Heinz Holliger/Marie-Lise Schüpbach: con slancio (ECM New Series 2807)

| Tyran Grillo

Heinz Holliger
Marie-Lise Schüpbach
con slancio

Heinz Holliger oboe, English horn, Sprechstimme
Marie-Lise Schüpbach English horn, oboe
Recorded July/August 2020
Radiostudio DRS Zürich
Engineer: Andreas Werner
Cover photo: Jean-Marc Dellac
An ECM Production
Release date: February 6, 2026

“I don’t want to communicate something definite, something concrete. I find music entirely unsuited for that.”
–Heinz Holliger

This latest recording for ECM New Series by Heinz Holliger and Marie-Lise Schüpbach, who last appeared together on 2019’s Zwiegespräche, feels less like a recital than an extended meditation on the tremor that precedes orality. Across its span, the oboe becomes a site where language approaches, falters, and reconstitutes itself. Holliger’s return to composing for the instrument after decades of reticence gives the album its emotional and philosophical axis. In the booklet interview with Michael Kunkel, he speaks of Klangrede, a kind of sonic declamation in which music thinks aloud without becoming discourse. Rhythm for him is not a law but a mood. “Only in strict moments do I use a rigid framework,” he admits, “otherwise, I simply can’t bear it.” One hears in this a deeper suspicion of any language that hardens into doctrine. Music, he insists, is abused when reduced to a message. There is no lesson here, only a soul seeking its acoustical climate. With the oboe, that climate is paradoxical, what he calls “speaking with a closed mouth.” The entire program plays with this idea, as if testing how much meaning can survive in the face of a written score.

Holliger’s own con slancio from 2018 opens the project like a gasp before a sentence. Played by him alone, it begins with a leaping gesture that keeps missing its metrical footing. Fluttering figures scatter upward into brief star-flecks of multiphonics before dissolving into a luminous fade. Rather than announcing a theme, the piece performs hesitation itself. This sense of suspended utterance returns in his Ständchen für Rosemarie, where the English horn spars with its own desire to communicate, turning inward midway to reveal dreams that feel both candid and concealed. The two duo pieces from 2019, Spiegel – LIED and LIED mit Gegenüber (contr’air), place melody inside a hall of distorting mirrors. In the first, microtonal inflections make each phrase mishear itself, whereas the second builds nested dialogues in which the instruments appear to listen to their own thoughts while voicing them. The later works Fangis (fang mich) and à deux – Adieu, both from 2020, entwine play and specter, quick verbal-like exchanges interrupted by haunted multiphonics that sound like syllables losing their jobs.

Around these pieces gathers a constellation of works written for Holliger over decades, each treating the oboe as a dialect in danger of dissolving. Toshio Hosokawa’s Musubi from 2019, for oboe and English horn, knots the two players together only to let them unravel again. The instruments align in heart yet retain separate bodies, inventing a private grammar of crane-like calls that shed purpose precisely by insisting on it. As articulation softens, the music sinks into a subliminal murmuring. Jürg Wyttenbach’s Sonate für Oboe solo from 1961 is an entire idiom compressed into four movements. The opening juxtaposes public proclamation with whispered aside, while the second turns inward like a language translating itself into secrecy. The third becomes a virtuosic thicket in which Holliger’s upper register fractures into glittering particles before the epilogue lets the instrument split its tongue into a dance that evaporates into silence.

Jacques Wildberger’s Rondeau für Oboe solo from 1962 begins with disarming lightness, a kind of conversational sparkle that slowly acquires gravity. Higher registers awaken like excited vowels, yet beneath them lingers the anxiety that too much thought can make flight impossible. György Kurtág’s con slancio, largamente from 2019, played on English horn, answers this with austere brevity. An opening octave plunges downward into the instrument’s dark interior, brushing past a fleeting memory of Bach before collapsing into aphorism, and aphorism into an empty shell. Rudolf Kelterborn’s Duett für Oboe und Englischhorn from 2017 initially speaks in whispers but soon weaves an intricate web of gestures, a conversation that proves restraint can be the most baroque form of eloquence.

Finally, Robert Suter’s Oh Boe für Oboe solo from 1999 becomes the album’s most openly linguistic experiment. Holliger adds Sprechstimme for this recording, a personal gloss absent from the score. The spoken fragments stumble between playfulness and severity, nonsense and revelation, as if caught in a productive net of aphasia. Directions trip, recombine, and disintegrate, scattering meaning across the floor for the listener to collect, knowing that some syllables will forever be missing.

Taken together, these pieces create a cartography of inaudibility. Breath functions as syntax, timbre as grammar, silence as punctuation. The oboe emerges not merely as an instrument but as a fragile throat, perpetually on the brink of forgetting how to talk and therefore speaking all the more urgently. Music here does not replace language, nor does language dominate music. Instead, both hover in a trembling middle space where saying and sounding keep mistranslating each other.

