Ramsau am Dachstein: A Film by Claus Homschak & Elfriede Jelinek (INDEX 052)

| Tyran Grillo

Elfriede Jelinek’s name is synonymous with language. As Austria’s first Nobel laureate, she was so crowned “for her musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that with extraordinary linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of society’s clichés and their subjugating power.” And in Ramsau am Dachstein, which made its television debut on May 21, 1976, via the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation (ORF), she does not abandon this density. Instead, she reveals how landscapes articulate what the mouth alone cannot hold.

Though often overlooked in discussions of her work, Jelinek’s sole cinematic statement carries the same restless energy that animates her novels and plays. In a rich essay for this timely INDEX edition, film and TV historian Sylvia Szely frames it as a document entangled with the conditions of its own making. Commissioned for the Vielgeliebtes Österreich series between 1975 and 1977, it became part of a larger project seeking to produce a “critical land survey” of Austria through the eyes of those bound to its regions by memory or affiliation. Jelinek’s own connection to Ramsau am Dachstein was as intimate as it was peripheral, braided through childhood visits to her grandmother in the Styrian Mürztal. Yet intimacy here does not produce nostalgia. It sharpens perception and unsettles inheritance.

The broader context of Austrian broadcasting reform in 1974 unfurls a crucial backdrop. ORF, newly tasked with promoting national culture and values, found itself in a paradox. It invited artists who could interrogate identity while also expecting a reaffirmation of cultural coherence. Among them were Franz Novotny, Karin Brandauer, and Michael Guttenbrunner, who were already shaping or would go on to shape the world of Austrian cinema in various ways. Jelinek’s participation appears inevitable and improbable at once, as she faced great hardship as a result of it, not least of all because of the involvement of Claus Homschak.

Homschak’s editorial intervention, at the behest of ORF, alters the trajectory of the film in decisive ways. His insistence on incorporating picturesque footage introduces a layer of visual appeasement, an attempt to soften the film’s more abrasive elements. The result does not erase Jelinek’s vision so much as distort it. The piece becomes a site of struggle between competing aesthetics. One seeks legibility, comfort, a surface that can be consumed without resistance. The other insists on rupture, on a refusal of coherence, on a mode of expression that unsettles rather than reassures. What emerges is tension preserved within the structure of the film itself.

This tension finds its thematic core in the question of tourism and its socioeconomic reverberations. Ramsau appears prosperous, its snowy expanses and pastoral scenes inviting admiration. Yet beneath this surface lies a stratification that the film exposes with quiet persistence. Farmhands and laborers, those who sustain the land without owning it, recede from visibility within the dominant narrative of progress. Jelinek reintroduces them through a method that resists conventional documentary logic. As contradictions accumulate, she renders a visual essay in which meaning emerges through dissonance rather than synthesis.

The opening sequence establishes this approach with disarming clarity. A folk song drifts across a snowy mountainscape with a strange duality. It enchants, yet something within it feels unsettled, as though the landscape existed outside both time and frame. The voiceover announces its intent to demythologize the notion of “simple, original and genuine farm life.” The phrase “to give things back their history” resonates as both promise and provocation.

Central to this excavation is Josefa, whose presence anchors the film’s emotional and conceptual gravity. She smiles and laughs while recounting a childhood marked by deprivation, by relentless labor, by abuse inflicted within the very structures that claim to sustain rural life. Her recollections unfold in fragments, each piece carrying a weight that the tranquil surroundings cannot absorb. As she places kindling into her stove, the gesture gathers symbolic force. Memory becomes fuel, consumed for warmth, yet never fully extinguished. The act suggests both survival and loss, a quiet economy of endurance.

Her trajectory continues through a series of displacements. After leaving school at 14, she works as a dairymaid in the mountains, a period she recalls with a certain tenderness. The mountain pastures offer a temporary reprieve, a space where the weight of her earlier years recedes, though never entirely: “I forgot my childhood, so to speak. But I couldn’t forget entirely.” The statement holds its own contradiction, a reminder that forgetting remains partial, always haunted by what persists within.

The film places her story alongside flashes of tourists who traverse the same landscape with ease and delight. Horse-drawn sleighs glide through the snow, their occupants smiling, insulated from the histories embedded in the terrain they admire. For them, the farms become postcards in motion, fragments of an aesthetic experience detached from its conditions of production. The voiceover traces the economic structures that underpin this transformation. Landlords accrue profit through taxes, tithes, and the consolidation of property. Tourism emerges as both a continuation and an intensification of these dynamics. The history of Ramsau reveals itself as a layering of exploitation and accumulation.

The refrain “This is a beautiful landscape” reverberates throughout the film, each repetition hollowing out its initial meaning. What begins as affirmation becomes incantation, then critique, then something approaching accusation. Beauty itself becomes suspect, implicated in systems that convert aesthetic pleasure into economic value. A beautiful place yields greater profit. The phrase lingers, stripped of innocence.

Religious history enters the film with similar complexity. Ramsau, a rare stronghold of Protestantism in Austria, carries within it a legacy of resistance and suppression. During the Counter-Reformation, Evangelical faith was outlawed, forcing believers into secrecy under threat of torture. The presence of a worn Lutheran Bible from 1557, preserved across generations, embodies this history. It appears fragile, yet endures. Its taped pages carry the imprint of survival, a material trace of belief maintained against erasure.

