Author: Tyran Grillo

Thomas Strønen/Time Is A Blind Guide: Off Stillness (ECM 2842)

| Tyran Grillo

Thomas Strønen/Time Is A Blind Guide
Off Stillness

Thomas Strønen drums
Ayumi Tanaka piano
Håkon Aase violin
Leo Svensson Sander violoncello
Ole Morten Vågen double bass
Recorded December 2021 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Peer Espen Ursfjord
Mixed July 2024 by Manfred Eicher, Thomas Strønen, and Michael Hinreiner (engineer) at Bavaria Musikstudios, München
Cover: Fidel Sclavo
Album produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: December 5, 2025

Off Stillness begins not with sound but with a memory, one that Thomas Strønen carries like a stone kept in the pocket of his youth, made rounder and smoother with time. His recollection of slipping unnoticed through a café kitchen in Tønsberg to witness his first jazz concert at age 15 is more than nostalgia; it’s an origin story. There, engulfed in the sounds of Jon Balke’s Oslo 13, was a revelation. Rhythm, he discovered, was not a grid but a worldview, a way for the body to converse with the unseen.

From this quiet prelude, the latest iteration of his band Time Is A Blind Guide opens with “Memories of Paul,” a piece that feels like stepping into the half-light of Rainbow Studio, a space that does not merely record music but seems to cultivate it. Despite the title, this is not a tribute to Motian or Bley so much as a meditation on the tension between lineage and selfhood. Ayumi Tanaka’s piano breathes first, the faint stirring of a creature waking in its natural habitat. Håkon Aase’s violin is a drifting breeze, Leo Svensson Sander’s cello a subterranean hum, and Ole Morten Vågan’s bass a slow-moving tide beneath the surface. Strønen’s drumming is the pulse of the room itself, a presence woven so delicately into the others that extracting any single thread seems almost sacrilegious.

As the album moves inward, the climate changes with “Season.” Here, the strings take on an arid beauty, as if we’ve been transported into a landscape shaped by centuries of shifting winds. The piece proceeds like an archaeological dig through sand and sovereignty, yet from this dryness small harmonies bloom, each a tiny flower of possibility pushing through historical sediment. The music astonishes by how much it conveys with so little, conjuring a vastness that feels earned rather than imposed.

The ensemble’s paradoxical strength, its ability to move loosely while bound by deep listening, emerges even more fully in “Fall.” The piece sways like a great creature with an internal compass that needs no magnetic north. Its journey nourishes itself, leaving behind traces—melodic footprints, rhythmic indentations—for the listener to follow. Time is not measured but wandered through.

The mood softens with “Tuesday,” a piece stripped to its essentials, left bare so its poetic speech can resonate. Whether the musicians play in unison or diverge into their own small eddies, they inhale and exhale as a single lung. It is tenderness as a means of clarity.

A shift occurs in “Cubism,” where architecture abounds. The piece balances on a precarious structure of boards and cylinders, a slow-motion circus act in which each rotation differs subtly from the last. Strønen provides the chemical uplift, one reaction setting off the next. Tanaka’s piano becomes an alkaline counterpoint to the more acidic strings, and together they settle into an equilibrium that feels strangely, beautifully neutral. The music is precise without being rigid, playful without losing its center.

Abstract shapes drift into form with “Dismissed,” which begins like an experiment suspended in midair. Its irregular surfaces soon accumulate heat, expanding into outbursts of collective energy. Metallic tensions shimmer and collapse, highs and lows collide, and the piece finally dissolves into a sonic steam rising from a cooling forge.

Then comes “In Awe of Stillness,” which glistens with a self-generated glow, moving as if guided by impulses as old as they are unnameable. Just when it feels ready to drift away, it recoils slightly, a moment of satoric self-recognition. This pause resets the ensemble for the next step in its nomadic journey. Even as the piece thickens into louder phrases and hints of groove, it never sacrifices atmosphere. Nothing is ornamental; everything breathes.

By the end, one realizes that Off Stillness is as much a pilgrimage as an artistic statement. Its stories do not unfold in straight lines but in spirals, circling back to that teenage boy in Tønsberg who planted a seed that has now grown into a tree in its own right. The music invites repeated listening not to decipher it but to inhabit it, each return revealing new details, like light shifting across the same landscape at different hours.

For all these reasons, it may well be—both in craft and in spirit—the ECM album of the year. There is truly nothing else like it.

Masabumi Kikuchi: Hanamichi – The Final Recording Vol. II

| Tyran Grillo

Red Hook Records began its journey with pianist Masabumi Kikuchi’s final studio recording, and now, for the label’s eighth release, we are given more of a revelation than a sequel. If that first album was a door half open, this one is the room beyond it: dimly lit, shadows stretching toward us with quiet familiarity. Drawn from the same December 2013 sessions, these seven tracks seem to have steeped longer in the vessels of memory and time. They arrive seasoned by the sort of emotional oxidation that turns recollection into something rarer and more useful. If saving the best for last were a novel, then this album would not simply be the final chapter; it would be the codex hidden in the spine, the annotation that changes the tone of everything preceding it.