By the album’s close, one senses that meaning survives only by remaining porous. Every phrase feels as though it might dissolve before finishing itself, and that very instability is what keeps it alive. Speech does not end in sound, sound does not end in speech. They circle one another like letters afraid of becoming words.

UnderStories Ensemble: A French Odyssey – Music for two cellos & basso continuo by Rameau, Barrière, Corrette, Boismortier, Berteau & Patouart

| Tyran Grillo

This recording unfolds as a meditation on movement: of peoples, of sounds, of power, and of bodies both musical and political. Forged in the turbulence of the Enlightenment and shadowed by the first tremors of revolution, the repertoire gathered here belongs to a France that was simultaneously consolidating itself at home and projecting itself outward through trade, conquest, and imagination. The 18th century witnessed an unprecedented circulation of goods, ideas, and bodies, and with it came an uneasy reckoning. Curiosity and domination advanced together, and music became one of the most refined sites where that contradiction could be staged, aestheticized, and occasionally questioned.

As Marco Crosetto observes in the album’s liner notes, ports, salons, and theaters absorbed the sonic residue of these encounters. Foreign rhythms, borrowed gestures, and invented “elsewheres” entered French musical language not as faithful transcriptions but as carefully framed reflections of desire and anxiety. The exotic was never neutral. It arrived filtered through fantasy, hierarchy, and control, transforming distant cultures into mirrors for Europe’s own doubts about virtuous progress. Rousseau’s warning that civilization estranges humanity from itself hovers over this repertoire, not as philosophy alone but as sound. What Europe called expansion often sounded like displacement, and what it called novelty frequently concealed erasure.

At the center of this program stands another transformation, quieter but no less symbolic: the ascent of the cello. By the mid-18th century, its depth and resonance began to eclipse the viola da gamba, an instrument long entwined with aristocratic inheritance and established authority. This was not a clean overthrow. Old techniques were adapted, absorbed, and revoiced within new forms. The cello did not abolish the past; it reincarnated it. In that sense, the instrument becomes a metaphor of its time, negotiating between continuity and rupture, inheritance and reinvention.

This philosophy animates the debut of UnderStories, a French-Italian Baroque ensemble that listens downward rather than upward. With Mario Filippini on viola da gamba, Loris Guastella on percussion, Marco Crosetto on harpsichord, Silvia De Rosso on violone, Margherita Burattini on harp, and Bartolomeo Dandolo Marchesi and Clara Pouvreau on violoncello, the group privileges the low register as a site of agency rather than accompaniment. Their approach embraces a Baroque freedom in which instrumentation remains fluid and arrangements remain provisional. The past here is not embalmed; it is negotiated.

Jean-Baptiste Barrière (1707–1747) offers one of the most eloquent articulations of this new cello identity in the Sonata a tre in D minor, No. 2, Book III (c. 1736). The opening Adagio unfolds with restrained longing, its melodic lines reaching outward as though aware of distance itself. The ensuing Allegro brightens the terrain without abandoning depth, allowing the ensemble’s tactile sonority to come fully into focus. Fingers, strings, and wood remain audible partners in the discourse, while the harpsichord gleams with controlled brilliance. The Aria sinks back into introspection, its melancholy exquisitely weighted, before the final Giga steps forward with buoyant resolve, dancing toward a horizon that remains deliberately unattainable.

Martin Berteau (1691–1771), trained on the viola da gamba and later a founding figure of the French cello school, embodies the transformation made audible. His Sonata a tre No. 6, Op. 1 (c. 1748) moves effortlessly between robustness and tenderness, never allowing one to eclipse the other. The harp’s presence lends an enchanted glow while also deepening the harmonic shadows beneath the surface. The central Siciliana stands as one of the album’s most persuasive moments, poised and inward, balancing restraint with warmth. Here, delicacy becomes discipline, and the ensemble articulates Berteau’s lines with refinement. This sonata emerges as a quiet manifesto for continuity through change.

Interwoven among these instrumental works are reflective pauses that clarify lineage. Marco Crosetto’s Prélude à l’imitation de Mr L. Couperin and Margherita Burattini’s Prélude à l’imitation de MM. Rameau et Naderman serve not as interruptions but as footnotes in sound. These solo interludes acknowledge ancestry while refusing nostalgia, reminding the listener that, in this century, imitation was a standard mode of dialogue.

Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683–1764) looms over the program not merely as a composer but as a cultural architect. His opera-ballet Les Indes Galantes appears throughout in carefully chosen arrangements that foreground both its brilliance and its complications. The Ritournelle pour “Le Turc généreux” and the Tambourins I–II, arranged respectively by Bartolomeo Dandolo Marchesi and the UnderStories Ensemble, pulse with rhythmic vitality and folk-tinged energy. Percussion and interwoven strings generate an intoxicating surface, yet beneath the dance lies a careful staging of difference. Rameau’s music constructs the foreign as spectacle, inviting admiration while maintaining control.