The economic realities of the region further complicate its pastoral veneer. Farms produce only enough to sustain themselves, leaving little room for surplus. The arrival of tourism introduces new forms of capital, yet these gains remain unevenly distributed. The labor that once sustained subsistence becomes subsumed within a broader economy oriented toward external consumption. Authenticity recedes, replaced by a curated version of rural life designed to meet the expectations of visitors.

A striking anecdote from a local woodworker, who also serves as church choir director, encapsulates this transformation. Farmhouses once featured small towers with bells that summoned workers to their daily tasks. These bells marked time through labor, structuring the rhythms of communal life. Now they remain as decorative elements, silenced to accommodate transient visitors who prefer uninterrupted rest. Function gives way to ornament. History becomes aesthetic.

The film’s visual language reinforces these themes through moments of quiet disjunction. Skiers glide across the snow with effortless grace, their movements suggesting an unburdened relation to the landscape. Pan to Josefa, standing within the same expanse, her presence grounded, immobile, bearing the weight of histories that the skiers traverse without awareness. The juxtaposition resists overt commentary. It allows the tension to persist, unresolved, demanding recognition.

A shot of an empty gondola lingers with particular force. Suspended in motion, it carries no passengers, no visible purpose. It moves through space as if propelled by an absent logic, a system continuing its operation despite the absence of those it ostensibly serves. The voiceover deepens this critique through its articulation of tourism’s theatrical dimension, saying, “One visits the old farms like theater plays.” The landscape becomes a stage, its inhabitants cast into roles that must conform to external expectations. The tourist, positioned as the audience, demands a performance of authenticity that conceals the conditions under which it is produced. The voice continues, suggesting that the tourist must perceive the landscape and its customs as existing solely for their benefit, perfected for their gaze. The world becomes an open-air performance, sustained through repetition, maintained through illusion.

The reception of the film reveals the volatility of this exposure. Editor and documentary filmmaker Silvia Heimader details the hundreds of phone calls that flooded ORF following the broadcast, expressions of anger from viewers and stakeholders who felt misrepresented, even betrayed. The film disrupted the image Ramsau sought to project. It challenged the alignment between self-perception and external representation. The resulting backlash extended beyond critique into hostility.

Jelinek’s return to Ramsau for a public discussion only worsened these sentiments. Surrounded by local officials, members of the Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP), and community members, she encountered an atmosphere charged with resentment. The gathering carried an undercurrent of threat, a collective anger directed not only at the film but at the artist herself. Within this charged space, Josefa’s presence becomes particularly poignant. She attends, only to leave in tears as the hostility directed at the film redirects itself toward her. Her life, her suffering, has become an unwanted mirror held up to the community.

This moment crystallizes the ethical stakes of representation. To give voice to marginalized experiences carries the risk of exposing those individuals to further harm. Jelinek’s attempt to draw attention to the plight of women such as Josefa encounters resistance that reveals the limits of empathy. The film does not resolve this tension. It leaves it exposed, unresolved, an open wound within its own reception. Despite these challenges, the film’s engagement with language remains its most enduring contribution. Jelinek approaches cinema with a vocative sensibility that reshapes the medium from within. Speech and text become structural elements, organizing the flow of images while simultaneously destabilizing their apparent coherence.

The result of Jelinek’s first foray into television was that it was also to be her last, and she still bears the emotional scars of the mob mentality that sought to have its way with her like a political ragdoll for various factions’ own amusement. What’s so painfully ironic about the whole ordeal is that ORF was likely seeking this kind of counter-cultural narrative in the first place, given that Jelinek was a member of the Communist Party of Austria and already well known for her radical approach to narrative. Otherwise, there would have been no reason to ask her to participate in this project. But it was Homschak who overtook the editing, during which Jelinek was not present, thus sanitizing (if not altogether cutting out) much of her experimental leanings toward alienation.

Jelinek’s later reflection on the film, articulated in her 2022 essay “Shipwreck on the Mountain,” frames the work through the lens of failure: “What I captured was not supposed to be captured.” And so, the act of capturing becomes both transgression and necessity. The film records what resists representation, what eludes the frameworks designed to contain it. In doing so, it exposes the frayed edges of those frameworks. Her characterization of the project as a shipwreck suggests collapse, yet also preservation. A shipwreck disperses fragments across a landscape, each piece retaining traces of the whole while existing independently. The film functions likewise. It resists closure and remains open to reinterpretation, continuing to generate meaning through its unresolved tensions.

In recent years, reception of the film has shifted. Contemporary viewers, including residents of Ramsau, have approached it with a renewed openness, recognizing its insights into the transformations that have reshaped the region. Time alters perspective. What once provoked anger now invites reflection. Yet the film’s history remains inseparable from its meaning. Its scars persist, informing its continued resonance.

This dynamic extends beyond the film itself, gesturing toward broader questions about representation, perception, and the construction of reality. If landscapes can be rewritten, if histories can be obscured or revealed through shifts in perspective, then the stability of meaning becomes uncertain. What appears solid dissolves under scrutiny. What seems transparent reveals layers of mediation.

At the edge of such uncertainty lies a more elusive inquiry. Perhaps reality itself exists as a surface continually inscribed by competing narratives, each seeking to assert its version of truth. Beneath this surface, no fixed essence awaits discovery. Instead, there is an ongoing process of articulation, erasure, and rearticulation. The film gestures toward this process without attempting to resolve it.

