Jazz

Enrico Rava Fearless Five with Joe Lovano: Corners (ECM 2868)

| Tyran Grillo

Enrico Rava
Fearless Five
with Joe Lovano
Corners

Enrico Rava trumpet, flugelhorn
Joe Lovano tenor saxophone, tarogato
Matteo Paggi trombone
Francesco Diodati guitar
Francesco Ponticelli double bass
Evita Polidoro drums, vocals
Recorded July 2025
Auditorium Parco della Musica
Ennio Morricone, Rome
Recording engineers: Angelo Mincuzzi, Massimiliano Cervini,
and Roberto Catucci (supervision)
Mixing engineer: Stefano Amerio
October 2025, Udine
Cover photo: Max Franosch
Album produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: October 16, 2026

On Corners, Enrico Rava’s lyricism acquires fresh contours in the collective imagination of his Fearless Five. Melody enters a studio whose occupants can move the walls, and the trumpeter’s familiar eloquence discovers unfamiliar dimensions within its own breath. Formed after an impromptu concert outside Rome in 2022, the quintet takes its name from a composition on his 1978 Enrico Rava Quartet. Guitarist Francesco Diodati, trombonist Matteo Paggi, bassist Francesco Ponticelli, and drummer Evita Polidoro bring distinct compositional identities to the ensemble’s ECM debut, joined by guest saxophonist Joe Lovano, whose partnership with Rava yielded Roma in 2019. Diodati alone had worked with Rava in other groups; their intuitive rapport helps make freedom a practical condition of the music. Recorded at Rome’s Auditorium Parco della Musica on July 21–23, 2025, and produced by Manfred Eicher, the album gathers contributions from every participant. Shared authorship becomes an invitation to alter the terms of belonging. Rava’s language passes between generations, acquiring shadows with anatomies of their own.

His flugelhorn introduces “Certi angoli segreti” with a supple assurance that lets the melody reveal itself by degrees. There is something clandestine in its poise, a private staircase descending through the center of a public gesture. Diodati’s delicate marbling deepens the rhythm section’s contours, giving Lovano ample space to carve airborne trajectories without losing the grain of his sound. The tenor’s robust delicacy holds ascent and gravity in the same phrase. Around Rava’s unraveling lines, the ensemble adjusts its proportions, allowing a melodic turn to become an opening through which the whole group can pass. Paggi’s solo burns through that space with exhilarating conviction, its lower register lending physical force to the gathering intensity. Diodati, too, pursues distortion, summoning a brilliance reminiscent of Terje Rypdal: the guitar’s radiance has teeth. Across nearly 12 minutes, the piece establishes how freely this ensemble can change direction while keeping each player’s presence sharply audible. Even the most fugitive line leaves a pressure mark.

That expansiveness makes the intimacy of Diodati’s “Sin peso” especially arresting. Its cinematic sensibility allows the open distances of a western to fold into noir’s troubled interiors. Rava’s muted trumpet moves with the composure of a figure carrying an undisclosed past; each phrase seems to know which door would be dangerous to open. The guitar supplies a landscape whose horizon has been confiscated, leaving the melody to negotiate distance through touch. Polidoro’s “Le mie gambe” draws that inward movement closer to the body. Sung by its composer, it is one of the album’s most affecting performances, her voice finding a passage through the instruments that seems scarcely wide enough for speech. Slinking guitar and tender bass give the song a palpable warmth, while the horns bring its emotional implications forward through their intimate harmonies. Feeling becomes audible at the point where the individual timbres begin to soften into one another. The voice inhabits that threshold, lending the ensemble’s abstraction a pulse beneath the skin.

Lovano’s “Sun Rava” unsettles the ground again. Its abstract blues opens onto freer exchanges, with momentum repeatedly finding and relinquishing its footing. The tenor’s conversation with drums and bass is particularly enthralling: Polidoro and Ponticelli make motion responsive enough to accommodate Lovano’s changing inflections, so that each rhythmic decision has consequences for the next breath. Freedom here involves the vertigo of being heard with such precision that an impulse can alter the entire group’s direction. Rava’s “Hitchcock at the Beach” concentrates its drama into a much shorter span, Polidoro’s vocals adding a silver sheen to its nostalgic atmosphere. Lovano’s melancholy points toward tragedy with remarkable restraint, leaving grief suspended at the threshold of articulation. The ache resides in that withheld disclosure. On “Tone, Shape and Colours,” a collective improvisation sparked by a Lovano motif, the tarogato gives contemplation a reedier edge. Bells and gongs float across the surface as tensions gather beneath them. Their eventual surrender to rest feels almost anatomical, a clenched hand discovering the space inside its palm.

