthens the ache.

From this fable’s wound, the solitary duduk of “When You Are Near” draws a more personal measure of closeness. With a lighter touch and a beauty that comes from within, it floats and traces its travels with a dream in its jaw. The intimacy here seems almost anatomical, a second heart discovered in the place where breath usually gathers. When the kalimba returns for “Brother Dolphin,” again with bodhran and genbri shading its lower reaches, kinship slips beyond the human couple. Its glints connect us to a creature whose passage through the sea requires no justification, and whose indifference to our explanations feels a form of welcome, admitting us without making us the center of its world.

With three shō braided into an equal number of dilruba, “Light On Water” opens a luminous chamber whose walls seem to have migrated from the inside of a shell. Two duduk lend their breath to these spiritual kin, the Japanese reed mouth organs suspending their haunting radiance across the bowed strings. One can almost feel the skeleton of a drowned star assembling itself inside the harmonies. That density opens onto the playful sincerity of “Swimming With Turtles,” where hang and four kalimbas flower as light incarnate. Fully committed to its interactive bliss, this meeting with nature allows delight to remain a sufficient reason for existence, carrying the philosophical gravity of a creature utterly absorbed in play.

From the more distant perspective afforded by “Far Horizon,” alternating sapeh and duduk solos recall their earlier encounter across a greater interval. The sapeh’s bright edges graze the skin, while the duduk carries a depth that resists any measurement the hand could make. Between them, three chord zithers touch the wind as if born to receive it, opening their arms to what cannot be held. The distance gives each utterance room to reach beyond the speaker, and the music’s tenderness gradually becomes inseparable from this relinquishment. We return to the sea carrying less certainty about where the body ends, its edges briefly porous to another order of being.

Such this is the sea’s least expected instruction: even a mountain can become worn down enough to enter a shoe. The sand carries that knowledge without a doctrine, submitting the grandeur of geological time to the tenderness of an exposed foot. In Micus’s hands, the smallest vibration makes a comparable passage, bringing an immensity into contact with the body’s unguarded places. Our desire to leave a lasting trace begins to seem strangely provincial beside such willingness to be changed, and the earth, having given up its monument, settles into the unbearable precision of entropy.

Glen Moore and David Rothenberg: Bass Lines / Border Lines

| Tyran Grillo

David Rothenberg lists whales among his contributions to Bass Lines / Border Lines, an arresting credit for a record made in the Dance Hall in Arivaca, Arizona, near the U.S.–Mexico border. The opening piece, “Jaguar through the Wall,” puts that border in the path of an animal with its own reasons for crossing. By the 17-minute finale, “Lives of the Desert Whales,” a humpback has joined Rothenberg and bassist Glen Moore. Rothenberg was 18 when he spent a summer studying with Oregon, the group Moore cofounded with Ralph Towner, to whose memory the album is dedicated. He had been listening to Moore for decades by the time of this recording, and in an interview he mentions how closely a humpback’s song can resemble a bowed double bass. With Moore in the room, the resemblance is just as intriguing the other way around, and you start to wonder how much ocean a bass can hold.

The jaguar is already in motion when we arrive, and the immediacy of the playing gives us no time to craft arbitrary expectations for the improvisatory wonders about to ensue. Upright bass and bass clarinet are griots of subterranean (if not submarine) proportions, versed in whatever passes between a root and the rock it spends its life prying open. Moore’s slides and Rothenberg’s reptilian dances make for a gorgeous pairing, their lines doubling back across ground that each has opened for the other. Beneath the bubbling surface is a deep sense of structure, audible in how much time the players give a delicate passage to find its footing. Their mastery has everything to do with the way they listen, and you can hear it when one catches the tail of the other’s phrase and lets it go.

The arco strains and harmonically infused glissandi of “Coati Mundi” bring us into more crystalline territories, into caves hewn by the slow drip of mineral. The navigation is both external and internal, concerned with the contact of feet to earth even as it works through crevices in search of a softer place. The restraint here is striking, each slip of pitch exposing another translucent layer in what had seemed an indivisible darkness. The title track opens with a superbly articulated bass solo, and the release is so consummate that even Moore seems to have been overtaken by it. Rothenberg’s monologue rides the wave of a backgrounded reverb, charting a passage through time as a physical substance to be felt with the soles of the feet. When an echo lays another floor beneath a word that has just touched down, you can almost feel the ankle adjust.

