Vincent Lê Quang: Everlasting (RJAL 397038)

| Tyran Grillo

Vincent Lê Quang saxophones
Bruno Ruder piano
John Quitzke drums
Guido Zorn double bass
Recording, mixing, and mastering, Studios La Buissonne, Pernes-les-Fontaines, France
Recorded December 2019 and Mixed February 2020 by Gérard de Haro
Mastered by Nicolas Baillard at La Buissonne Mastering Studio
Steinway grand piano tuned and prepared by Sylvain Charles
Produced by Gérard de Haro and RJAL for La Buissonne label
Release date: May 21, 2021

Everlasting announces the leader debut of Vincent Lê Quang with a quiet assurance that feels anything but declarative. There is no display of ego here, no virtuosic flourish meant to dazzle. Instead, the album reveals a rarer mastery that effaces itself in service of listening. Lê Quang’s soprano and tenor do not dominate the space so much as inhabit it, breathing alongside pianist Bruno Ruder, drummer John Quitzke, and bassist Guido Zorn in a shared atmosphere where composition and improvisation dissolve into one another. What emerges is a music that seems already ancient, yet continually being born in the present.

This clarity of purpose stems from 12 years of collective life, the quartet bound by a mutual attentiveness that allows each piece to function as a portal to a clearer understanding of the self. Lê Quang speaks of his compositions as keys to a common state, and that metaphor becomes audible across the record. Each track opens a different interior landscape, yet all are connected by a shared commitment to the risk of being fully together in sound. Gérard de Haro’s production deepens this sense of communion, letting the music breathe within the luminous acoustics of Studios La Buissonne, where every resonance carries memory and every silence feels charged with possibility.

The album begins with an environment. In “L’odeur du buis,” piano and drums murmur from beneath the surface while the soprano rises gently into the night air, suspended above an arco bass that glows with lunar patience. Rather than announcing a theme, the piece slowly gathers a climate, a scent of darkness, foliage, and open sky. From this opening terrain, “La fugueuse” moves forward with subtle propulsion, water passing over unseen stones, the band drifting deeper into a current that neither rushes nor rests. These two tracks form a single act of arrival, a descent into the world the album will inhabit.

From there, the music shifts toward flowering and fracture. “Fleur” reveals some of the band’s most delicate interplay, cymbals shimmering with glasslike detail while Zorn’s bass traces a folk-tinged modal path. The group moves as one organism, loose at the edges yet inseparable at the core. This sense of collective breath reaches its most expansive form in “Everlasting,” a ballad built on tremor. Quitzke’s drumming hints at subterranean movement while piano, bass, and reed hold to a semblance of order, a belief that time can be counted. Gradually, that belief unravels. Flow becomes the governing principle of a rising density that never tips into excess, only into gravity.

A quieter inward turn follows. “Novembre” unfolds with the slowness of a season retracting into itself. This introspection deepens in “Une danse pour Wayne,” which refuses dance in favor of drift. Piano and drums speak in a near-telepathic dialogue, light touching darkness and returning transformed. Lê Quang’s soprano hovers above them, trembling with life yet strangely disembodied. Where these pieces search inward, “À rebours” stretches alone, a piano tendon extending between bone and air, longing without consolation.

The album then tilts toward the uncanny. “Dans la boîte à clous tous les clous sont tordus” begins with a solitary soprano that slowly gathers companions, the music assembling itself piece by piece. Tension accumulates, an electric expectancy that never resolves into release, and the listener is left suspended between dread and wonder. That unsettled feeling grows in “Le rêve d’une île,” a land that appears solid only to shift beneath the feet, and in “Rayon violet,” where breath rides atop shimmering harmonics, drawing a luminous arc through darkness.

With “Unaccounted-for pasts,” Lê Quang moves to tenor and opens a deeper register of uncertainty. The sound becomes cavernous, filled with echoes of memory that cannot be named. The album touches collective anxiety without ever becoming rhetorical, transforming fear into a shared vibration that binds the quartet more tightly together.

“Everlast” arrives not as a conclusion but as a threshold. The music hovers at the edge of sleep, brushing the listener with a tenderness that feels neither like a farewell nor a promise, simply a moment of contact. Consciousness thins, time loosens, and the sounds hover between presence and disappearance.