Ponticelli’s brief “Ça va sans dire” distills these roaming impulses into a melodic aphorism. Its nocturnal wanderings leave Diodati a generous surface on which to work, the guitar giving depth to a statement whose brevity invites close attention. Rava’s “Bowery Dance” then turns toward the remembered streets of his New York years. Guitar fuzz and pliant bass introduce an abstract opening before a harder groove assembles itself, interrupted by stops and starts that keep its momentum alert. Lovano and Rava exchange phrases with lived experience in their jaws, allowing memory to find fresh musculature in the present tense. Their ease carries the knowledge of musicians who can recognize an opening before it has fully formed. Paggi’s “Mamma” brings this restless company into a tender close. Its gentleness gives the ensemble’s responsiveness an unexpectedly vulnerable meaning, reaching beyond the bandstand toward the strange beginnings of personhood. A child enters a language already in progress, addressed long before it can answer. Someone lends significance to a cry; a sound acquires a place in another person’s life. The musicians’ mutual attention gives that ancient transaction an adult complexity, their experience deepening the risk of allowing a phrase to need an answer. Fearlessness becomes unexpectedly fragile here, entrusted to another pair of hands. Rava’s lyricism, so articulate throughout Corners, approaches the obscure tenderness from which articulation first emerges. The first person begins in the second.

Enzo Favata: Ritornare (ECM 2883)

| Tyran Grillo

Enzo Favata
Ritornare

Enzo Favata soprano saxophone, clarinet, bass clarinet
Daniele di Bonaventura bandoneón
Marcello Peghin ten-string guitar
Salvatore Maltana double bass
U.T. Gandhi drums
Recorded January 2026
Bavaria Musikstudios, Munich
Engineer: Stefano Amerio
Cover photo: Jan Kricke
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: September 18, 2026

Every return contains a betrayal. The place may remain where it was, yet the person approaching has been revised by distance, while memory has moved the streets. On Ritornare, Enzo Favata treats return as imaginative recovery that transforms whatever it retrieves. Music carries landscape within experience, with literature serving as a compass across waters whose histories mingle beneath imposed names. The title points backward, though the album keeps opening forward. Home survives as an activity of attention and belonging that has quietly learned a foreign language in one’s absence.

Favata has long listened for submerged connections. Born in Alghero, Sardinia, in 1956, the saxophonist and clarinetist developed a musical language shaped by his native island, then widened it through the greater Mediterranean and distant shores. Atlantico, formed in 1999, gathered impressions during South American travels while attending to African inheritances across the ocean. “Tukuman” makes this migratory history palpable. Brushed drums and double bass establish a softly revolving ground, soon deepened by Daniel di Bonaventura’s bandoneón. Marcello Peghin’s guitar rises through it, and Favata’s soprano traces the theme in lucid arcs. The tune begins in transit, already pondering somewhere beyond its horizon.

Such movement never requires Atlantico to surrender its center. Favata and Peghin share decades of collaboration rooted in southern Italy, while bassist Salvatore Maltana and drummer U.T. Gandhi join di Bonaventura in a collective whose music expands without compromising its infrastructure. On the above-mentioned “Tukuman,” Favata dances through sudden turns as di Bonaventura weaves through a zoetrope of half-recovered scenes. A locomotive pulse gathers below the surface; elsewhere, the ensemble skims forward on the tensile calm of open water. Their travel is purposeful without submitting to destination, driven by the joy of motion itself.

The album’s journeys are as much literary as they are musical. Favata has recognized portions of his imaginative territory in Isabel Allende and Jorge Luis Borges, whose visible worlds admit secret laws. Gabriel García Márquez occupies another canopy in this forest of affinities. Favata describes Atlantico’s music as suspended between dream and reality, and “El Sur” dwells within that tension. Its melody seems to have waited inside the listener for years, requiring these musicians to pronounce it. Favata’s soprano carries a warm tone through each key change, altering its shape as the harmony breaks into tessellated color. No player merely accompanies another. The music passes among them as collective evidence from a dream whose witnesses recall different aspects of the same event.