As the duo comes together, grittier doctrines take shape only to be sliced by the blade of “Your Final America,” which brings cross-sections of the heart into focus. I hear a whisper pitched directly into the ear of an ungracious automaton whose instincts are wired for profit and exploitation. There’s an unnerving intimacy to the address, as though an apparatus of extraction might be persuaded to grow a conscience if someone spoke into it gently enough. Whatever tenderness our storytellers can recover from the encounter, they carry forward in the form of pollen, which has always depended on being taken somewhere it had no means of reaching on its own. Even the whimsically titled “A Lizard War” is a delicate conflict, one that creates as much as it destroys. Its scrapings and postures are part of a mutual language in which each contributor is an equal force, and what survives the scuffle is the possibility of succumbing just as quickly to the next encounter.

In “Lives of the Desert Whales,” the humpback’s song emerges as an organic sonic child and, in the same breath, a parent shepherding the space-time continuum through its own coming of age. The growling compass the musicians have been carrying through the desert now swings toward a creature for whom any line on a map must seem a remarkably provincial invention. The lines Moore and Rothenberg have been drawing all along are measured in breath and in the length of a bow stroke or finger strum. I imagine a fossil hunter lifting a human cochlea from an Arizona outcrop and cataloguing it as the shell of an extinct marine animal. There would be a certain justice in the error, for the most intimate thing that fossil could reveal about our species would be the shape of what once lived inside us without ever becoming ours.

William Basinski: Passing the Cup of Sorrows

| Tyran Grillo

After a sound has faded, it can take a moment for quietude to regain its force. The ear stays where the sound has left it, as though something might still be communicated. That is how I find my way into William Basinski’s Passing the Cup of Sorrows. He spaces his piano phrases with something of Morton Feldman’s patience, allowing a note to arrive late enough to change what one might easily mistake for an ending. Over the course of this single, nearly forty-minute piece, I grow attentive to those small revisions. A pitch I could have sworn was alone acquires a neighbor as it decays, a faint vibration the electronics seem to have picked up through the skin of the note. Sometimes a figure returns so subtly that I wonder whether it has sounded again or whether I’ve been carrying it all along.

Basinski took the title from a video about Life Between Lives, a form of regression hypnosis in which souls are said to meet between incarnations. In the exchange the video describes, a person comes to understand someone who hurt them well enough to forgive. The accounts moved Basinski to sit down at the piano. Listening to the time he leaves between gestures, I find myself thinking about the moment when the cup is still in somebody’s hands. Understanding the person who hurt you may be something you learned long before you had a category under which to file it. From the other side of a wall, a slight change in their voice could tell you what sort of evening lay ahead. There is a peculiar cruelty in asking someone to give freely what they once had to give to stay alive.

The click of a latch can carry two addresses. You hear it where you’re standing, and a muscle answers from a house that may no longer be habitable. Basinski’s recurring figures make room for that kind of displacement. Detuned strings give the dissonance a grain you could almost follow with a thumb. A figure comes back with its outline intact and its intention altered. The first time, it seems to be asking for something. On its return, the question has worn thin enough for me to hear the wood.

As the piece goes on, the air inside the piano seems to move even when a tone holds steady. A creak at the edge of its decay gives me the sense of a chamber wider than the one I can picture. There is something corporeal in the way that space keeps opening, as though stillness were a posture that required innumerable small adjustments to sustain. Halve the distance between two notes, and there is another distance to halve. Somewhere in that diminishing interval is the time it takes a body to realize it can heal.

I keep coming back to a piece of furniture missing from the account that sent Basinski to his piano. There ought to be a table between those souls, ordinary wood with a wobble in one leg, somewhere for the cup to go when the person holding it has had enough. The little sounds that travel through the piano’s cabinet make me wonder how that room would sound from beneath the table. A child hiding there, with an ear against the wood, would have a hard time making out whether anybody had been forgiven. What the child might hear with extraordinary clarity is the small knock of the cup touching down, and what comes through the grain in that instant is the news that something besides flesh can bear the weight.