This tension becomes more explicit in the Air pour “Les Sauvages” and Air pour “Les Esclaves Africains”, both arranged by Clara Pouvreau, as well as the Air des Incas, arranged by Silvia De Rosso. These pieces dramatize otherness through bold rhythm, percussive force, and ceremonial pacing. They reveal how European music transformed colonized peoples into sonic symbols, vessels for projected fantasies of innocence, savagery, or nobility. The ensemble’s gravelly strings and emphatic rhythms refuse to smooth over this history. Instead, they allow the weight of representation to be felt, asking the listener not merely to enjoy the sound, but to interrogate its framing.

That interrogation deepens in Rameau’s “L’Égyptienne” from Nouvelles Suites de pièces de Clavecin RCT 5–6, arranged by Bartolomeo Dandolo Marchesi. The piece is a dramatic masterstroke, yet its allure destabilizes admiration itself. Exotic color here becomes a lens of appropriation, reminding us that fascination often coexists with domination. The music dazzles, then unsettles, forcing a reckoning with the cost of its own beauty.

Louis-François-Joseph Patouart (1719–1793) brings the program into remarkable focus with the Sonate en trio pour deux violoncelles et une contrebasse No. 6, Op. 2 (c. 1750), presented here in a world premiere recording. The opening Adagio unfolds with luxuriant depth, the instrumental blend feeling both inevitable and freshly imagined. Gavottes follow with confident verve, their brightness never shallow, while the Minuettos grow from gentle poise into declarative presence. The music seems to test its own balance between symmetry and surprise.

Joseph Bodin de Boismortier (1689–1755) contributes a different energy in the Sonate en trio No. 5, Op. 37 (1732). Its opening movement bursts forward with rhythmic assurance, pressing against borders rather than merely crossing them. The central Largo finds unexpected poignancy, pausing to reflect before the final movement reasserts momentum with dynamic wit. Boismortier’s voice here feels pragmatic yet searching, a composer aware of the pleasures of motion and its costs.

Michel Corrette (1707–1795) closes the journey with “Le Phénix,” concerto pour quatre violoncelles, violes ou bassons(c. 1735). The work’s lively opening ushers the listener into a richly variegated sound world, followed by a tender slow movement that invites collective listening rather than display. The final Allegro rises with confident vitality, its interplay among strings suggesting renewal without amnesia.

By the end of this album, motion itself emerges as the central theme. Instruments migrate, genres adapt, and cultures encounter one another in asymmetrical exchanges that leave lasting marks. UnderStories does not attempt to resolve the contradictions embedded in this repertoire. Instead, the ensemble listens into them, allowing beauty and unease to coexist. In doing so, the recording offers a philosophical proposition as much as a musical one: that history speaks most honestly when we allow its fractures to resonate, and that listening, when practiced with care, can become an ethical act. The past does not ask for absolution. It asks for attention.

Julia Hülsmann Octet: While I Was Away (ECM 2869)

| Tyran Grillo

Julia Hülsmann Octet
While I Was Away

Aline Frazão vocals
Live Maria Roggen vocals
Michael Schiefel vocals
Héloïse Lefebvre violin
Susanne Paul violoncello
Julia Hülsmann piano
Eva Kruse double bass
Eva Klesse drums
Recorded September 2023
Hansa Studio, Berlin
Engineer: Nanni Johansson
Cover design: Sascha Kleis
An ECM Production

Following a lineage of quartet formations, including 2025’s Under The Surface, Julia Hülsmann now opens the doors wide and lets the air rush in. With bassist Eva Kruse and drummer Eva Klesse anchoring the pulse, and the strings of violinist Héloïse Lefebvre and cellist Susanne Paul adding tensile grace, Hülsmann’s piano becomes both compass and hearth. The true masterstroke, however, is the inclusion of three voices, each bearing a distinct history and hue. Aline Frazão, Live Maria Roggen, and Michael Schiefel do not merely sing atop the arrangements. They inhabit them, converse with them, and occasionally conspire against them, for the greater good of surprise.

The album begins with an invocation. “Coisário De Imagens,” drawn from the songwriting partnership of Rosanna & Zélia, brings warmth and motion. This is music that knows how to smile without grinning. Brushed drums sway, the strings shimmer with purpose, and Aline Frazão’s voice carries the tune with organic ease. The groove settles into the body quickly, yet it never stagnates. As voices pull back, cello and piano exchange signatures like old friends swapping secrets, revealing the song’s interior logic with a quiet confidence. Thus, the listener is ushered into a world whose colors feel freshly mixed.

Frazão remains a guiding presence on two Hülsmann settings, each offering a turn of the emotional prism. “Sleep,” based on Emily Dickinson’s meditation on rest and repose, dims the lights and invites reflection. Day and night are no longer opposites here but gradients, each shade carrying its own emotional charge. The ensemble responds with restraint and intent, carving space for a bass solo that speaks with an unguarded eloquence. Hülsmann follows, her piano widening the horizon, patient yet searching, as though mapping the distance between thought and feeling. “Hora Azul,” with lyrics by Frazão herself, deepens the inward gaze. This is a song of attention, of moments caught before they slip through the cracks. A steady piano figure and gently strained strings hold the listener in place, ensuring that the insight offered does not vanish with the final chord.