In this sense, Ramsau am Dachstein extends beyond its immediate context, offering a meditation on the conditions of seeing and speaking. It invites a reconsideration of how eyes and ears shape our understanding of the world, how they collaborate and conflict, and how they produce meaning through their interplay. And perhaps this is where its deepest significance resides. Not in what it reveals about a particular place or moment, but in how it unsettles the mechanisms through which revelation occurs. Yet behind this continuity, something shifts. A recognition that meaning does not reside within the image or the word alone, but within the unstable space that connects them, a space that resists closure, that invites perpetual reconsideration, that holds within it the quiet possibility of seeing otherwise.

Zosha Warpeha: I grow accustomed to the dark

| Tyran Grillo

Zosha Warpeha’s I grow accustomed to the dark is an inquiry into what it means for a body to become an instrument and for an instrument to remember the body. The Hardanger d’amore does not sit across from her as an object. It leans inward, absorbs breath, and answers pulse with vibration. A background in Norwegian folk traditions and avant-garde improvisation finds a meeting point here, though neither discipline remains intact in any familiar sense. Folk memory dissolves into texture, improvisation into ritual. Two long-form compositions unfold as if time itself were refusing linearity. Recorded at ISSUE Project Room, the space enters the music as an active presence. Reverberation blooms into another voice, sympathetic strings responding not just to the bow but to the architecture surrounding them. What emerges is a shifting threshold where presence flickers into absence, where sound takes on the density of touch.

“filament” begins with an instinct older than language. Tenderness arises from a delicate pressure that suggests both care and necessity, as though survival itself depends on sustaining contact. Each stroke carries the weight of a soul learning how to remain intact—lingering, circling, studying its own fade. Repetition takes on the character of incantation, not for trance alone but for the deepening of relation. Hair against string begins to resemble skin against skin, or nerve against thought. Drones hover as suspended light, while dissonances pulse with organic inevitability, neither resolved nor resisted.

Warpeha’s voice enters from another layer of perception. It threads through the field, a flicker at the edge of visibility. Her timbre carries the ghost of song without settling into melody. One hears the trace of a tradition remembered imperfectly, or remembered so deeply that it has been released from the prison of notation. The voice lifts and dissolves, leaving behind a residue that clings to the ear, closer to scent than sound. Stone becomes sediment, sediment becomes something combustible, something capable of holding light. Beneath everything, a pulse persists. It waits, patient and uninsistent, suggesting that continuity is not the absence of rupture but its quiet companion.

“visual purple” shifts the terrain. The opening pizzicato arrives as distant movement, each pluck a footstep landing with deliberate hesitation. The instrument searches its own interiors as sympathetic strings awaken in response, their afterimages suggesting hidden circulatory systems, an anatomy in fragments. Warpeha’s voice here is less tethered to breath as we know it. It gestures rather than declares, marking space with shapes that resist translation. Each utterance resembles a glyph drawn in darkness, meaningful without the need for deciphering. Language becomes a field of suggestions rather than a system of signs.

The music inhabits a space of memory that erodes as it reveals. There are dust particles in the air, remnants of objects that disintegrate upon recognition. The listener is not asked to reconstruct what has been lost. Presence with disappearance becomes the central task. In this sense, the instrument functions as both archive and agent of forgetting, holding traces even as it transforms them beyond recovery. When the bow returns, its entrance whispers a quiet finitude. The contact feels irreversible, as though a threshold has been crossed. Tension between pitches opens a space where ambiguity turns luminous. Interpretation rises, then falls away. What remains is immediacy, a clarity that stands apart from explanation.

Across the album, the instrument becomes a site where the performer encounters herself anew. Playing turns into a negotiation between intention and response. The body initiates, the molecules answer, and somewhere between them a third presence gathers. It belongs neither to performer nor listener but exists in perpetual relation.

The deepest truth reached for here is that identity is shaped through sounding, continuously altered by what passes through it. All of which leaves us with a choice: to close our eyes against the light or remain within the field and allow what arises to alter the contours of our being, one shadow at a time.

I grow accustomed to the dark is available on Bandcamp here.

Derek Hunter Wilson: Sculptures

| Tyran Grillo

Sculptures, the third solo offering from Portland-based composer and multi-instrumentalist Derek Hunter Wilson, gathers, darkens, releases, and clears in intimate, elemental cycles. Framed as “an ode to the ancient and contested shorelines of the Pacific Northwest,” the album’s six pieces trace the quiet, uneven topography of grief after the passing of Wilson’s father. What first appears gentle soon reveals itself as something patient and transformative, a slow-burning catharsis shaped by recapitulation, erosion, and the fragile courage required to let go.

Built on looping foundations in collaboration with harpist Joshua Ward, the music resists linear time. It circles, returns, hesitates, then presses forward again, mirroring the way mourning rarely obeys a straight path. Piano and synthesizer drift together in mutual trust, one offering structure while the other dissolves it. The result is a softening of resistance, a quiet agreement with impermanence.

The patterns of “Fort Stevens” move with a tentative grace, unsure whether to hold fast to the present or recede into recollection. Synth tones float while the piano steps lightly beneath, each note placed with the care of someone afraid to disturb what remains. With “Battery 247,” the sound narrows its focus, carving out a space where healing can begin to take shape. Arpeggios flicker like distant lights, guiding rather than commanding. Mirabai Peart’s viola enters as a kind of interior voice, suggesting that sorrow, when held long enough, becomes a chamber rather than a wound. Within it, something tender begins to bloom. Hope arrives as a gradual reconfiguration, a blade that learns to soften into a petal. Peart’s presence deepens further in “Deception Pass,” where the music turns inward, almost translucent. Here, absence becomes palpable, filled with unsaid things refracted through stained glass, each color hinting at meanings that resist direct expression. There is a quiet tension in the way phrases unfold, as if the music were attempting to speak a language it has not yet fully learned. 