What this music ultimately gives is a space held in common, a quiet breathing room where listening becomes a form of companionship. Everlasting suggests a practice of attention that carries us beyond our habitual divisions of past and present, self and other, motion and stillness. In that quiet recognition lies its lasting power, an invitation to inhabit the space between knowing and listening, where meaning reveals itself on its own time.

Jeremy Lirola: Mock the Borders (RJAL 397036)

| Tyran Grillo

Jeremy Lirola double bass
Denis Guivarc’h alto saxophone
Maxime Sanchez piano, keyboards
Nicolas Larmignat drums
Recording, mixing, and mastering, Studios La Buissonne, Pernes-les-Fontaines, France
Recorded and mixed in June 2021 by Gérard de Haro
Mastered by Nicolas Baillard at La Buissonne Mastering Studio
Steinway grand piano tuned and prepared by Alain Massonneau
Produced by La Poulie Production & Gérard de Haro and RJAL for La Buissonne Label
Release date: October 8, 2021

On the heels of 2016’s Uptown Desire, Jeremy Lirola steps beyond the grid of New York City and into a wider, less mapped territory, exchanging subway tunnels for constellations. The shift feels less like a change of scenery than a recalibration of conscience. Lirola is listening deeper, sketching a music that resists the gravitational pull of imitation. Building on the spirit of Ornette Coleman’s Harmolodics, he cultivates individuality with the patience of someone tending rare seeds in a storm-blown garden. Creativity here becomes a quiet counterforce to a world that profits from sameness, speed, and surveillance, a reminder that difference can be a form of justice. Joined by alto saxophonist Denis Guivarc’h, pianist Maxime Sanchez, and drummer Nicolas Larmignat, Lirola assembles not just a band but a small republic of attentiveness, each member accountable to the others and to the air they share. Together they construct music that feels open as a plaza yet grounded like a hearth, spacious enough to wander and steady enough to return to.

The album opens with “Mock the Lines,” a room freshly burnished for arrival, its shine inviting reflection without vanity. The track feels both ceremonial and intimate, as though the listener is being asked to shed shoes and preconceptions. From this polished threshold, the group glides into “Living Symbols,” where groove sits in a warm pocket that is physical, spiritual, and conspiratorial all at once. Sanchez’s keyboards spread color like slow daylight across a floor, while Guivarc’h’s alto illuminates hidden corners. The quartet flows naturally into “Danced Border,” a piece that toys with the very idea of boundaries. Sanchez’s pianism ripples with curiosity over a rhythm that knows how to sway without surrendering its footing. The melodic convergence at the end is a sly reminder that lines are made to be questioned, crossed, and occasionally turned into song.

At this point, the record begins to behave like a set of ethical parables told in sound, sometimes laconic, sometimes luxuriant, always purposeful. “Sensitive Border” leads seamlessly into the expansive “Ghost Dance,” where Lirola’s bass takes on the role of a traveling griot with stories tucked into every string. The latter track hovers between what is seen and what is whispered. Keyboards shimmer like memory about to become myth, while alto moves like a shadow figure, keeping careful watch on every phrase. Rather than a detour, this stretch feels like the album’s moral heart, a meditation on how history lingers, how wounds speak, and how music might listen back.

Midway through, the record blooms into a four-part chain of color impressions. “Red” arrives as glittering dawn, full of resolve without aggression. “Black” follows like an echoing supernova, vast, humming, and strangely tender in its immensity. “White” drifts in as a partial eclipse, bright but uncertain, clarity touched by doubt, while “Yellow” closes the sequence in a twinkling dream that refuses to wake too quickly. Taken together, these pieces suggest that resistance to darkness is never one shade but many, a spectrum of feeling that glows differently at every hour.

The album then gathers itself for its final movement. “Essai éternel” arrives like a love letter that slowly turns into a ritual, affection melting into collective motion, devotion disguised as dance. It is both intimate and communal, a groove that feels like care made audible. From there, “Mock the End Lines” eases the listener toward silence with graceful tact, buttering the bread of finality just enough so that the meal feels complete without overfeeding the moment.

What we are left with is not a protest but a gentle reimagining of how the world might sound if kindness were taken seriously. Lirola offers no sermons, only evidence that beauty can nudge brutality aside, that listening can be a form of courage, and that music can rehearse the habits of a more humane future.

Tamio Shiraishi: Sora

| Tyran Grillo

Sky, the sleeve insists. A promise of lift, blue, vapor, and horizon. Yet the sound arrives caked in soil, fingernails packed with loam, lungs full of iron filings. Sora speaks upward only to burrow downward. The heavens here feel subterranean, a firmament made of shale and pressure.