Sow Help Me God: Love’s Difficult Harvest in Dostoevsky’s The Karamzov Brothers

| Tyran Grillo

Verily, verily, I say unto you, except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone:
but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.
–John 12:24

In The Karamazov Brothers, a grievance can become so precious that giving it up feels like a kind of death. Dostoevsky’s people protect their resentments with an ingenuity they seldom extend to anyone’s happiness, then wonder why their lives have grown uninhabitable. Before we meet the family, the Gospel places something almost weightless in our hands. Christ’s words promise life for others through his death, and the epigraph carries that promise into a household where giving is inseparable from keeping accounts. The grain’s descent also suggests an inward surrender. To let another life reach us, we must relinquish the self we have made indispensable. This prospect terrifies the Karamazovs more consistently than the possibility of doing wrong. They can confess to almost anything, provided the confession lets them stay as they are.

The family offers ample occasions for such confession. Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov has allowed fatherhood to happen around him, leaving others to discover that his children require care. When his sons return to the provincial town where he lives, their reunion exposes debts no sum of money could settle. Dmitry, the eldest son, quarrels with him over an inheritance, a dispute entangled with their mutual desire for Grushenka, a young woman living under an elderly merchant’s protection. Each man imagines that her choice will determine his worth. Ivan, the middle son, finds little rest in the things his intelligence can explain, while his youngest brother Alyosha, a monastic novice, arrives bearing an affection the family scarcely knows how to receive. The mysterious killing of the family patriarch eventually brings these relations before the law. Yet I found the human follies, including the murder and subsequent trial, the least interesting aspect of a novel so attentive to them. Their unfolding reveals an impoverishment that could otherwise pass for ordinary life. We spend hundreds of pages examining responsibility for a single act, already knowing the culprit, while the daily evasion of it continues almost undisturbed.

Fyodor Pavlovich makes that evasion uproariously entertaining. He anticipates contempt and hastens to justify it, behaving disgracefully before anyone can wound him by expecting better. In the presence of Zosima, the starets whom Alyosha reveres, he confesses to the buffoonery that has made him increasingly difficult to address. How does one speak to someone who turns his own exposure into another performance? Zosima’s answer keeps returning beneath the more elaborate arguments: “The important thing is not to lie to yourself.” An inward lie can survive the collapse of every outward excuse. The father’s candor offers him a comfortable arrangement with wickedness, making an admitted fault seem beyond amendment. Alyosha runs a hand across the watery surface of that comfort. Fyodor is still moved by someone who sees his degradation without enjoying it. This small response complicates our wish to have finished understanding an appalling man.

The household’s religious conversations reveal a quieter estrangement in Smerdyakov, its cook and Fyodor Pavlovich’s rumored illegitimate son, whose upbringing has mixed care with contempt. The servant Grigory, who has raised him, helps preserve his life yet assaults the dignity of the child he has taken in. Under such instruction, sacred language is something one learns to survive. Smerdyakov’s later arguments about renouncing Christianity search ingeniously for escape clauses. Perhaps an inward loss of faith has already removed him from the religion he would outwardly deny. His reasoning turns confession inside out, preparing an acquittal before conscience can speak. It is disturbing, though the adults who helped educate him deserve no easy refuge in our disapproval. We hear what can happen to a religious question in a house where the one asking it has already been made to feel unwelcome.

Dmitry’s struggle with himself is more violent. His declarations frequently outrun his ability to live by them, and his abasement retains the extravagance of his pride. He recognizes the sacred even as he rushes toward its desecration. The customary division of the brothers into separate faculties leaves too much living matter outside the arrangement. Dmitry thinks through the very passions that scatter his thought. “You can be in love even while hating someone,” he tells Alyosha, admitting an intimacy in which desire clings to its object while refusing to care for her. His hunger for beauty contains a religious longing, although he repeatedly makes others bear the cost of his search. The question remains whether this abundance can bear fruit. For that to happen, remorse would have to outlast the pleasure of declaring himself ruined. A changed life must eventually begin on a morning when nobody is present to admire the change.