“Salish Sea” expands outward, reaching into the unknown with a sense of fragile yearning. It evokes the act of listening for something just beyond perception. There is a childlike hope embedded in its repetitions, a belief that distance can be bridged if one just waits longs enough. In that bated suspension, the boundary between loss and continuation blurs. The question of whether anything persists after death is not answered, yet the act of asking becomes its own form of solace.

The descent into “Cape Disappointment” feels like a return to ground, though not in defeat. The music glows with a dim, steady light, reminiscent of a lighthouse seen through fog. Pianistic motifs rise and fall with a quiet insistence, illuminating the contours of the coast without betraying its mystery. By the time “Benson Beach” arrives, the album has shed much of its earlier tension. The waves that once pressed heavily now move in sync, their motion no longer threatening but restorative. Raymond Richards’ pedal steel glimmers across the surface like sunlight breaking through cloud cover, offering a sense of warmth that feels hard-won.

Throughout Sculptures, the cinematic quality of Wilson’s work invites listeners to populate its montage with their own memories. The album becomes a kind of shared terrain, where personal histories cross-pollinate. In this way, it transcends its origin, transforming individual grief into something collective, echoing beyond the boundaries of a single life. All of this suggests that mourning is not a detour from living but an integral part of it, a way of learning to see more clearly through the veil of impermanence. If anything endures, it may not be memory in its fixed form, but the capacity to feel deeply, to open oneself even in the face of absence. In that openness lies a quiet, unsettling truth. Perhaps what we call loss is not the disappearance of something, but a transformation of our relationship to it, an invitation to listen for what cannot be heard and to find meaning in the fleeting, luminous act of being present at all.

Sculptures is available from Bandcamp here.

Miroslav Vitous: Mountain Call (ECM 2673)

| Tyran Grillo

Miroslav Vitous
Mountain Call

Michel Portal clarinet, bass clarinet
Miroslav Vitous double bass
Jack DeJohnette drums
Esperanza Spalding voice
Bob Mintzer bass clarinet
Gary Campbell soprano and tenor saxophones
Gerald Cleaver drums
Members of Czech National Symphony Orchestra
Recorded 2003-2010 at Universal Syncopation Studios, Prague
by Miroslav Vitous
Cover photo: Thomas Wunsch
Produced by Miroslav Vitous and Manfred Eicher
Release date: March 27, 2026

Mountain Call marks the end of a decade-long wait since the last ECM leader date from Miroslav Vitous, who presents us with a program of duets and small ensembles. Recorded between 2003 and 2010, the result is a broad portrait in detailed brushstrokes, showcasing his talents as composer, improviser, and arranger. 

The opening tracks with reed virtuoso Michel Portal, who was last heard alongside the Czech bassist on 2009’s Remembering Weather Report, unfold somewhere between what is remembered and what has yet to be. “New Energy” emerges already in motion, clarinet and bass entwining in lines that bend across uneven terrain. It carries a strange familiarity, the sensation of hearing something long forgotten yet intimately known.

“Second Touch” introduces movement of a different kind, a dance grounded in continuation. Modal currents ripple beneath the surface, tinged with distant geographies, suggesting lands both real and imagined. The two instruments circle each other with a quiet understanding, travelers who have never met yet share the same destination etched somewhere on their hearts. Lines coil and uncoil, never colliding, always converging.

By the time “Unexpected Solutions” arrives, rhythm begins to pulse more insistently, Vitous drawing percussive language from the body of his instrument while Portal deepens his tone into something almost primal. The feeling is grounded and tactile. Confidence emerges here through direction, a sense that the journey requires no explanation.

That latent need for propulsion finds its answer in “Tribal Dance,” a brief yet luminous duet with Jack DeJohnette. Knowing this performance lands among DeJohnette’s final released statements lends the piece an unspoken gravity. Each cymbal touch lingers as a fading footprint, implying both immediacy and permanence. The brevity sharpens its impact, a final glance exchanged between companions before diverging paths.

The subsequent duets with Portal on bass clarinet drift inward, their abstraction guiding a descent. These pieces fill quiet spaces between landmarks, where reflection takes precedence over motion. From this interiority emerges “Epilog,” a work that expands outward while retaining its core. The orchestral sampling transforms Vitous’s voice into a chorus of selves layered across time.

With “Evolution,” the landscape widens dramatically. Joined by Bob Mintzer and the Czech National Symphony Orchestra, Vitous constructs a triptych of transformations. Strings tremble with distant force, while timpani resonate with deep structural weight beneath the surface. The music unfolds with cinematic inevitability, guided by forces that seem larger than the individuals involved. Within this expanse, the dialogue between Vitous and DeJohnette remains the axis around which everything turns (so much so that everything else feels peripheral).

“Rhapsody” introduces the voice of Esperanza Spalding, whose presence alters the album’s emotional temperature. Her singing carries intimacy and radiance, inhabiting the music from within. Vitous’s compositional touch becomes painterly here, each gesture placed with care yet open to reinterpretation. “Africa” pulses with a soulful urgency, a call that feels both personal and collective, while the closing “Lullaby” compresses an entire day’s passage into a fleeting moment, light folding into shadow with quiet inevitability.