Seven pieces, titled with the Japanese equivalent of “A, B, C, D, E, F, G,” as if language has been stripped to scaffolding and left in a field to rust. Tamio Shiraishi treats the saxophone less as an instrument than excavation device. He does not play notes. He drills, siphons, and fractures. Two dialects coil around each other through the record, twin serpents sharing a single ribcage.

The opening shriek is a filament of sound stretched past mercy. It reads as violence at first contact, yet something in its extremity resembles benediction. A tear across the canvas of listening. One learns more about oneself in the flinch than in the pitch itself. Inside the cavern of ISSUE Project Room, Shiraishi lowers the bell into the dark and hoists up tones so narrow they resemble slivers of light under a locked door. Microintervals shimmer like insects trapped in amber. The saxophone forgets its lineage and becomes a wind tunnel lined with nerves.

These pieces graze the border of audibility. They do not ask to be heard in the usual sense. They haunt the periphery, collecting the chaff of abandoned frequencies, gleaning scraps from farms long since swallowed by dust. Listening turns agricultural. One reaps what the wind has misplaced.

Five subsequent tracks emerge from Thousand Caves in Queens, the studio name alone a premonition of the sonic ores being mined therein. Electronics enter as a brutal accomplice. Reverb collapses into something closer to bone. The altissimo still cuts deep, though now it presses against the ear with intimate insistence, breath fogging the glass between body and speaker. Interventions of wire, distortion, and circuitry feel extra-corporeal, as if the saxophone has grown a second spine made of copper.

There are moments that detonate in miniature, pocket-sized cataclysms recalling the scorched density of Merzbow yet compacted into pellets. They surge without regard for comfort. A geyser with no interest in its spectators. In response, Shiraishi dips into sub-tone murmurs, wind turned inward, a heat that grazes the skin from beneath. Air becomes flame, cheeks raw from its lick.

Even the brief shortest piece carries a gravitational pull, dense as a star imploding in private. It circles itself, a bird trapped inside its own dream of flight, wingbeats echoing until the sky folds and the ground rushes up like an answer.

The final track returns to reverberant space, though not as repetition. More like a figure tracing its outline in ash. A search for origin without nostalgia. The sound follows its own shadow, lengthening, thinning, until walking ceases to be possible. Where it falls dead is where it belongs.

Sora is available from Relative Pitch Records here.

Tamio Shiraishi: Subway Stations in Queens

| Tyran Grillo

Japanese saxophonist and underground luminary Tamio Shiraishi has carved out an inimitable niche for himself in the literal underground of New York City, the subway system of which has served as his performance space of choice for three decades. On this release, recorded at 67th Avenue and 63rd Drive in Queens, he burrows into the ear. The stations breathe around him. Trains arrive with the force of verdicts, depart with the hush of unfinished sentences. His altissimo pierces the air, which answers back in drafts and rattles. Steel sings. Concrete keeps count. The MetroCard becomes a tarot card, each swipe a prophecy of descent.

Eight tracks, eight apertures cut into the city’s ribcage. He coaxes something feral from the lockboxes of the psyche, something that refuses to remain archived. What at first feels abrasive becomes a form of acupuncture, needles of tone pricking the skin of habit until sensation floods back into limbs gone numb from routine commute. The ear flinches, then kneels.

His high register does not merely squeal. It drafts a constitution for frequencies that have never been granted citizenship. The tiled corridors convert into echo chambers of civic unrest. Flesh recedes. Circuits awaken. The saxophone becomes a filament glowing against the damp. Sound migrates through the tunnels like current searching for a body.

There are moments when the instrument bucks against the machinery, a caged voltage refusing containment. He wrestles the rails for jurisdiction over the present tense. Each cry is a summons. Each tremor a subpoena. The heart hears what the ear resists. This is not noise as nuisance. It is noise as notice. A reminder that beneath every timetable lies a graveyard of cancelled futures.

Justice flickers in these passages, cracked like ballast underfoot. Announcements collapse into phonemes, then into static, then into a slurry of intention and erasure. Language gets mugged by reverb. Meaning falls between platform and train. Shiraishi lifts it out with breath that feels rationed, precious, almost political in its insistence on continuing.