Katerina Ivanovna, Dmitry’s fiancée, gives this problem a devotional grandeur. Her attachment began when he supplied the money to save her father from disgrace. Her determination to save Dmitry invests his degradation with a purpose almost too precious to relinquish. “I’ll be the god to whom he will pray,” she declares, revealing how easily sacrifice reserves a throne for the one making it. What would be left of her generosity if its recipient no longer needed to kneel? The question hurts because her suffering is sincere. Dostoevsky entangles that sincerity with an ambition it cannot excuse, without reducing her to an illustration of hypocrisy. Grushenka, meanwhile, lives beneath judgments that precede her into every room. The rivalry surrounding her encourages us to see her as the occasion of other people’s failures, until her vulnerability demands the attention their explanations have withheld. These women give the love affairs their spiritual consequence. Loving someone may require surrendering the indispensable role we have assigned ourselves in that person’s unhappiness. There is a kind of benevolence whose secret prayer is that the wound never heal.

Ivan approaches suffering from a distance that ought to make benevolence easier. Instead, he assembles a case against the order of creation. His accounts of cruelty toward children strip away the consolations adults use to make one another’s pain comprehensible. No future reconciliation of the universe can entitle them to ask the children’s retrospective consent to their torment. “But then, what about the children, what shall I do about them?” he asks. “That’s the question I cannot answer.” And so, to turn another’s suffering into the seed of one’s own spiritual harvest would make redemption an instrument of the very cruelty Ivan condemns. Christ’s giving of himself grants nobody permission to volunteer a child for the cross. I cannot read this objection as an obstacle the novel merely plants in order to remove. Ivan has found a wound that every subsequent affirmation must acknowledge. A theology capable of stepping over it has already lost its way.

His revolt also carries a longing he cannot comfortably disown. He loves the spring leaves before he can justify loving the world that produces them, and he wants Alyosha to understand that this attachment survives his rejection of its order. Beauty arrives without having settled the argument. Their conversation draws its extraordinary attention to detail from this discrepancy, as each brother hears something in the other that a successful rebuttal would fail to reach. Ivan’s difficulty loving his neighbor belongs here, too. Humanity is magnificently lovable until a particular face brings an intolerable demand, one that cannot wait for the universe to explain itself. He grasps the scandal of innocent suffering with a force that makes indifference impossible, yet understanding offers little guidance in meeting the obligations that follow.

In “The Grand Inquisitor,” Ivan’s story within a story, the author enlarges this predicament into a vision of religious authority. His imagined Christ returns to a world whose custodians regard freedom as an injury requiring correction. The Inquisitor, an elderly cardinal, believes ordinary people cannot endure the responsibility of choosing what they worship. Bread makes allegiance tangible, while a miracle spares the believer the uncertainty of trusting. Christ’s temptations become proposals for managing human beings, and his rejection of them appears, in the Inquisitor’s account, an unbearable demand upon the weak. The horror lies in the tenderness this argument claims for itself. Its speaker will undertake the burden of governing consciences so that others may be relieved of having them. Under his care, the wheat may feed everyone, provided nobody asks who owns the field. Christ’s refusal to compel belief preserves a freedom that can reject him. The Inquisitor finds this risk unforgivable because his promised happiness depends upon ending the possibility of refusal.

Zosima meets the same human weakness without requiring its abolition before he can love. The ascetic practice of entrusting oneself to an elder promises release from captivity to the self, though the narrator also acknowledges the pride into which such obedience may harden. Religious submission offers another way of feeling exceptional. Zosima’s authority is most searching when it unsettles that satisfaction, directing us toward the people a supposedly spiritual life has made easier to avoid. His teaching on shared responsibility extends the household beyond the boundary of its surname. Fyodor’s neglected children have survived through the care of others, including the servant Grigory and his wife, Marfa. Their imperfect tenderness supplies what the father’s legal place cannot guarantee. Kinship is a duty someone may accept without owing anything by blood. Against the fantasy of self-sufficiency, Dostoevsky places the child whose survival depends upon another’s decision to stay.

This responsibility asks what we have withheld from another’s life, including the attention that might have interrupted an injury. The distinction between committing a crime and helping sustain a world where cruelty prospers is essential, however widely conscience extends its reach. Zosima’s teaching gains its force by turning the inquiry toward ourselves. Reversed into a demand that somebody else accept blame, it is grotesque. A neighbor’s suffering gives one no authority to arrange his burial. The book’s Christianity draws its gravity from this difficulty, keeping the wish to redeem others answerable to their existence beyond our wishes.