The standards here were formative ones in Kikuchi’s student days, and he approaches them as an elder returning to the foundational texts of his own becoming. They are less songs than mirrors that have aged with him, warped by years of touching, of looking, and of looking away.

“Manhã de Carnaval,” for instance, unfolds as a dream freshly slipped from its cocoon. Kikuchi walks tenderly across its terrain, each step testing the integrity of a world that seems to be forming beneath him even as he treads it. There is the sense of waking from a coma, unsure of what has changed most: the world outside, or the one within. As he coaxes the theme into coherence, it resembles memory grafting itself onto the present. Notes reach upward as fingertips toward a moon that has watched over him for decades, asking silent questions about the knots forming in the threads of existence below.

This pathos is his signature, and it reveals itself early, already pulsing under the surface of “Alone Together,” in which confidence is not announced but revealed slowly, the way a photograph emerges through chemical baths. Kikuchi does not so much play the tune as breathe through it. By the time we arrive at “I Loves You, Porgy,” the emotional stakes have deepened. The opening chords blush across time as if receiving a first kiss from a future that will never fully arrive. He settles into its changes with a kind of practiced vulnerability, proving that tenderness need not be fragile. His quietude carries drama the way a lantern carries flame, not ostentatiously but with an understanding of its purpose.

“My Ship” drifts into view as if slowed by the gravitational pull of recollection. Time is not a river but a weight, and living requires the steady muscle of acceptance. The ship does not simply approach; it gathers the currents of decades, reminding us that history is not always something the world gives us but grows in the chambers of the heart.

Faro-shuffled into these standards are three improvisations, astonishing in their immediacy and yet strangely timeless. As Ben Ratliff so beautifully puts it in his liner notes, they “can sound like instant ballads from another planet,” and together they form a kind of secret autobiography, spoken in a language only the subconscious fully understands. The first of them, “Improvisation II,” opens the door with a dark playfulness, as though Kikuchi were tugging at the piano’s hidden wiring, testing where resistance might give way to confession. What at first sounds abstract begins to gather logic the longer one listens. In “Improvisation III,” the music flips itself inside out. Small fragments swell into whole lifetimes, while emotional atoms compress into diamonds of feeling that shimmer before being tossed into the river of time. “Improvisation IV” climbs stairways within stairways, each gesture reaching for a rung made of breath and hesitation. A rhythm struggles to be born, faltering yet fiercely sane, as though meaning rises from the very fractures that threaten to undo it.

What is ultimately astonishing about this album is that it never feels tired or cynical, never weighted by the knowledge that these would be among his final recorded breaths. Instead, it is a witness: someone channeling truth in the moment, as though the body knows something that words and plans and even melodies cannot fully grasp. This is not farewell music. It is presence music, created by a human being who understands that honesty requires discipline.

To listen to this album is to feel the pulse of time through someone else’s fingertips, understanding at last that the deepest truths are not contained in beginnings or endings, but in the trembling line that connects them. In these tender and fractured meditations, Kikuchi offers not closure but permeability. The circle remains open, as all living circles do, inviting us to step through and find ourselves changed on the other side. Artistic life begins where the tape stops.