When he pauses, the silence does not soothe. It gapes. The station inhales with him. In those held breaths, the true ache surfaces. The city reveals its pulse as arrhythmic, tired, still stubborn. The screeching that once felt punitive now reads as prayer. A subterranean psalm pitched past comfort, past compliance.

Direct contact with a passing train ignites him. He answers its thunder with serrated ribbons of tone, midwifing a birth that happens between arrivals and departures. Whether the acoustics bloom or bruise, there remains a cavernous quality to the unfolding. Every note ricochets off tile and bone alike. The more one listens, the more a covert melody materializes, a fugitive tune hiding in plain hearing. What once felt like rupture begins to resemble release.

Toward the end, the textures grow denser, more derailed. Headspace cracks open like a skylight smashed from below. The final track stages a duet between time and space that refuses settlement. Neither wins. Both testify. The saxophone presses its case until the walls sweat condensation.

Then, as another train barrels through, the horn thins, frays, threads itself into the dark seam of the tunnel. The city reclaims its own acoustics. The platform returns to routine. A last filament of tone flickers, rides the rails into blackness, and keeps going, farther down the line, past the map, past the final stop, dwindling into a vanishing point that hums, and is gone.

Subway Stations in Queens is available from Café OTO here.

HÜM: Don’t Take It So Personally

| Tyran Grillo

HÜM moves with the quiet conviction that composition and improvisation are not opposing forces but twin currents in the same river. Pianist Bojan Marjanović, bassist Bjørnar Kaldefoss Tveite, and drummer Magnus Sefaniassen Eide approach each piece as both blueprint and excavation. Themes arrive as seeds, small melodic cells set carefully in the soil. What grows from them is shaped in real time, yet nothing feels accidental. Even at its most vaporous, the trio’s language carries the imprint of design.

“Dream Beliefs” opens the album as a threshold rather than a statement. Its textures shimmer with a submerged luminosity, gentle yet insistent. There is a sense of memory suspended beneath the surface, glacial fragments drifting through warmer currents. The music feels aware of time’s double exposure. Youthful wonder lingers, yet it has been tempered by experience, by the quiet knowledge that revelation is rarely loud.

On “Kringsjå blå,” a delicate tension governs the exchange. The bass enters with a humility that conceals its strength, shaping space rather than claiming it. Tveite’s solo unfolds in restrained lyricism, each note placed with a sculptor’s patience. Marjanović responds with a piano voice that seems to tunnel into memory itself, carving chambers where nostalgia gathers and resonates. Eide’s cymbals flicker at the periphery, catching light and scattering it across shifting meters. The trio etches emotional calligraphy into the shoreline of the piece, knowing that erosion is part of the art.

The title track deepens this meditation. Its groove settles into intimacy, sincere and unguarded. It feels almost ceremonial, as if casting impressions into wet sand, preserving them for a moment before the tide returns. Marjanović’s pianism here possesses an extraordinary fluency. His lines arc and return, tracing parabolic shapes that suggest both ascent and reflection.

“After Hours” narrows the focus. The rim taps of the drums glow in the foreground, tactile and close. The kick drum recedes, the bass anchors softly, and the piano threads its way through hushed terrain. The intimacy borders on confessional. Each gesture feels whispered directly into the ear. The trio resists drama, choosing instead to cultivate atmosphere.

In “Sedmaya,” the music opens a sealed chamber of recollection. The groove interlocks with playful intricacy, the bass and piano circling one another in spirals of suggestion. Eide’s drumming introduces subtle turns that redirect the current without breaking it. The recording itself seems to glow from within, resonant and nocturnal. There is an undercurrent of longing here, a recognition that memory is both fragile and generative. The musicians do not attempt to recreate the past. They allow it to shimmer and dissolve, then build anew from its residue.

“Day Dreamer” begins with a crystalline piano introduction, each note suspended in patient clarity. The surface is calm, inviting the imagination to wander. As the piece unfolds, its apparent simplicity reveals deeper intricacies. The bass rises into a solo that sings just at the edge of awareness, hovering between articulation and suggestion. Every phrase feels necessary.

“Peculiar Being” shifts the energy. The bass sets a rocking foundation that propels forward with understated momentum. There is a locomotive spirit here, yet it is guided by tenderness rather than force. Marjanović’s solo surges with oceanic breadth, exploring registers with fearless curiosity. Eide’s cymbals and snare weave a rhythmic tapestry that both supports and provokes. The music twists back upon itself in stepwise motions, generating tension that resolves through trust.