For Zosima, active love means continuing the labor after imagination has ceased finding it beautiful. His instruction to rise from bed and finish an uncompleted duty makes the principle exacting. Spiritual life has reached the hour when a comfortable person would prefer to consider the day concluded. “Be forever active,” he avers, giving words that might otherwise float free of conduct an ordinary task to fulfill. His insistence upon work accompanies an equally insistent invitation to “ask God for joy.” The request changes the emotional color of holiness. There is no special virtue in growing too embittered to receive the created world, nor does delight absolve us from attending to its pain. Zosima’s love of the earth makes room for mourning within gratitude. The ground beneath is now something we might touch, and the body kneeling upon it belongs to this world.

Alyosha brings these teachings into encounters that test them. His goodness seems disarmingly immediate, yet it requires an attentiveness the other characters repeatedly fail to sustain. When Ilyusha, a schoolboy whose father has been publicly humiliated by Dmitry, bites his finger, he tries to discover the grief behind the apparently senseless injury. After the boy’s father, an impoverished former army captain, rejects financial help, Alyosha recognizes how exposed need brings fresh shame. Charity must learn to approach without forcing the recipient into a posture of gratitude. Such moments give smallness a precision the grand declarations often lack. A benefactor may correctly identify a material need and still misunderstand the one who has it. Alyosha’s awkwardness helps preserve this distinction. His affection is capable of embarrassment, and his desire to do good does not exempt him from learning how. For all the praise surrounding him, he stays open to experience, which gives his faith somewhere to grow.

That openness also draws him into Ivan’s struggle. Devotion to Zosima tempts Alyosha to ask the world to acknowledge the worth of someone he loves. Even without a theological push behind it, love may want a visible guarantee. At this painful point the brothers’ vocabularies cross, unsettling any division that would keep belief safely apart from revolt. The narrator’s earlier suggestion that miracles follow faith grows more exacting once the believer longs for vindication. Alyosha must discover whether his devotion can survive without the evidence it desires. Much of what may bear fruit takes place where a spectator would see only loss. To insist upon watching the seed open would be to dig it up each morning and wonder why nothing grows.

Translator Ignat Avsey’s English gives these changes of scale a persuasive intimacy. The plain imperative of “ask God for joy” inhabits the same book as Fyodor Pavlovich’s obscenities, with no safe demarcation between sacred speech and a world beneath it. Dmitry’s confessions continually threaten to turn into theater, while Zosima’s gentleness can suddenly require more of a listener than an accusation would. Avsey accommodates these shifts, allowing exaltation to retain the awkwardness of actual speech. I was especially struck by the way a seemingly excessive declaration leads, through embarrassment, to something unexpectedly bare. Dostoevsky’s characters have seldom finished explaining themselves when the need they were explaining away becomes audible. Their eloquence is exhausting, as is their determination to force every exchange to bear the magnitude of an ultimate question. That weariness belongs to the experience of reading them. Occasionally one wants someone to stop speaking long enough to hear the person beside him.

The demonic thrives in precisely this failure to listen. Dostoevsky gives evil a familiarity more disturbing than grandeur, allowing it to sound conversational and to concern itself with appearing respectable. It borrows the mind’s objections until inquiry is scarcely distinguishable from the pleasure of making commitment impossible. Doubt is indispensable, though it turns corrupt when every answer must preserve the questioner’s exemption from acting. Such intelligence keeps an entire life suspended. Zosima’s account of hell gives this postponement a terrifying finality, calling it “the suffering caused by not being able to love any more.” The fuller horror lies in the will that resists the love still offered to it, nursing its refusal until that refusal is the only identity it can bear. The seed has kept its shell, and eternity has given it no reason to open.