Amina Claudine Myers: Solace of the Mind

| Tyran Grillo

Even as the world churns in its ceaseless kaleidoscope of beginnings and erasures, Amina Claudine Myers sits at her solitary piano like a witness to the secret continuity beneath all ruptures. Her inner flame neither wavers nor consumes. It hovers, steady as a lantern held by an ancestor who has patiently waited for us to open the door. In this solo offering, recorded at 81 years young, she extends a topography of intimacy where every listener may stake a claim not of ownership but of belonging. It is a home carved from the psychic sediment of music made in real time. “African Blues” rises first, a kind of invocation to the heart’s memory of itself. Its anthemic pulse thins the veils between the seen and the felt until the blood remembers how to sing. “Song for Mother E” unfurls in response, sculpted yet unbounded, a river reasoning with its own flow. It reminds us that every emotion is both a tributary and a delta of something older than the body that hosts it. Here, her church roots shimmer not as dogma but as archeology. Layers of hymnody and gospel slough their husks to reveal a holiness that needs no altar. It is a spirituality so egalitarian it could only have been shaped by hands that labored long to mend the broken lens of the world with the glue of lived experience. Her “Hymn for John Lee Hooker” becomes a wandering morality, touching the past like a finger trailing over photographs saved from a burning house. The American spiritual “Steal Away” drips from her like baptismal water that refuses to dry, anointing with the trembling newness of a spirit freshly called. Her original pieces, nearly all of them windows cut into the architecture of her being, span a spectrum of interior climates. In “Ode to My Ancestors,” her Hammond B3 hums like a memory engine as she speaks of the lineage that built her path, hand upon weathered hand. Each uttered reflection is a stepping-stone laid. In “Voices,” the piano speaks in tongues older than language, delivering messages only the flesh understands. “Sensuous” enlarges the ears into satellite dishes that capture transmissions from the universe’s unanswered questions. It draws us into rooms of shadow and recollection where love’s contradictions bloom like crushed orchids—messy, fragrant, impossible to arrange without getting the fragrance on your fingertips. This ambiguity stretches further into “Twilight,” where starshine blurs into meteor-ghosts. Time loosens its grip, and even certainty forgets its name. “Cairo” offers points of reference that feel like déjà vu wearing new garments. “Beneath the Sun” tilts the face of the self upward, eyes closed, receiving the warmth of our nearest star as if gratitude were a gravitational force. Its chords unspool dissonance the way wisdom exudes suffering, letting each tension reveal its lesson. And though Myers’s personal history could indeed fill countless pages, tracing constellations of influence and expression, none of that is required to feel as though she is already kin. The moment we press play, we are confronted not with her story but with a shared stream of remembrance, carried by waters that have been flowing toward us long before we knew how to swim.

Bill Frisell/Kit Downes/Andrew Cyrille: Breaking the Shell

| Tyran Grillo

With Breaking the Shell, the sixth release from the groundbreaking Red Hook label, producer Sun Chung has offered not merely a trio but a quietly seismic realignment of possibility. Electric guitar (Bill Frisell), pipe organ (Kit Downes), and drums (Andrew Cyrille) form a constellation that feels, paradoxically, at once unprecedented and long familiar, like discovering a new moon only to realize its gravity has pulled our tides all along. Chung, having cultivated relationships with all three musicians through previous ECM projects, sensed a convergence before any of the participants could name it. As Philip Watson writes in his liner notes, the trio exists “in a deep state of not-knowing,” a phrase that might just as easily describe the listener’s condition of being suspended between recognition and estrangement.

Recorded at St. Luke in the Fields in New York’s Greenwich Village, the music bears the acoustics of a space built for a resonance of spiritual persuasion. Here, sound doesn’t merely travel outward but returns, circling back like a question that grows more meaningful the farther it wanders. The trio treads honestly without ever falling over, even as it allows trips and stumbles to become part of its gait. There is no fear of imbalance. Instead, there is trust in the materials of the moment. And while one could easily linger on the rare combo or the grandeur of hearing the pipe organ in a chamber-like setting, once the album begins, such considerations dissolve. The instruments become porous vessels for a collective intuition.

The opening track, “May 4th,” emerges in a slow-rolling fog, the organ releasing a detuned drone that tilts gently against the ear. Higher notes graze the air with the soft certainty of fingertips tracing an old, half-forgotten symbol. Frisell and Cyrille enter as if waking from the same dream, their gestures swelling and receding in a space where time loops back on itself. The music feels exploratory—not in the sense of searching for what is missing but in allowing what is already present to unfold without resistance.

From there, the trio slips into “Untitled 23,” a meditation that cycles through scenes like a zoetrope, each revolution shifting character just enough to remind us of the fragile illusions we call continuity. The trio invites the imagination to wander alongside them, not as spectators, but as co-conspirators in the act of making sense of the flickering.

The journey then turns extraterrestrial with “Kasei Valles,” named for the vast valley system etched across the Martian surface. The music reaches outward with similar breadth: Downes’s organ stretches into horizonless zones while Frisell’s guitar, distorted into an adventurous rasp, scratches the underbelly of atmosphere. One can almost sense distance itself, not only as measurement but as emotional terrain.

On “El,” cellist Lucy Railton joins the ensemble, her tone a shaded river cutting through the organ’s cathedral-like glow. The track breathes with the warmth of a melody as an offered hand rather than a distant signal. Cyrille’s brushes sketch spontaneous star paths, while Frisell’s detailing elicits messages whispered from within.

The mood deepens further with “Southern Body,” perhaps the album’s most quietly radiant piece. It is an earth swell of potential energy, the sound of something enormous choosing rest over detonation. Downes releases ocarina-like tones from the organ’s upper registers that seem to summon the wildness nestled in even the most domesticated corners of ourselves.

The first of two traditionals, “Sjung Herte Sjung,” arrives as a turning point. Translating from the Norwegian as “Sing Heart Sing,” it mirrors the ethos animating the entire project: a willingness to let the voice rise unforced. Frisell’s modal wanderings feel like steps taken along an ancient footpath, one that continues to reshape itself beneath each traveler.