Michael Schiefel arrives like a flash of theatrical lighting. On Ani DiFranco’s “Up, Up, Up, Up, Up, Up,” he revives the song from its 90s origins and gives it a new passport. Familiar contours remain, but the emotional terrain has shifted. Schiefel’s voice leans into vulnerability and abrasion in equal measure, allowing feeling to fray at the edges. A violin solo spices the mix, proving that nostalgia need not be stale. Hülsmann’s setting of “You Come Back” (with words by Margaret Atwood) sharpens the focus further. A geometric vamp populates the dance floor, and Schiefel’s diction slices cleanly through expectation, revealing scenes of emotional negotiation and unsettled bonds as energy accumulates. On “Iskele,” Schiefel contributes his own composition, rich with understated drama and a quiet electric charge. Morning and night coexist here, possibility balanced against reflection. His presence recalls the particular sort of art song and theatrical jazz that distinguishes Michael Mantler’s work, lending the album an added layer of dramaturgy.

Live Maria Roggen brings a Scandinavian clarity and a gift for storytelling that feels both intimate and expansive. “Felicia’s Song” unfolds like a memory allowed to speak for itself, uncorrected and unpolished. The instrumental center glows with Hülsmann’s melodic assurance, her piano both narrator and witness. “Moonfish Dance” lifts the tempo, introduced by playful pizzicato that clears the stage for Roggen’s imagery. There is a gentle tilt toward the surreal, a reminder that wonder thrives when routine loosens its grip. On “Walkside,” Roggen’s lyrics meet the bandleader’s music in a tender alliance. The tune rocks with a soft inevitability, carrying reflections on time, travel, and promises bent but not broken. Loss and repair intermingle, and the song trusts the listener to hold both in equal measure.

The album’s heartbeat arrives with “TicToc,” Hülsmann’s inspired setting of E. E. Cummings. Here, whimsy becomes discipline. Multiple voices articulate a spoken refrain with crystalline precision, honoring Cummings’s playful defiance of linguistic order.

By the time the final notes fade, the scope of the project comes fully into view. This is not simply a collection of songs but a carefully plotted journey, one that treats collaboration as a way of life rather than logistics. Hülsmann has assembled a community of voices and instruments that dialogue and dream together. The album listens as much as it speaks, and in doing so, it achieves a rare sense of scale. It feels lived in, thought through, and generously offered. What lingers is not just melody or craft, but the sense of having traveled somewhere expansive, a place where time, language, and sound conspire to remind us how large music can be when it refuses to stay in its lane.

Roberto Masotti: Keith Jarrett – A Portrait

| Tyran Grillo

Italian photographer Roberto Masotti (1947-2022) was among the most perceptive visual chroniclers of modern music, a figure whose work shaped the sensibility of ECM Records. His photographs graced nearly two hundred covers and booklets for the label, forming a parallel archive to the music itself. From the austere radiance of Officium to the quietly arresting portrait of John Cage that frames Herbert Henck’s recording of the composer’s early piano works, Masotti played a role in defining how this music would be seen, approached, and remembered. He was not merely a documentarian of studio sessions but a devoted listener whose camera functioned as a secondary instrument, tuned to the inner heartbeat of performance. Nowhere is this fusion of attention more evident than in Keith Jarrett: A Portrait, a volume that reads less as a record of appearances than as an extended act of listening rendered visible.

Masotti’s own words illuminate his method with uncommon clarity. “In this series of photographs that I observe with a retrospective gaze,” he writes, “I play with the concept of presence, that one of the body and the one of the instrument, which appear and disappear in the image.” He speaks not of capture but of exchange, of an intimacy grounded in restraint. These photographs arise from what he calls an “objective attention” shaped by long admiration, yet they are equally the result of Jarrett’s conscious acceptance and active participation. The images are thus collaborative in spirit, not imposed from without but allowed to unfold through mutual recognition. What remains is an archive that resonates with sound even in silence.

To move through the sequence so carefully composed in this book is to encounter a photographer who understands that an artist such as Jarrett cannot be approached through biography or chronology alone. Masotti storytells through a mode of looking that resembles ritual, one without a prescribed outcome, sustained only by attention. For him, photography does not consist of isolated instants but of moments, a distinction that carries ethical weight. Within a moment, an entire accumulation of experience can register itself through posture, gesture, or stillness. This understanding leads naturally to a deeper inquiry: what, after all, constitutes a portrait?

In Masotti’s hands, the portrait ceases to be an act of description. It becomes a site of encounter where identity is neither fixed nor fully disclosed. A portrait does not declare who its subject is; it asks how presence manifests, and under what conditions it withdraws. In this sense, the portrait is not a mirror but a threshold. It holds open the possibility that what is most essential about a person may resist total visibility. Masotti seems keenly aware of this tension. He recognizes the value of distance, of knowing when not to press closer, of allowing the subject’s aura to assemble itself without the insistence of the lens. This discipline is inseparable from his deep admiration for Jarrett, an admiration rooted not in fandom but in experiential listening. He does not set out to check off the pianist’s achievements so much as to dwell within their unfolding.