When Ivan, feverish after his final conversation with Smerdyakov, finds himself entertaining Satan in the guise of an impoverished gentleman, anxious to please and determined to be treated with respect, the bewildered Karamazov is internally struck. “What am I on this earth, if not a parasite?” the visitor asks. In so saying, he inhabits Ivan’s very thoughts, borrowing their language and returning their discarded arguments with a familiarity that makes dismissal almost impossible. Ivan recognizes his own worst ideas in the conversation, yet recognition gives him no power to end it. His humiliation lies partly in the visitor’s vulgarity, as a mind so accustomed to intellectual distinction must now hear itself speaking through an unwelcome dependent. The Gentleman’s concern for his reputation deepens the injury. “I value only my reputation as a respectable man,” he explains, having almost casually acknowledged that he is a fallen angel. Even Satan would prefer that his conduct not interfere with his standing. His agreeable manners make the family’s evasions recognizable on a more terrible scale. Here is another speaker who can admit what he is while making that admission a reason to expect indulgence. Ivan’s fury registers the difficulty of confronting an evil that already knows the accusations against it and can incorporate them so organically into the flow of one-on-one conversation.

The visitor’s real ingenuity, however, lies in keeping Ivan suspended between conviction and doubt. He admits to administering vacillation, exploiting the “uncertainty, worry, the conflict between belief and disbelief” that can torment a conscientious person. He even promises to plant “only a tiny seed of faith,” beginning with belief in his own existence and elaborating a grotesque prospect of Ivan’s eventual salvation. The language of saintly growth becomes suspect in the mouth of someone cultivating dependence upon himself. This encounter brings the novel’s arguments about freedom and responsibility into Ivan’s orbit of unrest. Every motive can be questioned until action becomes impossible. Yet Ivan’s torment also reveals a conscience that his explanations have failed to silence.

Seen in this light, the courtroom’s elaborate competition over motives takes on a peculiar sadness. Psychological insight supplies an explanation for almost anything, and opposing speakers use its discoveries to make incompatible accounts appear inevitable. The legal inquiry matters because acts have particular authors and consequences, and mercy cannot make accuracy dispensable. Yet the soul’s capacity for renewal exceeds what a public account can establish. A verdict must concern what someone has done. To claim that it exhausts what he might yet become would assume an authority the epigraph has already placed in question. Wheat grows beyond the hand that first held it, without ceasing to have come from that grain.

By this point, my impatience with the characters’ romantic entanglements had begun to expose a failure in my own attention. What if we brought to our spiritual lives even a portion of the ingenuity expended here on discovering who loves whom? So much feeling goes toward making another person confirm an identity its owner scarcely believes in. Dostoevsky gives this waste its full, often comic duration, then lets a gesture of kindness interrupt its apparent importance. A remembered act of tenderness may survive for years before finding an occasion to help. Its giver need never witness the result. Here the fruit promised in the New Testament exceeds the individual’s desire to inspect his own goodness. The act passes into a future beyond his possession, carrying the possibility of further giving. A field has no single center from which every stalk can be counted.

I return, then, to the smallness of what Dostoevsky places before this immense novel. The corn of wheat bears a promise whose fulfillment requires surrender to a ground it cannot survey. Christ’s words touch characters struggling to give up the versions of themselves that have made love impossible, even as Ivan refuses to let anyone’s hope cancel a child’s cry. Both claims must stay audible. The book’s religious force depends upon how deeply the cry troubles the hope, and how persistently love answers by staying with the sufferer. Reading it, I grow less interested in possessing the right explanation of a life than in what my explanation might prevent me from giving. Somewhere beyond the last sentence, an unrequited duty waits for the reader who would rather remain moved. The grain is still in our hands.

Caroline Davis/Grey Mcmurray/Qasim Naqvi: Trappings of Sleep

| Tyran Grillo

On Trappings of Sleep, the latest release from former ECM producer Sun Chung’s Red Hook imprint, every musical phrase bears record of an intercepted confidence. Caroline Davis’s alto saxophone and electronics extend the body into that disruption, while Grey Mcmurray’s guitar illuminates the intervening dark. Qasim Naqvi approaches the drums with an alertness that makes even the smallest quiver consequential. Together, they suggest an observatory of reflection. Recorded in Brooklyn in May 2025, the album gathers compositions by each participant, giving their instinctive rapport a written framework that remains open to the discoveries of performance. Across this Red Hook Records release, the ear adjusts to unfamiliar magnitudes, discovering that a barely sustained tone can occupy an enormous expanse. The invitation is to listen beyond the point at which recognition usually permits us to stop.