Between these landmarks lie hints of discovery, including the swirling interplay of “Two Twins,” whose energies braid together like strands of DNA before dissolving in a delicately percussive fade. “July 2nd” is a drifting lantern, its tender, fluttering textures slipping briefly into an electronic-sounding mirage, as if a synthesizer were dreaming of being an organ, or vice versa.

Cyrille’s own “Proximity” appears near the album’s end, its tender-footed steps guided by the composer’s trademark sensitivity. The brushes move not to clear a path but to reveal it. Finally, another traditional, “Este a Székelyeknél” (“Evening in Transylvania”), closes the circle. Its Hungarian melody (one that passed under Bartók’s orchestrating hand) dissolves into the trio’s shared air, a cultural imprint carried forward not by preservation but by transformation.

By the end of Breaking the Shell, the title reveals its shape. What breaks is not the world but the hard surface of clinging to familiar forms. Frisell, Downes, and Cyrille do not present answers, nor do they ask us to seek them. Instead, they remind us that unknowing can be a place of shelter, and that music—when allowed to move through its players rather than be moved by them—can form a thematic circle in which every beginning contains its end, and every ending nods softly back to the beginning.

Here, in this luminous setting, the shell breaks not with force, but with attention. And what slips out feels like truth.

Wadada Leo Smith/Amina Claudine Myers: Central Park’s mosaics of reservoir, lake, paths and gardens

| Tyran Grillo

Central Park’s mosaics of reservoir, lake, paths and gardens names the first duo recording between trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith and pianist-organist Amina Claudine Myers. It’s also an apt metaphor for this fated coming together. The park is a place where distinct elements coexist without competing, where horizons keep shifting depending on where you stand and how long you linger. The same is true here. Myers, newly crowned with the more-than-deserved title of NEA Jazz Master in 2024, reaches deep into the caverns of her lived experience, drawing up raw ore from eras that still shine in her memory. Smith—himself a master, visionary, and fellow first-wave AACM member—opens doors worn smooth by time yet still swinging freely on their hinges. Together, they make a room feel larger simply by entering it. To hear them share air is like waking gently from uninterrupted sleep just as the sun begins to slip between trees and buildings, a thin blade of gold dividing dream from day.

“Conservatory Gardens” emerges from that threshold with Myers at the piano, her touch shaping the terrain before the listener with an almost mystical receptivity. Her phrases crest and dip like small hills, and Smith answers with the kind of breath that seems to turn the unseen visible. The heart of the duo beats openly here, exhaling what cannot be kept, inhaling what must be carried. With each exchange, they shed the weight of old confidences and doubts alike, making room for fresh memory to sprout. The piece ends in a sparkle of high piano keys, like a handful of coins flung into a fountain.

That glimmer carries into “Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir,” though the energy shifts. This is a brief but vivid ride through sunlit water, a handful of moments suspended between rhythm and reflection. Myers moves to the Hammond B3, and the air between the musicians grows charged, shimmering like heat on a city sidewalk in August. Or is it winter’s sheen, the delicate silver of a frozen surface holding its breath? Such is the multivalence of their language: one gesture, two meanings, both true.

From the promise of morning and the fullness of midday waters, we arrive at “Central Park at Sunset.” Here, the light tilts toward indigo, and the city that never sleeps permits itself a rare moment of stillness. Smith and Myers play with a darker warmth, as if acknowledging that even ceaseless motion casts a shadow where rest might hide. Their pacing slows; the atmosphere grows languid, tinged with something nearly mournful—not despairing, but honest, a reminder that endings are just beginnings caught between breaths.

“The Harlem Meer” widens the frame again, offering a wingspan that spans both the intimate and the immense. The music floats with quiet purpose, occupying only as much space as it needs, leaving room for listeners, memories, and spirits to fly alongside it. There is grace in that restraint, a generosity that doesn’t announce itself but is felt nevertheless.

The album’s twin tributes, “Albert Ayler, a meditation in light” and “Imagine, a mosaic for John Lennon,” honor two artists whose visions cracked open the world in different but equally luminous ways. Ayler’s piece manifests in chiaroscuro, where the borders between radiance and shadow blur and reform themselves. The nod to Lennon, by contrast, dwells in both movement and stillness, its shifting textures forming a picture that seems to rearrange itself with each listen. Together, these tracks offer a kind of yin and yang, a dialogue of forces that meet in the liminal zone where sky meets land. One could fall asleep there, nestled between contrast and complement.