It was through Jarrett, in fact, that Masotti first came into ECM Records’ orbit. At the pianist’s recommendation, he traveled to Munich in 1973 to present a photo shoot to producer Manfred Eicher. The encounter proved decisive. The images were received enthusiastically and would soon be incorporated into the Bremen/Lausanne release of that same year, marking the beginning of a collaboration that would shape the label’s visual identity for decades to come.

Jarrett’s well-known sensitivity to distraction during performance posed a particular challenge. To photograph him in action required not only technical skill but a form of empathy calibrated to the moment. Masotti met this challenge with a chameleonic tact, adapting himself to the environment rather than imposing upon it. The resulting images often unfold in a montage that feels almost cinematic, though they never lapse into spectacle. Their power lies in continuity, in the quiet accumulation of gestures and expressions that suggest movement beyond the frame.

1971, Miles Davis Group, Philarmonie di Berlino
1973, Monaco di Baviera, America Haus, soundcheck
1974, Pescara, Jazz Festival
1999, Verona, Arena, Jazz Festival, with Manfred Eicher
2002, Lucca, Summer Festival

Taken together, the images chart Jarrett’s evolution from a fiercely expressive sideman in the orbit of Miles Davis to an increasingly enigmatic figure, and finally to a singular presence in solo improvisation. Yet the photographs resist narrative closure. They do not resolve into a story so much as a constellation of states. Among them, one image stands apart. It is the second one above, where Jarrett’s face appears refracted in soft color, suspended between clarity and dissolution. Masotti, a photographer of formidable technical command, rarely indulged in overt manipulation. Here, however, he allows the image to drift toward the spectral. The effect is restrained yet profound. It touches something central to Jarrett’s music, its simultaneous rootedness in the physical act of playing and its persistent reaching beyond the self. The photograph carries within it a residue of sound, an afterimage of music that seems to hover just beyond reach.

Keith Jarrett: A Portrait proposes a way of seeing that honors absence as much as presence. Masotti reminds us that the deepest forms of attention do not seek to possess their subject. They remain open, patient, and receptive. The book closes with a quiet suspension between composition and improvisation, as though the music has not ended but simply moved elsewhere. In that lingering space, photographer and musician meet on equal terms, each attentive to the other, and to the fragile, enduring moment they share.

Björn Meyer: Convergence (ECM 2844)

| Tyran Grillo

Björn Meyer
Convergence

Björn Meyer 6-string electric bass
Recorded September 2024
Bavaria Musikstudios, München
Engineer: Michael Hinreiner
Cover photo: Jan Kricke
Produced by Manfred Eicher

In the wake of 2017’s Provenance, Björn Meyer widens his territorial reach on the six-string electric bass with a second solo album that feels less concerned with claiming ground than with listening for its contours. His ever-deepening attunement to space and the forms that allow it to exist becomes the true subject here, and his skills are offered not as a display of mastery but as the slow emergence of a language still discovering its grammar. What might initially register as post-production illusion reveals itself, upon closer attention, to be articulated in real time through a deft choreography of live effects. Magnets prepare the instrument for unfamiliar conversations, finger tapping redraws its internal architecture, and entire washes of sound are permitted to overtake the listener in search of calm.

The album opens with its title track, setting a narrative in motion while refusing to pin it down. Each encounter reshapes the story, rearranging its implications without altering its essence. A fuzzy tone carries a gentle spirit within it, one that moves the way sediment drifts and resettles after a glass of wine has been swirled. Notes surface in reverse order, establishing a tonal context in which the debris of this slow-motion tornado can be articulated through pointillism. The resulting shape and flavor recall Steve Reich’s Electric Counterpoint, though here the patterning feels provisional, animated by a restless urge to stray just as readily as it returns. Deeper strums and higher callings exchange roles, and the sky above the music darkens by degrees, one shade at a time.

As the climate of “Hiver” briefly brightens the scene, it emits a particular quality of light, the muted radiance that arrives under an overcast sky on the verge of snowfall. In this moment, it becomes clear that the narrative forming across the album is inward-facing. This is not the documentation of a journey so much as the journey undertaken by the one who documents. When the echoing bird calls of “Drift” begin to tug at the soul, they do not ask for permission. Direction is accepted without resistance, and the listener seeps further into the flow of time, less a passenger than a dissolving witness. “Gravity” resists the comfort of arrival altogether, suspending any promise of destination in favor of an elliptical song that bends back on itself. Meyer’s guitaristic approach draws a rose’s worth of texture and fragrance from the bass, unfolding petal by petal until only the stem remains. In “Motion,” it becomes a receiver tuned to a distant transmission. Subtle glitches and pulses trace the heartbeat of another time, and when that signal falls silent, only an echo remains to confirm it ever existed.