“Arctic Ice” introduces arco bass, with a tone that is austere yet luminous. The expanse feels vast, almost ascetic, until warmth begins to seep through the cracks. The trio navigates this terrain with patience, allowing cold and heat to coexist. From this clarity emerges “Cvekje cafnalo,” a hearth after distance. The piece gathers strength without aggression, building toward a crescendo that retains softness at its core. The blade is dulled by compassion.

For listeners attuned to ECM streams, this album will resonate deeply. It shares a lineage with the introspective yet expansive elegance of Bobo Stenson and the lyrical restraint of Tord Gustavsen, yet HÜM’s voice remains distinctly its own. Their sensibility is a climate to be inhabited, one in which light and shadow converse without hierarchy. The blurred boundary between the predetermined and the spontaneous becomes a philosophy of living.

Don’t Take It So Personally ultimately proposes that music can be an act of gentle revision. Each piece reshapes experience, sanding down harsh edges while preserving essential contours, proof that identity itself may be composed in this way, through attentive listening to the spaces between what we expect and what arrives.

Caustic Reverie: Transit Signals

| Tyran Grillo

For his 27th transmission under the moniker Caustic Reverie, Bryn Schurman opens a pressure hatch beneath the psyche and invites us to descend without a tether. The result is a series of gravitational events, each bending perception until the mind forgets which way is inward.

“Transit of Iapetus” arrives like an eclipse that has forgotten its sun. The opening tones hover in a suspended hush, as if sound itself has chosen to kneel before crossing a forbidden threshold. Its frequencies seem older than the idea of time as a straight line. They move with the patience of tectonic thought, burrowing into the private chambers of awareness where instinct hovers, dormant and luminous.

Listening becomes an act of exposure. We realize how fragile the architecture of the self truly is. We exist beneath the illusion of coherence, believing ourselves to be stable forms in a navigable cosmos, yet Schurman reveals the dreamlike viscosity of our movements. Each gesture lingers longer than its intention. Each emotional tremor sends ripples beyond the horizon of consequence. We are stretched thin across existence, a filament of atoms trembling between dimensions, radiant and precarious.

“PSR B1913+16” widens the aperture. It pulses with distant radiance, the kind that travels for millennia before grazing the skin of perception. A single ray of light becomes a biography of exile. By the time it touches us, it has been severed from its birthplace, orphaned by distance and duration. We cradle that light without knowing its original name. In this way, we are less observers than vessels of matter waiting to be kissed by something that has wandered across impossible expanses.

Schurman’s digital hush carries a deceptive serenity. On the surface, the textures shimmer with tranquil restraint. Beneath that calm lies a compressed ferocity, a spirit capable of eruption yet choosing to remain coiled in discipline. It is the silence before a supernova that never announces itself, intensity distilled to a whisper that vibrates the bones more profoundly than any roar.

The album suggests that perception itself is a narrow corridor carved through an immeasurable field. We are granted only slivers of pattern, fragments of constellations, hints of geometry in the sky. “Quantum Interference Lensing” pushes further into distortion, where refraction becomes revelation. What appears solid in illustration evaporates in lived experience. The unseen becomes essential, the safety net of oxygen, gravity, and coherence, all taken for granted until absence tightens around the throat. Schurman seems to argue that catastrophe is rarely loud. It is incremental, almost tender. A slow forgetting of the forces that sustain us. A quiet suffocation within our own assumptions.

When “Collapse of Rigel” surges into the foreground, hope does not vanish in spectacle. It erodes. The track drifts like debris expelled from an airlock, spinning in a silence too vast for prayer. This is not drama. It is inevitability. The requiem is not sung for a single body but for the idea of permanence itself. Reflection multiplies reflection until identity becomes a hall of mirrors stripped of silver. We stare into ourselves and find watercolor remnants, pigment drained from the page, form barely clinging to contour.

Yet within this apparent desolation lies a fierce philosophical clarity. If we are only momentary configurations of dust and algorithm, then our fragility is our miracle. We are the brief interval in which the universe becomes aware of its own turbulence.

Instead of delivering us back to ourselves, the album performs a subtler transmutation. It suggests that consciousness is a corridor of stellar residues in which the act of listening is synonymous with curiosity. In that realization, the terror of insignificance collapses into astonishment. We are not stranded in the dark. We are the dark learning to articulate itself in flashes of awareness.