In his liner notes, John Corbett calls the album “a central spot, a convention center for the reconvening of heavy spirits and sympathetic souls.” This becomes especially evident in “When Was,” the only composition not by Smith but by Myers herself. It is a piano solo placed at the album’s center. The piece begins tentatively, stepping as if uncertain whether the ground will hold. Then, slowly but unmistakably, Myers finds her footing. Her voice strengthens. A door opens. And suddenly the sky is within reach. She swallows it whole—not greedily, but reverently—allowing its storms and clouds to move through her, granting them flesh, letting them speak.

In her playing, metaphors become visceral: a tourniquet slipping from a newly vaccinated arm; a child’s secret wish cupped tenderly by her single mother; a wanderer tasting hope in a single moment of unconditional kindness. The city exhales its ghosts one by one, making space for new life to take root. As Myers builds toward abstraction, the mood bends toward hope. She restores the scenery not by repainting it but by gazing at it as if for the first time. And when the final notes crest and dissolve, they leave behind the unmistakable trace of joy promised and joy delivered.

BlankFor.ms/Jason Moran/Marcus Gilmore: Refract

| Tyran Grillo

On Refract, electronic musician Tyler Gilmore (a.k.a. BlankFor.ms), pianist Jason Moran, and drummer Marcus Gilmore refuse the idea of a simple collaboration. Instead, they open their triad like a prism, splitting, bending, and rejoining light in ways that illuminate what music becomes when it learns to question its own edges. Their real-time explorations shatter the familiar, producing new angles of incidence and escape, each honed like a digital blade against the raw stone of acoustic touch. Tyler captures sounds as they appear, then manipulates and redeploys them as new organisms, refractions that remember their origins only in the way a rainbow remembers rain. It’s sound becoming itself by passing through itself. Using an inimitable array of degraded cassette tapes, analog synthesizers, and the tactile wisdom of his training at the New England Conservatory (where he studied with Jason), he brings physical materials to heel in service of apparitional textures. When producer Sun Chung first encountered these experiments, he discovered an irrepressible tension between fragility and force. The idea of being in a room with hard-hitting improvisers struck Tyler as both thrilling and terrifying. Jason and Marcus were invited, and suddenly the studio became a chamber of mirrored possibilities.

Before a single note was recorded, Sun and Tyler lingered in the long dawn of preparation, an apprenticeship to undetermined futures. Tyler laid out multiple pathways for the trio but held his expectations lightly, as gardeners do with unripe branches that might bear fruit or vanish into thin air. He offered fully formed pieces with melodic husks and harmonic marrow, skeletal sketches designed for wandering, and, above all, the spinning oracles of his tapes, each a prophecy split into new wavelengths.

The first sounds we hear come in “Onset I,” a beautiful wash of ambience, comforting and luminous, that meets the listener not with answers but with an invitation to dream without judgment. In this opening, where the glitch becomes the norm and coherence dissolves like a mirage, Jason’s pianism is pointillist and exploratory, fitful yet unguarded, as if tapping along the walls of an invisible room. Is the titular onset that of a seizure, a psychotic break, or a moment of long-awaited healing? The music refracts every interpretation, scattering our expectations into sympathetic fragments. Swirls of digital murmurations settle into sustained, lyrical pianism, hopeful despite the tremors, and without noticing, we find ourselves in “Onset II,” where subterranean beauty rises like musical lava. Tyler adds cryptic messages in plain earshot, flickering codes awaiting the translation of a dialogue that seems to recognize us even before we have learned how to listen.

The tender disorientation of this opening gives way to the warm, contoured intimacy of “Affectionate, Painful,” a track that feels like a kiss traded between piano and distorted inner hiccups. So much beauty and hope lie nestled in these woods, their branches bending with emotional weight. It pairs organically with “Inward, Curve,” a blossoming that moves into a fluent, jazzy ride of piano and drums, recalling the sheen of 1980s ECM while remaining unmistakably its own creature. These pieces feel more sculpted, guided by harmonic intention, though the electronic threading makes them seem strangely more organic—ironically so, given the circuitry at their core. Other pieces, however, arise from structures left intentionally open, vessels designed not to hold sound but to parse whatever light finds them.

Most of the album’s 16 tracks stem from the completely improvised tape loops—those fragile, flickering seeds in which the trio’s instincts seem most clearly aligned. From sputtering, almost vocal textures to interlaced patterns of tender repetition and meticulous drumming, each carves out a linguistic territory all its own. These passages examine surface texture across backward speech acts, elongated sustains, and distant echoes of time. They refract the notion of forward motion, making memory and immediacy exchange masks. At the album’s conclusion, “Tape Loop D” offers a particularly poignant elegy, polished just enough to shimmer. Its lyricism rises from the din of the city, swirling once more before sliding into an open manhole.