With “On Hope,” fluttering wings and a tactile fuselage lend lift to the album’s vessel, suggesting ascent without insisting upon it. Just as the cusp seems within reach, a malfunction intervenes, pulling everything back into the improvisational clang and hum of “Rewired.” The interruption does not feel punitive but necessary, a reminder that flight depends on friction as much as flow. When the circuitry is restored and life resumes its forward momentum, “Magnétique” extends the promise of repair. Its circular motifs and palpable sense of contact arrive as a blessing to worn ears, sound reconnecting with touch. That promise finds its fulfillment in “Nesodden,” which lowers itself not into sleep but into a state of awakening, discovering tenderness in the act of becoming and allowing that discovery to stand on its own.

This music reaches us only after its initial blaze has already passed, its transient glory having dispersed into silence somewhere beyond our reach. What remains is not absence but residue, an ember glow that warms the present without explaining itself. To listen is to accept that distance, to recognize that meaning does not diminish as it travels, and to sit quietly with the feeling that something vast has chosen, briefly and generously, to make itself known.

Alessandro Sgobbio: Piano Music 3

| Tyran Grillo

To say that Piano Music 3 continues where Alessandro Sgobbio left off on Piano Music 2 would be misleading, since this record feels less a step forward than a careful turning back toward the source, a reversal that reveals new truths by retracing old paths. The electronics remain, but rather than projecting momentum they seem to seep inward, extracting hidden ligaments from the piano’s body and letting them fall gently into the past. In “De Dei Dono,” barely discernible voices hover at the threshold of language, murmuring reminders that intention and consequence are often separated by a breath, that meaning arrives only after action has already passed. This dissolves seamlessly into the fragile radiance of “Red Gold,” an acoustic meditation whose quiet grandeur carries the weight of countless unnamed lives, each one lifted briefly from the archive of history and consigned to its fire, not to be erased but transmuted. “Echoes” reopens the digital aperture, arranging time with almost devotional care, as if memory itself were being sorted and polished in a dream. When the world outside feels uninhabitable, the music invites retreat into an interior sanctuary where despair still sings and hope persists despite knowing better, each phrase reaching upward while slowly collapsing. Within this tension, “Dogs On 5th Avenue” arrives with startling clarity, a cinematic reverie steeped in nostalgia that gestures toward a vanished geography preserved only on fragile film. Each return to it wears away more detail, faces softening into abstraction, footsteps advancing with quiet resolve while already suspecting the promise of arrival. As “Dawns (صور)” unfurls, beauty and grief become inseparable, and the act of listening feels perilously close to mourning, an unguarded response to the daily violence done to faith and empathy by a world addicted to fear. In such a climate, music offers not escape but a rare form of repair. “Veils” draws the self inward with measured grace, its flowing arpeggios and subtle electronic pulses converging into something revelatory, shedding concealment rather than enforcing it, blooming into nocturnal tenderness and the possibility of love. “Forte Rocca,” Sgobbio’s reimagining of Martin Luther’s “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” speaks with austere urgency, reframing the piano as a structure of shelter and resistance. At last, “Alang” advances carefully into first light, bearing the quiet residue of what has been lost so that something else may endure, leaving the listener suspended between fragility and resolve, uncertain yet unwilling to surrender the hope that survival itself can still be an act of grace.

Alessandro Sgobbio: Piano Music 2

| Tyran Grillo

After the intimate unveiling of Piano Music, Alessandro Sgobbio returns to place his instrument’s confessional power in a wider field of air and signal. This new work feels like a continuation of the same diary, only now the pages have been left open by a window. Live electronics enter not as ornament or distraction but as a means of listening more deeply. They clarify rather than obscure, giving the emotional truths at hand a longer reach, a resonance that lingers beyond the touch of the keys. What emerges is music that invites the listener to sit with it, inhabit its spaces, and recognize healing as slow, attentive, and unfinished.

From the outset, the album announces itself as a journey. “Keys And Returns” drifts with a sense of cautious freedom, as if learning to trust its own motion again. The surrounding sounds resemble nocturnal life, insects and birds rendered as soft static, not imitations of nature but its memory. These textures frame longer shadows, suggesting movement without urgency. It is the first step outside after a long confinement, when the world is still strange and full of promise.

That sense of tentative grace deepens in “Modular Circles,” where time itself seems to loosen its grip. Here, the added layers feel inseparable from the instrument’s inner life, as if dreaming aloud. Reflections wobble gently, disturbed just enough to remind us that memory is never still. Through subtle live manipulations, Sgobbio traces the outlines of absence and presence, ghosts that do not haunt so much as accompany. There is urgency, but it is the urgency of care, of knowing that attention itself is an ethical act.

Healing takes the form of water in “The River,” which salves a wound trembling in the night air. The music flows inward before opening outward, carrying introspection toward release, bearing the promise of another morning. It is not triumph that is offered here, but continuity. The simple assurance that movement, however gentle, is still movement.