The fascination of “Three” begins in its agitated details, which draw us toward something whose dimensions remain uncertain. Davis brings a palpable warmth to the emerging forms, allowing the alto’s physical character to persist amid the electronic shimmer. Her playing keeps a human presence within reach, however strange the surrounding coordinates become. A related restlessness inhabits “Joust,” where the guitar’s fractured gestures and the drums’ shifting footing make the encounter more volatile. Davis cuts her own path through their activity, her lines retaining an elusive quality even at their most incisive. That roughness makes the album’s beauty feel provisional, keeping the dark alive with possible disruptions. These musicians can expose an unstable surface while making us want to approach it, trusting curiosity to carry us across.

Another scale of movement becomes perceptible in the title track, where recurring guitar figures make the passing seconds unusually tangible. As the ear grows familiar with their contours, Davis discloses variations of feeling within the repetitions, and Naqvi’s restraint allows their weight to register. When writing the liner notes for this album, I described its human current in these terms: “Connection appears as a vibration that cannot be possessed.” Here, that thought acquires the delicacy of light arriving at a lens, its journey briefly gathered into an image. “Pulse” approaches the question of duration through Mcmurray’s guitar delays, giving an earlier gesture another life within the ensemble’s unfolding present. Davis and Naqvi attend to those continuations with care, accommodating sounds whose beginnings already belong to the past. An almost vertiginous depth opens between the initial articulation and its persistence, as the musicians respond to what is still arriving. Repetition acquires a peculiar poignancy here, allowing an echo to carry something of the tenderness we reserve for a departing voice.

Such temporal distances find a spatial counterpart in the relationships surrounding Davis’s melodic presence. “Out of the Way of It” brings her into close alignment with Mcmurray, their unisons giving the ear a slender means of orientation as Naqvi keeps motion supple beneath them. The longer perspective of “Mono Lake” leaves the saxophone more exposed, its inflections coming into focus within the sparer accompaniment. Following a phrase becomes an encounter with the effort of sustaining it, the instrument’s warmth made more affecting by the quiet around its edges. Mcmurray and Naqvi offer support with enough restraint to preserve the solitude of Davis’s line, and that balance rewards sustained attention. We hear how a musician can remain alone within a thought while being accompanied through its consequences. The observatory has discovered something familiar at an impossible remove, and the familiar has acquired the strangeness of being seen through fresh eyes.

The aperture narrows further in “The Toy,” until a melody seems capable of containing all the distance through which we have been listening. The tune has an openness that Davis inhabits without reserve, and Mcmurray’s replies shade its directness with an ache that remains difficult to name. Naqvi attends to that vulnerability through the delicacy of his interventions, keeping the surrounding activity close to the song’s emotional center. Something private has come within range, and the musicians preserve its fragility throughout the encounter. The recording’s wider expanses make this nearness especially affecting, since we have grown accustomed to searching for signs at the edge of perception. Even a modest melodic gesture now reaches us with the force of personal address, bringing the remote directly into the hands.

That address becomes more elusive in “Say It,” where Davis lets the edges of an utterance blur and the ensemble sustains the feeling left hanging around it. An incomplete statement can reveal how much of communication depends on another person’s attention, and the music gives that dependence an audible form. “Media Training” extends the inquiry into the uneasy business of presenting oneself for an audience, its title bringing a public gaze into this otherwise intimate encounter. The performance draws vitality from the friction between expression and the shapes through which expression becomes recognizable. We hear the players negotiating that friction without settling into a fixed representation of themselves, preserving the subtle departures through which a living voice escapes its portrait.

The album’s title leaves us hovering over the uncertain border between surrender and vigilance, where the mind’s loosened grip can sharpen the ear. Its vision moves by changes of focus, finding immensity within the interval between one musician’s decision and another’s response. For all the reach of its electronic extensions, the recording stays close to the bodies making it possible, preserving the sense that someone has risked a little of themselves in sending a sound outward. Listening supplies the other end of that exposure, and the task feels more absorbing as our own surroundings recede into realms we had mistaken for emptiness.