Amid these atmospheric passages comes the urban stride of “Eighth Pose,” the album’s most rhythmically grounded passage. Its pulse lays down a stretch of imaginary sidewalk, giving piano and drums room to catch their feet as they navigate back streets of unfamiliar harmony. Each swirl is another crack in the glass of the matrix. The music is phenomenal, not because it aims for spectacle but because it continually demonstrates how easily light can be fractured—and how beautiful the fracture becomes when treated with such care.

From here, the album breathes outward. “Stir” stretches a heartbeat into eternal song, a strip of empty road dissolving into the horizon. “Release” blossoms in suspended time, a long exhale after the chest has forgotten how to loosen. And “Little Known” closes this inner arc by turning a child’s secret thoughts inside out, shading them in charcoal and silver, a reminder that innocence contains shadows as complex as any adult confession.

And while echoes of Jon Hassell, Tim Hecker, Takagi Masakatsu, William Basinski, Aerovane, or Kettel may drift through the trees, these touchpoints evaporate almost as soon as they form. They are ephemeral reflections along a deeper pool, quickly lost in the forest of granulations that surrounds us. For Refract is not merely an album but an experience, one that holds us in its open palms and recalibrates the ears until they find their way.

John Scofield/Dave Holland: Memories of Home (ECM 2860)

| Tyran Grillo

John Scofield
Dave Holland
Memories of Home

John Scofield guitar
Dave Holland double bass
Recorded August 2024 at NRS Recording Studio, Catskill NY
Engineer: Scott Petito
Cover photo: Juan Hitters
Produced by Dave Holland and John Scofield
Release date: November 21, 2025

Guitarist John Scofield and bassist Dave Holland, two musicians with such distinct sonic identities, join forces for a duo album that is as mighty as it is intimate. Despite having crossed paths countless times over the decades, whether onstage with giants like Herbie Hancock and Joe Henderson or in high-octane settings like ScoLoHoFo, Memories of Home marks their first album as a duo.

The idea had lingered for years, even surviving a pandemic-scrapped tour in 2020. When they finally hit the road in late 2021, the chemistry was immediate. By the time they toured again in 2024, making a record felt inevitable. The result mirrors their live sets with its blend of new and revisited originals shaped by decades of shared musical language. Their overlap in taste and technique makes the pairing feel natural, while their differences keep the music alive, alert, and constantly evolving.

A major point of connection, of course, is Miles Davis. Scofield’s mid-80s stint and Holland’s late-60s tenure offer a rare shared lineage, and you hear echoes of that history right away in the opener, “Icons at the Fair.” Built from the chord movement of Herbie Hancock’s version of “Scarborough Fair” (a session both musicians played on), the tune’s wistful intro quickly settles into a buoyant groove. Scofield’s rounded tone is an elegant vehicle for his improvisational flights, and the two musicians trade roles like seasoned copilots, each taking the lead before easing back into support. Holland’s solo radiates that trademark close-eyed smile, matching Scofield’s buoyancy beat for beat.

Scofield revisits several of his own classics here, each transformed by the duo format. “Meant to Be” adopts a darker hue than its earlier incarnations, its fluid changes and easy-living feel revealing two players fully at ease with themselves and each other. Holland pulls his solo seamlessly from the texture, almost as if it had been hiding there the whole time. Later, “Mine Are Blues” brings their full energies to the forefront. The drive is infectious, with the pair finishing each other’s phrases in a display of rhythmic and melodic telepathy. Scofield’s crunchy, tactile tone is on point. “Memorette,” swankier and more rhythmically playful, finds a lovely twang in the guitar and Holland sounding lush and resonant beneath it all.

Holland contributes several reimagined pieces from earlier in his career. “Mr. B,” his tribute to Ray Brown, brings out a delicate, cerebral side of Scofield, who responds to Holland’s writing with gorgeous restraint and curiosity. “Not for Nothin’,” first heard on Holland’s 2001 quintet album of the same name, reveals new secrets when reduced to its essentials. Here, the tune becomes lightning in a bottle—lean, open, and unexpectedly adventurous. Scofield seems newly inspired by the stripped-down setting, exploring bolder shapes and touches of abstraction.

The guitarist’s ballad “Easy for You” emerges as a quiet triumph that carries a gentle energy and a deep love for life. At over eight minutes, it gives both players space to breathe, to stretch, and to enjoy the subtleties of their wholesome interplay.

The album closes with two Holland compositions. “You I Love” is a vivacious romp, brimming with delight, while the contemplative, pastoral mood of the title track draws out the earthy, country-tinged side of Scofield’s playing. Like ending credits to a Western, it rides off slowly, tracing the silhouette of a hero dissolving into sunset. It’s both a musical farewell and a gentle summation of everything the duo shares.