These two larger-scale pieces are framed by duets with Portal on bass clarinet. “Delusion” pushes the mechanics of improvisation. Here, melody becomes a question, one that both musicians address in fleeting alignments that dissolve as quickly as they form. The title track concludes the journey with a return to the elemental. Vitous’s bow draws out tones that are forthright and resonant, the instrument revealing its own hidden history. There is no ornament here, no excess, only the raw exchange of sound and intent. Each phrase feels necessary, each silence earned.

These are musicians who understand that sound is produced and received in equal measure, shaped by what lies between intention and perception. Thus, the true subject of Mountain Call concerns the strange continuity that binds time together. Old paths travel with us, reconfigured with each step. Beginnings carry traces of what came before, endings open toward what cannot yet be named. Somewhere between stasis and motion, identity loosens its grip, and in that loosening, something wider than self begins to listen back.

Marilyn Crispell/Anders Jormin: Memento (ECM 2867)

| Tyran Grillo

Marilyn Crispell
Anders Jormin
Memento

Marilyn Crispell piano
Anders Jormin double bass
Recorded July 2025
Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI, Lugano
Engineer: Stefano Amerio
Cover photo: Thomas Wunsch
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: March 20, 2026

Memento arrives with quiet poetry, the kind that settles into the human heart of its own volition. In this first duo encounter between Marilyn Crispell and Anders Jormin, collaboration feels secondary to recognition, as if two long-circling orbits have finally aligned. Both artists carry histories that run through the ECM tapestry, yet what unfolds here feels more essential than lineage or style.

The opening sequence of improvisations awakens the album with a fragile sense of recall. Each gesture conveys the hesitancy of memory surfacing, not fully formed, yet insistent. A tender gravity settles over these exchanges, one that avoids declaration and favors suggestion. Crispell’s piano hovers at the edge of articulation, tracing lines that seem both discovered and surrendered, while Jormin’s bass responds with near-instinctive sensitivity. Their interplay unfolds like a language stripped to its essence, where every note feels earned, released only when it can no longer remain unspoken. Even moments of lightness retain a delicate restraint, a shared understanding that silence is an equal partner in the unfolding.

As the album deepens, this sensitivity becomes its guiding principle, especially in its treatment of memory. The pieces shift and refract, less like fixed compositions than terrains revisited under changing skies. Jormin’s “Three Shades of a House” embodies this quiet transformation. Its dual incarnations feel like glimpses through different windows of the same interior. The “Morning” version carries a tentative warmth, while the “Evening” rendering withdraws into solitude, its contours softened by introspection. Time alters not only the surface of the music but its inner weight, revealing how experience reshapes even the most familiar forms.

The album also gestures outward, though always through an inward gaze. “The Beach at Newquay” evokes place through atmosphere rather than description, a coastline suggested in fragments of tone and texture. Jormin’s bass releases distant calls that dissolve before they can settle, while Crispell’s piano glides like shifting light across water. The scene feels steeped in night yet illuminated from within.

What binds Memento together is its understanding of relationships as living presences, shaped as much by absence as by proximity. Crispell’s compositions, especially “Song” and the title piece, carry a clarity that resists sentimentality while remaining deeply felt. Affection moves through these works with a measured grace, tempered by the knowledge that connection always harbors the answer to its own vanishing. Jormin responds with a tone that approaches the human voice. Together, they form a grammar of care that finds strength in vulnerability, itself a source of resonance.

By the time “Dragonfly” emerges, the album has settled into something less like a sequence and more like a state of being. Crispell’s elegy for Gary Peacock allows the past to move freely within the present. The closing moments feel like a gentle release, a soft shift in the air. What remains is something akin to a shadow that no longer belongs to an object. It suggests a world where presence is always in the process of becoming something else, where even disappearance holds authorship.

Alicia Hall Moran: Coldblooded

| Tyran Grillo

Alicia Hall Moran is one of the most uncompromising artists I know. Her albums may be few and far between, but they twist the very center of our emotional response into a flower of contrasting textures, wordplay, and urban hymnody. The world is a better place for her voice (on all levels thereof). Click on the cover of her latest below to read my extensive review for All About Jazz.

Mark Turner: Patternmaster (ECM 2835)

| Tyran Grillo

Mark Turner
Patternmaster

Mark Turner tenor saxophone
Jason Palmer trumpet
Joe Martin double bass
Jonathan Pinson drums
Recorded April 2024 at Studios La Buissonne
Engineer: Gérard de Haro
Mastering: Nicolas Baillard and Christoph Stickel
Cover photo: Max Franosch
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: March 13, 2026

Following in the footsteps of 2022’s Return from the Stars, which found saxophonist Mark Turner gazing past the horizon of earthly jazz into a more cosmic register, his quartet with trumpeter Jason Palmer, bassist Joe Martin, and drummer Jonathan Pinson returns with the aptly titled Patternmaster. If its predecessor charted a voyage outward, this record feels like the mapping of constellations discovered along the way. Lines weave and bob with adroit precision while maintaining a pliant freedom that lets the occasional jab of surprise land with force. Turner and Palmer operate as simpatico melodic leads, their phrases joining and separating like a quasar whose pulse cannot be predicted but somehow feels inevitable. Turner has long been a paragon of control in tone, technical craft, and compositional balance. Yet something in these performances carries the gravity of accumulated time. The music speaks with an elder’s clarity without surrendering its curiosity. One hears not only mastery but also a widening orbit of possibility.