Moments of restraint are equally vital. “Fondamenta De La Tana,” stripped of digital decoration, arrives like a hymn. Its solitude feels intentional, a reminder that healing also requires silence and unadorned speech. “Tula” follows with similar tenderness, notes hovering in reverie while distant traces flutter at the edges, as if the world were listening back. These pieces do not interrupt the album’s arc but ground it, reinforcing that the electronics are a choice among many ways of speaking.

The twin invocations of “Asker” feel like messages transmitted across thresholds. In “Asker (Light),” distant signals glow with the promise of peace earned through endurance. It acknowledges hardship without sanctification, offering instead a fragile hope that gives direction to wandering. Later, in “Asker (Trees),” that dialogue becomes almost conversational. Echoes are transformed into melodies, and melodies into the possibility of renewal.

“Îlot Chalon” briefly unsettles the calm, pairing pulsing undercurrents with a lyrical surface. Distortion presses upward, threatening to fracture the flow, yet beauty prevails, not by force but by persistence. It is a reminder that conflict is not foreign to healing, but part of its texture. The album closes with “Einhausung,” a fleeting moment of intimacy that feels like a hand resting on the shoulder. Nothing is resolved, yet everything is held.

Throughout, Sgobbio’s care is evident in every note and every silence. These are not performances designed to impress; they are reflections offered with humility. The electronics never cloud the piano’s voice but instead sharpen its emotional lucidity, extending feeling into space where it can be shared. By the end, the listener is handed something more generous than closure: time.

Theo Bleckmann/Joseph Branciforte: LP2

| Tyran Grillo

LP2 surfaces as memory: already in motion, already altered by time. It emerges from conditions set long before its contours became audible, shaped by residue and intention held in suspension. Vocalist Theo Bleckmann and electronic musician and producer Joseph Branciforte return to a shared language first articulated on 2019’s LP1, though “return” feels imprecise. What unfolds resembles a sustained act of listening.

The album opens in a state of half-awareness. Sound drifts forward without a fixed point of origin, part breath, part circuitry, voice and machine dissolving into one another before any roles can be assigned. Nothing announces itself. Instead, the ear is gently reoriented, adjusting to a space where boundaries have softened and distinctions lose urgency. Understanding gathers slowly, arriving through familiarity, through the sensation of being inside something that has been waiting.

This threshold was never intended. The opening fragment began as a technical aside, a moment caught incidentally and set aside. Heard on its own, it revealed an unexpected gravity. What might have been dismissed instead became a doorway that refused to close. Folding it back into earlier work no longer felt possible. From that insistence, LP2 quietly took form, bound to its predecessor through consequence.

Years removed from its initial capture, the album reads as an extended aftereffect. Its modest length disguises the precision of its attention. The exchange between Bleckmann’s mercurial voice and Branciforte’s powered architectures has grown increasingly permeable, unconcerned with hierarchy or authorship. Sound operates as shared terrain, a meeting place for intention, accident, and recollection.

Where LP1 favored immediacy, time is now allowed to fold inward. Improvisation remains central, guided by images, instructions, and gestures that never fully declare themselves. Layers are revisited and subtly reconfigured. At moments, structure briefly surfaces, a harmony aligning, a texture clarifying, before dissolving back into motion. What persists is the sensation of listening under pressure, of sound shaped by forces it cannot articulate.

Several longer works act as gravitational centers. In the opening piece, “1.13,” the voice strains toward release but remains suspended within a luminous enclosure. Light translates itself into sound, illuminating an abyss shaped by collective longing. Movement is tentative, nearly imperceptible, as if forward motion itself has grown uncertain. Falsetto phrases assert presence with quiet insistence, only to be repeatedly subsumed. The calm suggested on the surface carries an undercurrent of warning, a reminder that serenity and menace often coexist.

“11.15” unfolds as a contemplative space. Its pulse and interwoven voices, punctuated by gong-like resonances, suggest ritual, encouraging attention over destination. “7.21” permits deeper aporias. Here, Bleckmann elicits more palpable gestures, a vulnerability that feels unguarded and exposed. That tactility continues into “9.23,” where hymn-like passages orbit their own unraveling. The voice moves between grit and elevation, traversing emotional thresholds in compressed succession. Glockenspiel tones glimmer at the margins, offering fleeting points of orientation, reminders of impermanence.

Threaded throughout these pillars are shorter interludes that function as glitchy nervous tissue. They interrupt continuity, splintering the listening experience into moments of raw recall. These fragments feel unearthed, surfacing abruptly and vanishing just as quickly. Each prevents comfort from settling too fully. Among them, “10.17.13” leaves the most haunting imprint. Its click-driven pulse and premature dissipation suggest erosion in real time, the sound of something slipping beyond reach.

For all its beauty and atmosphere, LP2 carries a persistent shadow. It does not attempt to diagnose. Space is left open for reflection, trusting the listener to bring their own histories into the exchange. The album offers no tools, no instructions. It sings quietly toward the places where repair might begin, leaving discovery in our hands. What is reclaimed in this way carries a different weight. Recognition arrives slowly, shaped by attention, and whatever healing emerges feels earned, never bestowed.