That equality of attention gives the album much of its emotional authority. “Escuchame” brings Favata’s clarinet forward with grave tenderness, carrying a winding theme that seems to hold dust in its mouth and an old key beneath its tongue. Gandhi places minute percussive touches around it, while Maltana’s bass turns through the harmony with unforced intelligence. Di Bonaventura and Peghin shelter the theme without enclosing it. The performance reveals an ethical awareness in which each voice makes space for another to become more fully itself. Such intimacy rises from years spent hearing the fraction of a second before a friend decides where to place a note.

The quintet’s history therefore enters the recording as an invisible player. In “Donde nace el viento,” Peghin’s delicate strumming draws reverie into three dimensions, each chord swaying above an imagined Mediterranean courtyard. Favata’s soprano gives the moving air a throat, while marine salt flavors every unspoken word with distant relatives and childhoods spent along the shore. Recorded at Bavaria Studios in Munich in January 2026 with Manfred Eicher producing, Ritornare is Favata’s first album for ECM and Atlantico’s most finely illuminated acoustic statement. Eicher allows silence to acquire mass while every tone retains its contour. Sardinia remains audible beneath the compositions, and other continents move within their rhythmic memory as currents rather than destinations.

This spacious acoustic world carries echoes of classic ECM sessions without collapsing into homage. Ralph Towner and Egberto Gismonti can be sensed in its meeting of lyricism and space. John Surman occupies a nearby constellation, his shadow passing across the low reeds. “Sine nomine” opens a cinematic chamber where Dino Saluzzi’s tenderness meets the patient visual imagination associated with Theo Angelopoulos. Yet influence behaves as nourishment rather than costume. Associations surface and blur into Atlantico’s own language, one assembled from human contact and therefore resistant to distillation. The composition’s title, therefore, feels apt. It moves through identities without accepting permanent residence in any of them, leaving an outline that the mind continues to fill with speculation.

“Milonga del Sol” extends that cinematic feeling through a haunted dance, holding sweetness near an ache it never attempts to cure. Eleni Karaindrou’s bittersweet gravity hovers at the edge, then Favata veers into improvisational flight and loosens the reference’s claim. His phrases persuade gravity to reconsider its loyalties while the band maintains an exquisite balance between ritual and surprise. Di Bonaventura compresses whole lifetimes of longing into the bellows, and Peghin answers with translucent chords. Gandhi and Maltana keep the dance moving from centuries beneath their feet.

Such ambiguity gives Ritornare its peculiar attraction. The music recognizes places the listener has never visited, awakening the impression of a past that belongs to no single lineage. “Ventana” sharpens that paradox through an unprecedented view of a landscape already seen through other eyes. Its window also examines the act of looking, the secret appetite through which attention changes its object. Favata frames the view, then disrupts it, before the ensemble follows him into a terrain where recognition morphs into estrangement. Familiar materials are angled until their concealed surfaces catch the light. The piece asks how long a life can contain beauty before the mind finally notices, leaving a window open inside the question and the observer exposed to an answering gaze.

“Albatros” gathers the album’s virtues into a final statement of astonishing restraint. The tender throatiness of bass clarinet gives the piece an earthbound gait that brightens from within. When the soprano opens above it, the instrument spreads a wing across the morning and calls toward the sea, a prayer for the hidden catch to rise. The ensemble avoids spectacle, allowing desire to lose its dominion in favor of something selfless. Impeccably performed and recorded, Ritornare contains some of the most enduring melodies to emerge from a Manfred Eicher production in recent years, making it a persuasive contender for ECM album of the year. Its deeper triumph resists ranking. Perhaps the self is only the harbor’s temporary arrangement of ropes and salt-worn voices, held together long enough for one vessel to recognize another. Far beneath that exchange, the drowned map turns over in its sleep, and every border drawn upon it opens a patient ear.

Andy Sheppard: Salt Catchers (ECM 2856)

| Tyran Grillo

Andy Sheppard
Salt Catchers

Andy Sheppard tenor and soprano saxophones
Rita Marcotulli piano
Michel Benita double bass
Recorded March 2025, Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI, Lugano
Engineer: Stefano Amerio
Cover photo: Jan Kricke
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: September 11, 2026

Across six ECM releases, Andy Sheppard has treated ensemble form as an instrument in and of itself, altering the ambient details around his reeds so each setting reveals a different nuance of his breath. The quintet on Movements in Colour surrounded him with shifting densities, Trio Libero pursued more intense conversation, and his quartet with Eivind Aarset opened electronic passageways through acoustic terrain. Most enduringly, the trio with Carla Bley and Steve Swallow placed his lyricism inside a world where wit could hold hands with pathos.