The album’s title reaches outward into literature through the first book of science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler’s Patternist series, a saga in which telepaths form intricate networks of shared consciousness. Butler imagined communities linked by invisible threads of perception, individuals whose thoughts reverberate through an unseen lattice of awareness. Her fiction often asked difficult questions about power, responsibility, and the fragile architectures that bind societies together. Turner’s quartet mirrors that speculative vision through sound. Each musician senses the others before the note fully arrives, improvisation functioning as a kind of musical telepathy. Melodies propagate through the ensemble like signals traveling through Butler’s imagined psychic web. Turner also gestures toward Wayne Shorter, whose own compositions often seemed to arise from dimensions beyond surface-level perception. In that lineage, Patternmasterproposes jazz as a field of relational intelligence. Ideas migrate from instrument to instrument, forming configurations that only exist because several minds are listening at once.

The title track makes that premise audible from its opening measures. A buoyant groove sets the stage while the horns present their theme with geometric clarity, every interval placed like a star plotted on a navigational chart. The rhythm section hums beneath them with gravitational assurance. The piece casts the listener’s gaze skyward toward something outer-spatial, yet its deeper pull leads inward. The connection it suggests cannot be quantified in apparent magnitude or spectral analysis. It registers in a quieter register of experience, the realm where recognition occurs before language intervenes.

From there, the bass monologue that opens “Trece Ocho” arrives like a lone satellite sending its first transmissions home. Joe Martin traces thoughtful arcs through silence, as though recording data that must still be interpreted. The tune unfolds in stages of perception, moving gradually from solitary voice to collective emergence. Each solo alters the musical environment that follows. Turner’s improvisation resembles an elegant algorithm, cascading through possibilities with luminous logic. Palmer answers with lines that tighten the weave, bringing a sharper contour to the harmonic field. Just when the music appears to settle into contemplative quiet, it erupts in a radiant final flare. Martin’s arco passages slice across the ensemble grain with exquisite articulation, a supernova of sound that briefly illuminates every corner of the quartet’s shared cosmos.

“It Very Well May Be” ventures furthest into the unknown. The groove leans toward the future with persuasive momentum, as though propelled by engines still being invented. Pinson and Martin ignite the rhythmic atmosphere with an intensity that feels both grounded and volatile. Palmer’s trumpet thrives in that oxygen, stretching its phrases with expressive daring while Turner threads agile countercurrents through the harmonic stream. Martin’s solo cools the embers and tends the kindling anew. His dialogue with Pinson’s cymbals suggests two lungs breathing through a single body of rhythm. In the wake of such combustion, “Lehman’s Lair,” named for saxophonist Steve Lehman, relaxes the tempo slightly while preserving its inner electricity. The musicians exchange impulses with the ease of charged particles colliding inside an invisible chamber. Stardust seems to enter the room, settling gently across the architecture of the tune.

“The Happiest Man On Earth” reveals another dimension of the quartet’s sensitivity. Its slow burn unfolds with patient grace, motifs drifting into alignment like planets discovering a shared orbit. Turner and Palmer circle one another with remarkable courtesy. Each phrase opens space for the other to extend its wingspan. Nothing intrudes upon the song’s unfolding. What emerges instead is a profound sense of trust, a musical atmosphere where melody can breathe without hurry.

This mood prepares the way for “Supersister,” a composition that longtime listeners may recall from Turner’s 2009 Fly Trio recording Sky & Country. Here, the piece expands into a sprawling landscape exceeding 12 minutes, with ample terrain to explore. Martin and Pinson construct intricate tessellations that support the horns’ luminous harmonies. Pinson’s extended solo deserves special mention, proliferating as it does with a kind of microbial brilliance, rhythms multiplying and mutating before being gathered back into the bloodstream. The effect resembles a cellular organism discovering new forms of life within itself. Each section of the tune carries its own perspective, its own microcosm of meaning. By the end, those fragments cohere into something larger than the sum of their parts. Martin’s bass returns to cradle the central rhythmic flame, leaving traces of abstraction that gradually resolve into a calm and congruent landing.

The result of all this suggests that patterns govern more than melody or rhythm. They shape the ways minds encounter one another, the ways attention moves through time, the ways imagination stitches together distant points of experience. Perhaps that is the quiet lesson at play. The universe may be vast beyond comprehension, yet meaning arises wherever perception forms a network. A few listeners in a room. Four musicians in conversation. Vibrations in air that momentarily align. From such fleeting constellations, whole worlds become thinkable.

Soaring into a Cloudy Sky: The Köln Concert at 50

| Tyran Grillo

On December 12, 2025, ECM released a 50th anniversary edition of pianist Keith Jarrett’s The Köln Concert, returning one of the most unlikely landmarks in recorded music to the present age. Half a century after its first appearance in 1975, the recording remains the best-selling solo piano album in history and a resilient beacon within the ECM catalogue, an improvisation captured under circumstances so fragile that its survival feels almost miraculous. But the deeper significance of the reissue lies elsewhere. It invites listeners back to the site of a transformation. What once seemed like a fleeting document of a single evening now feels closer to a permanent warm front in the cultural atmosphere. The music continues to circulate through time, condensing into private revelations whenever someone lowers the needle or presses play.

The legend surrounding the performance is familiar. Jarrett arrived in Cologne exhausted from touring. The piano provided for the concert was smaller than expected and in poor condition, with weak bass notes and uneven action. The hour was late. But the constraints became an engine. Jarrett reshaped his approach in response to these limitations, leaning toward the middle register, carving rhythmic patterns that could carry the music forward without relying on the instrument’s wounded depths. What followed, then, was a sustained act of adaptation, a musician turning difficulty into propulsion. The result has since become one of the most widely heard recordings in jazz, classical crossover, and improvised music, though it belongs comfortably to none of those categories.