Jean-Marie Machado: Majakka (RJAL 397039)

| Tyran Grillo

Jean-Marie Machado piano
Keyvan Chemirani zarb, percussion
Jean-Charles Richard saxophones, flutes
Vincent Segal cello
Recording, mixing, mastering Studios La Buissonne, Pernes-les-Fontaines, France
Recorded September 23-25, 2020, and mixed by Gérard de Haro, assisted by Matteo Fontaine
Mastered by Nicolas Baillard at La Buissonne Mastering Studios
Piano preparation and tuning by Sylvain Charles
Produced by Cantabile, Gérard de Haro with RJAL for La Buissonne
Release date: February 5, 2021

On Majakka, a word that in Finnish means lighthouse yet also suggests an inner watchtower, pianist and composer Jean-Marie Machado establishes a roaming state of mind. The album feels like a journey that refuses checkpoints, a music that travels because it knows nothing else. It charts the migration of memory, the drift of identity, and the strange geography of listening itself.

Throughout, Machado speaks of looking back at his own past recordings and discovering a color that had been waiting for him all along, a private illumination that insisted on being seen. That realization becomes the emotional compass of the album. Majakka is less a retrospective than a return that keeps going forward, a circular voyage where the act of remembering becomes another form of departure.

Surrounded by a remarkable ensemble, he shapes this odyssey with great subtlety. Keyvan Chemirani’s zarb (or tombak), a heartbeat of wood and skin, brings a tactile, breathing pulse. Jean-Charles Richard’s saxophones and flutes cut lines through the air like invisible routes, while Vincent Segal’s cello adds gravity, warmth, and a kind of traveling shadow beneath the light. Together they constitute a terrain that is constantly shifting, constantly unfolding.

Born into Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese lineages and raised in Morocco, Machado carries a passport made of histories rather than nations. His affinity for Brazilian music and for the impressionistic expanses of Manuel de Falla and others is his natural climate.

“Bolinha” opens with a sound that feels newly discovered even as it seems traditional. The zarb skims the surface of the music, giving gentle traction to the piano, bass, and saxophone as though the rhythm were lightly tugging the travelers onward. Beneath the beauty lies a quiet insistence, a pulse that suggests inward as much as outward motion. One senses that this journey begins by turning inside before it ever reaches the horizon.

In “Um vento leve,” the wind grows brighter, but longing deepens. Piano and soprano sax converse with tenderness while the rhythm section moves with guarded wisdom, keeping secrets until the landscape demands them. The music carries an ache for destinations that may not exist except in the act of seeking.

Both pieces belong to La main des saisons, a project inspired by Fernando Pessoa, whose poetry itself is a labyrinth of wandering selves. Later, “Emoção de alegria” returns to this spirit, dancing sideways rather than straight ahead. It refuses linear passage, opting instead for meandering revelation. The joy here is full of shadows.

“La lune dans la lumière” pauses the expedition. Cello and low flute circle the piano in a nocturnal embrace, creating a sound at once intimate and distant. The moonlight seems to hover rather than shine, illuminating sorrow without dissolving it. For a moment, travel becomes stillness, and stillness becomes its own destination.

“Gallop impulse,” first heard on Machado’s 2018 Gallop Songs, arrives like a sudden clearing after nightfall. Born from his connection with Chemirani, and colored by Machado’s earlier collaboration with Naná Vasconcelos, the piece blooms into immediate life. Percussion slips in and out of view, shaping the space around it.

The trio of pieces written for the quartet in the studio, “Les pierres noires,” “Outra Terra,” and “La mer des pluies,” carries the tremor of a pandemic-afflicted world. They feel carved from isolation, shaped by a time when itineracy felt forbidden. Yet within that restriction, Machado finds expansive imagination. The latter piece, a solo piano ballad, stands apart like a private confession. Its beauty is spare, unadorned, and devastating. It tells a wordless story of hunger for air, light, and meaning beyond the body’s limits.

“Les yeux de Tangati,” originally conceived for a duet with Dave Liebman, brings the journey back to earth and breath. Wooden flute (perhaps a nay?) and soprano saxophone weave across an imagined desert, while piano and pizzicato cello plant delicate footprints in the sand. A conversation with landscape itself, as though the dunes were speaking back. Finally, “Slow bird” lifts the listener into quiet enchantment, moving with restrained grace before opening into a surging release.