Salt Catchers begins another chapter, bringing the English saxophonist together with Italian pianist Rita Marcotulli and French bassist Michel Benita for the first time as a unit. Their cohesion suggests that certain ensembles exist before they are convened, awaiting only the studio in which their latent testimony can be documented. The drummerless format retains a trace of Sheppard’s years with Bley, whose “Lawns” is the sole nonoriginal among nine pieces, yet memory is a hidden foundation rather than a governing premise.

Most of the album was written during the pandemic, as Sheppard moved from the guitar-centered environments of earlier projects toward chamber music’s concentrated intimacy. Marcotulli opens fissures within composed material, while Benita touches the folkloric roots of Sheppard’s writing without disturbing the earth around them.

A Portuguese shadow passes through Salt Catchers. Now living near Lisbon, Sheppard draws on the gravity of saudade, allowing longing to organize melodies that function as complete emotional bodies rather than maps for improvisation. Their romanticism carries something of John Martyn, absorbed so thoroughly that its source has become molecular. Recorded in Lugano in March 2025 under Manfred Eicher’s direction, the album gathers geography and recollection into a deceptively calm surface, demanding that every note justify the silence it displaces.

“Elevation” establishes this economy with piano that raises a transparent structure around the listener. Sheppard’s tenor enters above its own shadow, offering a melody whose openness contains the ache of distance, while Benita traces the invisible contours that keep it suspended. An echo of Charles Lloyd inhabits Sheppard’s spacious tone, though time may be the deeper influence: decades of listening move through his sound as sediment, leaving the line clear as the past gathers beneath it.

Where “Elevation” offers a horizon, “Lawns” provides an address. Bley’s composition flowers into a suburban psalm, its chords carrying the holiness of ordinary refuge. Marcotulli’s phrases hold survival and repose within the same circumference, as Sheppard’s breath-softened lower register gives the melody human grain and Benita places each note with tender exactitude. With each iteration, the harmony resembles a childhood house whose rooms change dimensions whenever one tries to enter.

The title track begins beneath the keyboard’s conventional surface. Reaching into dampened piano strings, Marcotulli releases metallic murmurs and half-born harmonics. Sheppard’s soprano evokes salt as residue and preservative, the crystal in which an evaporated sea continues thinking. When the musicians reach the concluding unison, three private trajectories have discovered a single edge.

The Portuguese current nears the surface in “Encantos,” whose buoyancy gives Sheppard’s melody an unforced radiance. Enchantment survives through partial concealment: the tune gives itself freely while keeping a central chamber locked. Later, “Salgado” answers with understated montuno inflections and geometric harmonizations.

“Draw You In Stars” opens with a luminous piano arpeggio, a spiral staircase whose destination recedes as it rises. Sheppard’s tenor exposes a vulnerable grain before he and piano meet, then part for Benita’s restrained, quick-minded solo. Marcotulli moves farther from the harmonic center, seeking a truth faithful to instability.

Marcotulli opens “This Too – Three Hills” like a book at an unknown page, and Sheppard enters carrying the next sentence in his breath. The hills become folds in memory, elevations made by all the mind has buried unevenly. As the playing dissolves into breath and pause, each phrase embraces uncertainty instead of converting it into drama.

Absence takes intimate form in “Those That Left.” Piano and bass communicate across a missing center, exchanging signals whose tenderness derives from what they decline to resolve. Marcotulli’s dream logic brings light to grief’s edges without making loss decorative. “Irene” then gathers bass and soprano into a supple dance before piano widens the emotional field. Elegant without sweetness, it draws darkness inside radiance, knowing beauty does not cancel sorrow but grants it another form of circulation.

Marcotulli is the session’s revelation, turning modest gestures into portals through which whole emotional cartographies appear. She does not decorate the music; she alters its physics. Benita gives every contour a quiet gravitational center, allowing Sheppard’s melodies to travel without losing human proportion.

The title contains the key. Salt preserves by entering what it preserves, becoming inseparable from the body it protects. These musicians practice a related attention: each voice receives the others deeply enough to be changed, yet no identity dissolves. Listening becomes a willingness to let another person’s silence speak for itself. Perhaps civilization begins there, in the discipline required to let another person’s unfinished phrase live.