In a new essay for the edition, German journalist Thomas Steinfeld recalls how there was little to distinguish the concerts surrounding the famed Köln performance and that all of them were “an expression of a will toward aesthetic emancipation.” United under that humble, if not humbling, banner was Jarrett’s commitment to improvised-only concerts, which allowed for the fullness of nothingness to make itself heard in real time. Each evening began with an empty field and ended with a configuration that had not existed before the first note. And yet, what emerged in the confines of the Cologne Opera House on that fateful date of January 24, 1975 seemed to cut out a new eyehole in the mask of history through which a new perspective on what was achievable at the piano was revealed in a way that perhaps no musician has before or since.

Steinfeld is quick to caution us against the gravitational pull of myth. This concert was one night within a longer tour and within a longer life of music. To isolate it too completely risks freezing Jarrett in a single pose, as though the artist were merely the vessel for this one improbable event. In truth, the Köln performance was a turning point along a broader arc that led to the monumental Sun Bear Concerts, whose vast landscapes of improvisation would extend Jarrett’s language even further. What we hear in Cologne is therefore not a conclusion but a threshold, the moment when one door swings open and the wind of possibility pours through.

There is something timeless about this music precisely because it is so firmly entrenched in time, documented on tape but composed in air. The opening of Part I arrives already in motion, like a river glimpsed from a bridge rather than a spring discovered at its source. Phrases rise and fall with the tentative confidence of a bird learning the currents of the sky. The melody circles overhead, close enough that its shadow passes over us. Jarrett’s left hand begins with the quiet determination of a traveler testing unfamiliar ground. A rhythm forms beneath the surface, hesitant at first, then increasingly sure of its own footsteps.

Before long, the music finds a pulse that seems older than the instrument itself. The piano becomes a breathing creature. Harmonic light flickers across the surface while deeper currents move beneath. When the famous vamp emerges just after the seven-minute mark, it feels like a clearing in the forest where everything suddenly gathers.

Yet any sense of grandeur refuses to settle into monumentality. Jarrett dismantles the structure almost as soon as it rises, examining it from within, turning it gently in the light like an object whose inner workings remain mysterious. The music behaves as a living cell. We witness its movement, its expansion, its ability to replicate feeling from one listener to another. Its mechanisms remain hidden. The effect spreads nonetheless.

The expansive final passage of Part I, with its thick block chords and surging textures, greets the listener not as a goodbye but as a hello.

Part IIa begins with a different temperament. What began as an aerial survey of the imagination now feels grounded in the body. A rhythmic pattern settles in with irresistible buoyancy. One hears the echo of gospel, the sway of folk dance, the bright elasticity of American vernacular music filtering through Jarrett’s internal vocabulary. The audience’s energy becomes part of the current. The music dances, stumbles briefly into contemplation, then rises again with renewed vitality.

This trajectory feels inevitable, as though following a path that had always existed beneath the floorboards of the hall. The music quiets into reflection before lifting itself once more with a blues-tinged warmth. Jarrett’s playing here carries the sensation of a traveler pausing beside a river before continuing onward.

Part IIb deepens the inward pull. The left hand coils into a spiraling figure that suggests a single direction of travel. Not outward but inward. Each repetition tightens the circle until the music finds an opening at its center. From there it rises into a fierce, sunlit expanse. The harmony burns with an almost desert brightness. One senses the pianist squinting into that light, moving forward despite the glare.

Such bravery animates the entire performance. Improvisation always contains the possibility of failure. Here that risk becomes the music’s secret fuel, as each phrase steps onto uncertain ground and finds footing just in time.

Part IIc arrives like a quiet epilogue whispered after the main story has ended. Its intimacy carries a gentle radiance. The closing gestures resemble a warm hand on the shoulder, a kiss on the cheek of a wanderer about to continue down the road. What remains is a small bundle of warmth carried forward into whatever lies ahead.

It’s easy to forget that Jarrett’s performance began just before midnight, after the opera audience had already departed and the city had slipped into a quieter rhythm. Jarrett stepped onto the stage at precisely that hour when the imagination becomes receptive to rarer signals. Perhaps this is why the music radiates with such unusual clarity. Under those conditions, suspended between today and tomorrow, even the smallest musical gesture appeared luminous.

All of which leads back to the peculiar solitude at the center of the recording. A lone pianist sits before a flawed instrument and invents an entire landscape from nothing. No bandmates share the burden. No written score provides direction. The artist listens to the room, to the objects at his disposal, to the faint murmurs of possibility that hover just beyond hearing. Music emerges like mist from a valley floor.

As is evident from my first attempt to describe this music in mere human language, the recording eludes definitive characterization. Words are the cloudy sky into which it has soared over the years. However, what language fails to capture finds perfect expression in sound. The piano speaks with a fluency that criticism can only admire from a distance.