By the end, travel no longer feels like crossing from here to there. It becomes a way of being. Machado’s lighthouse does not guide ships to land but teaches them how to drift with purpose. The album suggests that borders are simply habits of hearing, lines we draw because we are afraid of the open.

And so, Majakka proposes a gentler philosophy. To journey is not to arrive, to belong is not to stay, and to remember is not to return but to keep moving with deeper awareness. The true horizon is not a place but a practice, the quiet art of listening while in motion, forever and without frontiers.

Andy Emler: No Solo (RJAL 397035)

| Tyran Grillo

Naïssam Jalal flute, voice
Aïda Nosrat voice
Rhoda Scott voice
Thomas de Pourquery voice
Phil Reptil sound design
Ballaké Sissoko kora
Aminata “Nakou” Drame voice
Claude Tchamitchian double bass
Géraldine Laurent alto saxophone
Hervé Fontaine beat box 
Ngûyen Lê electric guitar 
Andy Emler piano 
Recorded live and mixed at Studio La Buissonne on February 7/8, 2019, by Gérard de Haro
Steinway D piano preparation and tuning by Alain Massonneau
All guests were recorded at Studios Sextan – La Fonderie Malakoff by Vincent Mahey and Arthur Gouret
except Nguyên Lê, Thomas de Pourquery, and Phil Reptil, who overdubbed from home
Mixed by Gérard de Haro and Andy Emler
Mastered by Nicolas Baillard at La Buissonne Mastering Studio
Produced by Gérard de Haro and RJAL for La Buissonne Label and Andy Emler
Release date: August 28, 2020

After a sequence of musical journeys ranging from the boldly orchestral to the hushed and introspective, Andy Emler arrives at a revealing new vantage point with No Solo. The title gestures toward a meditation on relation in which individuality becomes clearer precisely by being placed in conversation with others. Surrounded by collaborators who span generations, geographies, and aesthetic traditions, Emler constructs an expansive portrait of an artist continually navigating the blur between solitude and collectivity. From the very first notes, the music suggests that borders are never fixed lines but shifting membranes through which feeling, history, and sound continually pass.

Such tensions are announced with gentle irony in the opening moments. “Jingle tails” and “The warm up” begin as solo piano excursions, yet their isolation never feels enclosed. The playing seems already attuned to voices yet to arrive in anticipation of dialogue. The pieces balance a soft, melancholic edge with a dense sense of nostalgia, revealing Emler’s gift for emotional acuity and storytelling without artifice. As they unfold, the textures grow more panoramic and suggestive, evoking the quiet brilliance of winter light alongside the promise hidden within its stillness. Instead of lingering in recollection, the pianist moves through memory with the velocity of rewound time, allowing fragments to flicker past while granting each moment enough space to resonate. From this inward world, the music gradually opens outward, preparing the listener for a widening field of encounter.

That expansion becomes tangible in “For nobody,” where Naïssam Jalal appears first as breath rather than melody. Her flute and voice hover in sibilant, almost vaporous gestures before coalescing into drifting lines that feel both fragile and insistent. What begins as liminality slowly gathers gravity, and her presence reads less as accompaniment than as an elemental force shaping the atmosphere itself. Her timbres stand vividly in the foreground, sculpting a climate of unresolved yearning, a feeling that carries directly into “Gold timer,” where vocalists Aïda Nosrat and Rhoda Scott usher the listener into more populous territory. Spoken reflections on togetherness surface amid the harmonies, imagining a world beyond division while quietly questioning whether such separation was ever absolute. Here, Emler’s writing probes the idea that music might precede political or cultural borders, operating as a language that connects before it categorizes.

That inquiry deepens further in “Light please,” which inhabits a distinctly mystical register. Phil Reptil’s ethereal sound design and Thomas de Pourquery’s falsetto suspend time in a luminous haze, allowing the music to drift through slow currents of call and response. Voices feel scattered across invisible distances, suggesting that connection is less an achievement than a condition already written into the air. This sense of movement finds a different, more earthly expression in “12 Oysters in the lake,” an enchanting meeting of Ballaké Sissoko’s kora and Aminata “Nakou” Drame’s voice. The narrative takes shape organically, intertwining images of shared labor, mutual care, and the rhythms of the land. The kora glimmers with radiant delicacy while Drame sings with an urgency that feels both grounded and transcendent, as if addressing not only listeners but the very environment that sustains them in an act of sonic reciprocity.