Wu Wei/Martin Stegner/Janne Saksala: Pur ti miro (ECM New Series 2843)

| Tyran Grillo

Wu Wei
Martin Stegner
Janne Saksala
Pur ti miro

Wu Wei sheng
Martin Stegner viola
Janne Saksala double bass
Recorded October 2022
Teldex Studio Berlin
Cover: Fidel Sclavo
Executive producer: Manfred Eicher
Release date: November 21, 2025

Pur ti miro represents one of those rare convergences in classical music when disparate lineages find themselves speaking, almost accidentally at first, a common language. It begins with curiosity, as violist Martin Stegner and double bassist Janne Saksala, both members of the Berlin Philharmonic, step beyond their usual orchestral frame to meet Wu Wei, master of the sheng. His instrument—an ancient Chinese mouth organ whose history predates all the works played here—has been modified with keys for the modern ear, capable of whispering like breath against glass or expanding in a cathedral-like radiance. When Stegner encountered Wei in 2009, as he recounts in the album’s liner note, he felt something akin to recognition, as if this millennia-old voice, rendered anew, had been waiting patiently to show him a corner of the musical universe he had not yet visited.

Their collaboration began with long improvisations that felt like conversations between strangers who, little by little, discover that they share the same dreams. But the true spark arrived one day when Wei, without announcement or expectation, introduced Claudio Monteverdi’s Sì dolce è’l tormento to the group. The sheng’s timbre, at once reed-like and celestial, enfolded the melody in a new kind of vulnerability. Early music, that echo of distant rooms and candlelit courts, suddenly breathed with a startling immediacy. Hearing it was nothing short of a revelation for Stegner.

From this moment, a desire for a project to nurture that revelation without taming it grew. The idea of a trio emerged: sheng, viola, and cello. Yet Stegner wondered what might happen if the music’s lower roots reached even farther into the earth. And so, the cello was replaced in the imagination by a double bass, and eventually in reality by Janne Saksala, whose warm resonance, playful experimentation, and architectural sensibility offered the perfect counterweight to the sheng’s shimmering glow. What began as an artistic experiment became a living portrait of three musicians drawn together by curiosity, humility, and a willingness to let go of what they thought they knew.

The recording opens, fittingly, with Sì dolce è’l tormento, and one feels immediately the trust between them. The strings do not accompany the sheng, nor does the sheng simply ornament the strings; instead, they dissolve into one another, forming a single instrument with three voices. The mournfulness of Monteverdi’s melody gains new terrain. It feels less like lament and more like a story we have heard so many times in languages we do not speak, whose meanings we may sense only in the pauses between syllables. Here, at last, someone translates them for us in real time.

Johann Sebastian Bach’s Organ Trio Sonata No. 1 in E-flat major follows, and with it an architectural shift. The lively outer movements float and spin with a measured buoyancy, but it is the Adagio that becomes the trio’s proving ground. In that slow movement, the muted viola curls around the bright woodiness of the sheng, while the double bass expands the room so we may step inside the harmony itself. Bach’s geometries reveal themselves as bodies in motion, human-shaped and breathing. The Andante from the Organ Trio Sonata No. 4 in e minor deepens the sense of natural inevitability, a landscape in sound. The sheng is a waterfall glimpsed from afar, the viola a lone bird carving patterns into a gray sky, and the bass the mist that holds all of it in gentle cohesion. And when the title piece from L’incoronazione di Poppea at last appears, we recognize the sensation it carries: that life is forever repeating its own small operas, and we are simply pilgrims passing through the middle of one that has been running since long before we arrived.

At the center of the album sits Vivaldi’s La Follia, a theme-and-variation playground that allows the musicians to stretch not only their technique but their imaginative reach. Here, Wei’s sheng sounds at times like an accordion leaning into a waltz, at others like a human voice. Meanwhile, Saksala’s bass dances with kinetic clarity. When the trio slips unexpectedly into jazz-tinged territory, we catch a glimpse of what they can do when the score becomes a suggestion rather than a command. Echoes of Gianluigi Trovesi and Gianni Coscia drift through, blooming into a finale that approaches the exuberance of a Romanian folk dance.

Thus, it makes poetic sense to end with a folk song proper: Bruremarsj frå Beiarn, a Norwegian bridal march. The trio plays it with both reverence and wonder. There is a hint of sadness at the beginning, that ache of separation inherent in every union, the leaving of one home to build another. The sheng’s accordion-like hum traces a path between joy and nostalgia. In its gentle call, the future becomes something familiar, while the past turns mysterious and soft-edged, retreating into obscurity.

Throughout the album, even in the most composed selections, a spirit of improvisation remains. The players listen more than they declare. They treat each phrase not as a given but as a question waiting to be answered. And because none of the instruments carries an aggressively sharp tone, the ensemble moves within a spectrum of shadow rather than light. The absence of a violin removes any temptation toward brilliance for its own sake.