Jean-Marie Machado: Como as Flores (RJAL 397052)

| Tyran Grillo

Jean-Marie Machado piano
Claude Tchamitchian double bass
Zé Luis Nascimento drums, percussion
Recording, mixing, mastering at Studios la Buissonne, Pernes-les-Fontaines, France
Recorded April 2024 and mixed May 2024 by Gérard de Haro, assisted by Matteo Fontaine
Mastered by Nicolas Baillard at La Buissonne Mastering Studio
Steinway grand piano prepared and tuned by Sylvain Charles
Produced by Cantabile and Gérard de Haro with RJAL for La Buissonne 
Release date: January 23, 2026

After a series of ambitious, large-scale projects that stretched outward in many directions, pianist and composer Jean-Marie Machado turns inward and returns to the elemental with this luminous trio recording. The gesture feels less like a reduction than a distillation, as if years of orchestral color and structural ambition have been pressed slowly into a sweet-smelling essence. The album’s title, Como as Flores, translated from Portuguese as “Like Flowers,” names the guiding metaphor with quiet elegance. A flower does not argue for its beauty. It opens. Fragrance spreads through the air without instruction, invisible yet unmistakable. In much the same way, Machado’s music unfolds here with an unforced grace, each note blooming from the last, each phrase releasing a delicate aroma of feeling. With Brazilian percussionist Zé Luis Nascimento and bassist Claude Tchamitchian beside him, Machado enters a kind of musical relativity where gravity and flight continually exchange roles.

“Romantic Spell” begins like the moment one falls into a lover’s arms and forgets where the body ends. The opening breath carries warmth and ease, a gentle suspension that seems to hover between waking and dream. Piano chords drift like petals across still water. Tchamitchian’s bass speaks in soft murmurs, grounding the trio in a tender gravity. Nascimento introduces colors that shimmer at the edges of perception. Curtains sway in moonlight somewhere within the music. A slow tide of emotion gathers its strength. Everything feels receptive, open, full of promise.

From this intimate beginning, “Valsa Ouriço” arrives with a sudden brightness that resembles the first flash of morning light through an open window. Energy crackles through the trio’s playing. Machado’s piano lines spiral and leap with the exhilaration of new affection. The piece carries the buoyancy of ocean waves, rising and falling with a natural elasticity. Nascimento’s percussion reveals astonishing sensitivity here. Each gesture lands with the precision of a brushstroke in a finely detailed painting. The rhythmic patterns do more than support the melody. They sing alongside it, adding hues that feel melodic in their own right. His hands seem to conjure entire landscapes with the lightest touch.

In “De Memorias e de Saudade,” time slows until each note lingers in warm air. Nostalgia inhabits the space without turning heavy. The music resembles the quiet contemplation of an old garden where memory and present sensation mingle freely. Machado allows silence to bloom between phrases. The ascent begins with “Le Voleur de Fleurs,” a piece that climbs with patient determination before releasing itself into radiant flight. One hears echoes of wandering through fields thick with color, the senses saturated by scent and sunlight. Nascimento becomes particularly vivid here, his playing lush and expansive. A few strokes across skin or wood seem capable of summoning vast distances. The percussion glows with a deep golden warmth. One could almost imagine pollen drifting through the air.

Shadows appear briefly in “Our Tears Never Cried,” where slight dissonances introduce a delicate ache. Even flowers contain a kind of fragility. Their beauty persists beside the knowledge of how easily they can wilt and detach from their stems. Machado leans into that ambiguity, shaping phrases that hover between sweetness and sorrow. The trio then turns toward Miles Davis with a supple and groove-laden interpretation of “Nardis.” Familiar territory becomes fertile soil for improvisation. Machado’s touch balances clarity and mystery, while Tchamitchian and Nascimento weave a rhythmic fabric that moves with graceful inevitability.

“Piuma,” performed as a piano solo, offers one of the album’s coziest moments. The title suggests a feather, something light enough to drift through the air. Machado plays with remarkable restraint, allowing tenderness to accumulate slowly. Beneath the softness lies a quiet melancholy, the subtle awareness that love carries its own permeability. Feelings pass through us like wind through branches, leaving movement long after the breeze itself has gone.

Tchamitchian then steps forward with his arco introduction to “Perdido em Clareza.” The bowed bass opens a clearing within the album’s poignant terrain. When the trio joins together, they settle into a mid-tempo dance marked by playful curiosity. There is a childlike wonder in the way the themes unfold, as though the musicians are discovering their shapes in real time.

“Transvida” turns the spotlight toward Nascimento in a percussion showcase that reveals the full breadth of his expressive vocabulary. His playing suggests rain striking leaves, wind traveling across dry earth, and footsteps crossing hidden paths through a forest.

The closing piece, “L’Endormi,” inhabits a more dreamlike register. Frame drum pulses softly beneath harmonic bowing from Tchamitchian. Machado’s piano carries a darker hue, as if twilight has settled over the garden that opened at the beginning of the album. The music drifts through strange and beautiful terrain where shadows possess their own quiet luminosity.

Yet the deeper resonance of Como as Flores extends beyond individual tracks. Flowers appear here not simply as decoration but as a philosophy of form. Each composition grows organically, rooted in attentive listening and mutual responsiveness. Nothing is forced open. Each musical gesture unfolds in its proper season. One hears the trio tending their sound the way a gardener tends living soil, trusting the invisible processes that allow life to emerge.

Perhaps that is the quiet wisdom contained in Machado’s return to the trio format. Creation often resembles cultivation rather than construction. One prepares the ground, listens carefully to the conditions of light and rain, then waits with patience for something unexpected to appear. A garden cannot be commanded into bloom. It answers only to care, curiosity, and time. In that sense, music and flowers share a secret. Both reveal how beauty enters the world without force, rising gently from hidden roots that continue their work long beneath the surface.