“Près de son nom” shifts the perspective toward darker, more resonant depths. Claude Tchamitchian’s arco bass sketches a sequence of sonorous shapes that accumulate weight and gravity, as though the ground beneath the music were slowly giving way to ocean. The sound swells, thickens, and finally seems absorbed by an imagined vastness, suggesting how personal expression can dissolve into something larger without losing its essence. From this submerged state emerges “The rise of the sad groove,” a piece that feels as if dawn were breaking after a long night. Géraldine Laurent’s alto saxophone breathes with quiet optimism, offering tender phrases that transmit feeling without explanation. Just as the mood appears ready to drift, beat boxer Hervé Fontaine introduces a grounded rhythmic pulse, his deep bass anchoring the flight and demonstrating that momentum and vulnerability can coexist.

In closing, “You’re so special” arrives as a generous ballad illuminated by Ngûyen Lê’s singing electric guitar. Its lyricism soars yet remains warm, drawing together the strands of connection that have threaded through the entire work. Taken as a whole, No Solo reveals how distinctions can coexist within a shared space, allowing identities to overlap without dissolving into sameness. The music does not simply end but recedes toward a quiet horizon, where breaths, strings, and distant echoes continue to shimmer just beyond hearing, as if the lines between here and elsewhere were slowly loosening in a gentle, unbounded glow.

Vincent Courtois: EAST (YAN.009)

| Tyran Grillo

Vincent Courtois cello
Mixing: Gérard de Haro at La Buissonne Studios
Mastering: Nicolas Baillard at La Buissonne Studios
Production: Gérard de Haro and RJAL for La Buisonne & La Cie de l’Imprévu
Marketed in cooperation with ECM Records
Release date: November 12, 2021

Although cellist Vincent Courtois is best known in jazz circles, his musical imagination was founded in classical discipline at the Conservatory of Aubervilliers. When the early days of the pandemic suddenly suspended ordinary time, he found himself alone with an instrument, a room, and a long-held desire to confront the monumental solo repertoire of the 20th century. This album is a chronicle of that isolation, a record of inward motion that gradually widens into something like spiritual travel.

Arthur Honegger’s rarely heard Paduana opens the program with a plunge into the cello’s subterranean depths. From that darkness emerges a voice at once grounded and restless, searching for a horizon it can almost taste. Courtois draws a tone that feels inhabited, a living current that runs beneath every phrase. The music breathes, pauses, and advances with a quiet inevitability.

Hans Werner Henze’s nine-part Serenade follows like a gallery of shifting faces. Each movement appears to illuminate another angle of an elusive figure as it comes into being. The central Vivace flares with kinetic brilliance, as if the music were hammering itself into form before our ears. Courtois moves effortlessly between bowed intensity and fleeting pizzicato gestures, revealing how much freedom resides in precision.

Krzysztof Penderecki’s Per slava begins as a whisper that refuses to remain small. Taut double stops hover in an uneasy suspension, suggesting a soul momentarily detached from its body. As the piece unfolds, sorrow gathers weight without ever softening into consolation. Courtois describes its difficulty as “a seemingly unclimbable mountain.” Yet his ascent feels less like a conquest than a patient persistence that carries him to the summit.

That hard-won clarity leads naturally into György Ligeti’s Sonata for Solo Cello. The opening slides glint with a folkish warmth before the music accelerates toward the incandescent Capriccio, where exuberance becomes almost ecstatic. The performance vibrates with alertness, every gesture sharpened by joy. Luciano Berio’s Les mots sont allés, built from the letters of dedicatee Paul Sacher’s name, follows as a kind of celebratory labyrinth. Its variations rub against one another until friction turns to flame.

Paul Hindemith’s Cello Sonata then arrives with immediate authority. From its first gesture, it strides forward rather than wanders. Courtois lets the music declare itself with unshakable resolve. Texture accumulates, yet the line never fractures.

The album ends with Dominique Pifarély’s pour Fernando Pessoa, a work of quiet turbulence. Tender passages give way to veiled unease. Courtois shapes its twists with restraint, allowing mystery to remain intact. What lingers most is not technique, however adventurous, but the sense of an instrument speaking plainly across time. These works belong to an era when the cello still carried the burden of narrative, capable of song, proclamation, and inner confession all at once.

Solitude has not narrowed this music; it has deepened it. In listening, we are reminded that art does not rescue us from isolation so much as reveal what we were always carrying within it.