It seems no coincidence that Pur ti miro translates to “I gaze upon you.” Listening to this album, one feels watched, not with scrutiny but with tenderness. The music looks at us the way a friend might look across a quiet table, curious about what we will say next. It regards us openly, lovingly, holding its breath just long enough for us to understand that we, too, are part of this conversation.

Bittová/Crispell/Maurseth/Rothenberg: Four Fold

| Tyran Grillo

An important aesthetic principle in ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arranging, is known as ma: the interval, the pause that holds all gestures in balance. This recording lives within that interval. Each sound is a petal in still air, its meaning found not in arrival but in suspension.

The album’s story begins at Banlieues Bleues in Paris, 2018. There, pianist Marilyn Crispell, Hardanger fiddle player Benedicte Maurseth, and reedist David Rothenberg gathered to explore the early birdsong transcriptions of Olivier Messiaen. In these notations, the wildness of the natural world first touched paper before it was tamed by harmony. A year later, Iva Bittová was added to the mix, her voice bridging word and weather.

Together, the quartet steps into the fragile terrain between music and its memory. What emerges, through years of subsequent reflection and patient shaping, feels less composed than revealed: a series of conversations with the unseen.

The first notes are a line drawn thin. Piano and clarinet trace its contour, a horizon trembling at the edge of being. From within that tremor, a voice unfurls, and the world begins its slow Folding. The fiddle answers from another time, its tone flecked with age and dust. The players seem to move by intuition, mapping silence the way birds adapt to wind: by feel, not by sight. What takes shape is not melody but the suggestion of one, a phrase on the verge of being spoken.

From the residue of that stillness, Ashlight begins to appear, pale and flickering, illumination born of what has burned away. Maurseth’s bow draws the dawn into being while Crispell drops her chords into water. Each tone contains its own echo. It neither advances nor repeats but hovers, luminous and uncertain, as if listening for its own reflection. Gradually, the instruments find each other in motion. Piano, fiddle, and bass clarinet circle in slow orbit, their lines folding inward and out again like geological strata. Hence Syncline, the meeting of two curves beneath the surface. Their rhythm is not one of time but of breath, a tide sensed more than counted. When Bittová enters, she brings something remembered rather than sung, a folk melody that the earth itself might hum when no one is listening.

In the wake of that convergence comes a retreat into intimacy. Fingers pluck at strings, keys whisper, tones barely formed—what the group calls Know No No, a study in almost-saying. Here, we behold a spiderweb of gestures catching the small debris of thought. A faint rustle passes through: the shimmer of Ruffle, where light and water trade reflections. The bow glides near silence, and the piano answers in small ripples, as if repeating the same idea in a different language. One senses communication without intention, like wind tracing reeds. And then, a sudden brightness opens the room, the solemn turning toward play.

The music leans into Anticline, the upward curve that follows a descent. Rothenberg’s clarinet teases, while Bittová answers in bursts of speech remembered from a dream. The ascetic finds her smile; the ritual learns to dance. It is here that the human reenters the sacred through joy. The air thickens again as if preparing for transformation. Out of the mix rise real-world signatures in Magpie, Moth. Rothenberg weaves them into the ensemble as if greeting long-lost kin. His bass clarinet decodes the nocturnal death’s head hawk moth, his seljefløyte joins the Australian magpie’s bright cry in an ecology of listening. The others respond in turn: piano breathing like wind through branches, Bittová’s voice flickering between the human and the elemental. For a moment, it is impossible to tell what is performed and what simply exists.

Out of this communion comes darkness. Crispell’s piano turns inward, each chord heavy and deliberate, the sound of thought imploding in sequence. Maurseth’s fiddle flashes briefly, a line of copper in shadow, and the piece known as Crinkle unfolds as an elegy for what has been touched and passed through. Here, absence finds its form, but the descent softens. From the quiet grows a song that seems to belong to no one, a Soft Fall through the air. Bittová sings as though speaking to the trees; the others move with her, their tones fragile as breath. There is no drama, only continuity, the sense that nature has momentarily found its human voice. The later pieces exist on the border of dissolution.

In Opposite of Time, the instruments scrape, sigh, and wander, seeking an equilibrium beyond rhythm, beyond structure. Here, the quartet listens not to one another but through one another. What follows is both release and return. The clarinet exhales, the piano sends a faint shimmer into the distance, and the fiddle carries us outward into Unfolding, a final gesture that feels less like an ending than an opening. A tune dissolves into the horizon, its players into the air.

When the last vibration fades, it becomes clear that this project was never about birds, nor about interpretation, but about presence: the act of being still enough to hear the world think. It is a study in attention, how breath becomes tone, how tone becomes silence, how silence, when held long enough, begins to sing.

Four Fold is currently available digitally on Bandcamp and will be on all streaming sites as of November 21, 2025.