Craig Taborn/Tomeka Reid/Ches Smith: Dream Archives (ECM 2833)

| Tyran Grillo

Craig Taborn
Tomeka Reid
Ches Smith
Dream Archives

Craig Taborn piano, keyboard, electronics
Tomeka Reid violoncello
Ches Smith drums, vibraphone, percussion, electronics
Recorded January 2024
Firehouse 12, New Haven
Engineer: Nick Lloyd
Mixed by Craig Taborn, Manfred Eicher, and Michael Hinreiner (engineer)
Bavaria Musikstudios, München, July 2025
Cover photo: Thomas Wunsch
Album produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: January 16, 2026

After beguiling audiences during their 2025 German tour in anticipation of the album at hand, pianist Craig Taborn, cellist Tomeka Reid, and percussionist Ches Smith align their trio for ECM’s first release of 2026. The title, Dream Archives, frames the music in the most charming of contradictions. Does it propose a vault where dreams can be stored, catalogued, and retrieved at will, filed away under emotional subject headings? Or does it imply that dreams themselves function as archives, containing versions of ourselves we would never dare to perform while awake? The answer seems to flicker between both states, never settling, always indexing something just out of reach.
 
The opening lines of “Coordinates For The Absent” lean toward the former interpretation through their careful laying down of intent. Subtle electronic signals hang in the air, suspended as if awaiting authorization, and the piece offers itself as a puzzle box of possibility, one that opens only when the correct sequence of ambient gestures is entered. Each removal reveals another chamber until a nexus of musicianship appears that feels parthenogenetic. What unfolds is a system waking up, blinking itself into awareness.
 
From this tender pile of ashes rises “Feeding Maps To The Fire,” a phoenix song rendered with turn-on-a-dime precision and lightning-fast cognition. Reid circles the square, squaring the circle even, granting Taborn and Smith a territory they can claim equally with hands and feet. Her transitions from declaration to sublimation arrive with uncanny grace, functioning as a single conductive wire of intention that transmits thought across the studio in real time. Direction is fed directly into combustion here, and nothing burns without learning something new about its own heat.
 
“Dream Archive” opens with Smith on vibraphone doubling Taborn while Reid recalibrates the internal circuitry with a quiet furiosity that hums beneath the surface. Some of the session’s most intimate connections are forged in this space. An intelligent system comes online, discovering its cellular reality one line of musical code at a time. Still, the music never forgets the hand that writes the algorithm. There is a constant searching for connections that only breath, skin, and intention can provide. Motifs bend themselves into a twisted ballad before being pushed off a cliff, tumbling across jagged terrain, landing improbably intact, scuffed but smiling.
 
“Enchant” turns the night sky inside out and offers it as a writable surface, a palimpsest of the heart rendered in constellation and groove. Reid’s ostinato summons further digital traces, as though the hairs of her bow were the threads to which these signals cling, pulled magnetically toward a pulse that knows how to moonwalk away from expectation.
 
Set within this sea of Taborn originals are pieces by two of his guiding lights. Geri Allen’s “When Kabuya Dances” blossoms with the utmost delicacy, unfolding as a textile woven from shadow and intention. It searches for illumination in Taborn’s pianism and finds it as Reid and Smith combine their energies into ground, horizon, and sky. A stomping denouement introduces phenomenally geometric trio work, Reid on pizzicato assuming the role of bassist while Smith’s drumming speaks in joyful, articulated angles. The music smiles openly here, happiness not hinted at but announced, stamped, and joyfully notarized.
 
Paul Motian’s “Mumbo Jumbo” continues that spirit of play, revealing a compositional singularity in which Taborn clearly recognizes a kindred mind. Its angular melody opens the door to some of the trio’s most delicately adventurous exchanges. The tune carries a faint echo of Tchaikovsky’s “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy,” refracted through beat poetry, stripped of words, and filtered back into breath and wood and skin. Smith’s use of gong and timpani lends a ceremonial grandeur that never tips into pretension, offering Reid a tender surface upon which to draw her confident, decisive lines.
 
Ultimately, the dreamlike quality of Dream Archives does not arise from its unpredictability, nor from the way it renders the surreal inevitable. It emerges instead from the album’s theatrical intelligence. These performances understand that dreaming is an act, one that requires commitment, timing, and a willingness to forget oneself mid-gesture. The trio performs with the concentration of method actors who never break character because the character is the moment itself. In doing so, they blur the line between performer and listener, pulling us into their private syntax of meaning.
 
By the album’s close, the archive no longer feels like a place of storage but a living institution, one that rewrites itself each time it is entered. The dreams here are not preserved so much as rehearsed, practiced until they become fluent. When the final notes fade, it feels less as though the music has ended than as though we have woken up holding fragments we cannot fully explain. These are the kinds of dreams that follow you into daylight, that annotate your memory without permission, that insist on being remembered even as they refuse full recall. In that sense, we are reminded of how to keep dreaming with our eyes open, filing experience under wonder, and leaving the cabinet unlocked.