Ralph Alessi: A Sun That Never Sets (ECM 2864)

| Tyran Grillo

Ralph Alessi
A Sun That Never Sets

Ralph Alessi trumpet
Joseph Alessi trombone
Matt Mitchell piano
John Hébert double bass
Ches Smith drums, vibraphone
Recorded February 2025
Oktaven Audio Studio, Mount Vernon, NY
Engineer: Ryan Streber
Mixed by Manfred Eicher, Ralph Alessi, and Michael Hinreiner (engineer)
Bavaria Musikstudios, München
Cover design: Sascha Kleis
Produced by Ralph Alessi and Manfred Eicher
Release date: July 3, 2026

On A Sun That Never Sets, Ralph Alessi expands the architecture of his quartet by adding a second horn: his brother Joseph, a trombonist best known for his work with the New York Philharmonic. Their shared history gives the music an immediate intimacy, but the album draws its energy from the differences between their voices. Joseph is more than a featured guest. His burnished tone changes the ensemble’s center of gravity and reveals new colors in Ralph’s compositions. The result is an album concerned with kinship, not only between brothers but also between freedom and form.

Pianist Matt Mitchell and bassist John Hébert return alongside Ches Smith, who moves between drums and vibraphone. The musicians navigate Alessi’s writing with confidence, allowing angular ideas to open into clearings where lyricism can emerge without becoming sentimental. The influences of Ornette Coleman and Igor Stravinsky remain present without sounding imitative. Coleman’s example encourages melodic liberty, while Stravinsky’s is evident in the music’s rhythmic disruptions and structural precision. These forces help the album sound cerebral but never clinical. Each musician receives ample space, yet every contribution remains connected to the group’s larger movement.

The title track establishes this language through a precise theme that gradually loosens into exploratory improvisation. Smith’s vibraphone and Hébert’s bass approach the music from different angles, creating productive uncertainty over where its rhythmic and harmonic direction originates. Mitchell supports Alessi’s trumpet without restricting it, enabling the bandleader to move beyond the tune’s apparent boundaries while retaining a thread back to its central idea. The performance captures the strength of a quintet that can surrender a fixed destination without losing its sense of direction. Unity comes through the negotiation of contrasting approaches rather than strict agreement.

Several pieces turn that tension inward. “Nothing Is Dead” suspends piano and vibraphone within an elusive harmonic atmosphere, allowing its meaning to emerge gradually. Alessi’s trumpet is assured but guarded, conveying emotional weight without forcing a single interpretation. In “Ether,” Smith’s brushed drumming opens space beneath Mitchell’s wide range of touch, attracting fragments of memory into the present.

The closing “Behind Clouds” extends this fascination with concealed presence. Over Hébert’s steady, intoning bass, the ensemble proceeds with melodic care. Placed beside “Nothing Is Dead,” it creates correspondence across the record, as both compositions examine how absence can remain active.

The brothers’ most prominent duets, “Relaxed Misery” and “Of Trees (Variations on a Theme by TB),” bring the album’s interest in inherited language into sharper focus. Trumpet and trombone circle one another through muted exchanges, sometimes converging and sometimes letting the space between them carry the conversation. “Relaxed Misery” earns the sardonic tension of its title, turning discomfort into buoyancy and giving Ralph room for some of his most animated soloing. “Of Trees” is more oblique, developing its theme through disparities that keep the source partly hidden. The pieces share a jaunty, alert quality, but their emotional charge comes from the brothers’ ability to recognize and challenge one another in real time.

A familial current also runs through “Twichild,” “Slow Dancing Bear” and “Duck Face,” whose titles suggest private humor and childhood memory. Each uses wonder as a disciplined way of reconsidering familiar materials. “Twichild” follows delicate, winding lines toward a more inward mood, with Ralph’s precision made unusually vulnerable. “Slow Dancing Bear” finds tenderness in an awkward rhythmic gait, allowing weight and grace to coexist. On “Duck Face,” Hébert provides a perceptive countervoice before Smith’s solo releases the tune from its established footing. Together, the tracks treat play as a vital form of communication.

“Sweet Spot” occupies a warmer region. Its spacious, glowing color recalls Enrico Rava, while Mitchell’s piano creates a suspended foundation beneath the horns. Joseph’s trombone contributes a dusky depth that approaches a lullaby without becoming overly sweet. Small harmonic disturbances keep the tune’s balance alive. “Transitional Imagery,” by contrast, converts instability into propulsion. Mitchell and the rhythm section move with fierce clarity, shapeshifting as they proceed. The title could describe Alessi’s broader method: his music is most alive when one shape gives way to another.

Across these 11 originals, Alessi’s fluency as a player and composer gains a more varied context. The expanded ensemble shows how strongly his music depends on the willingness to offer an unfinished thought and let another musician transform it. His writing gives each player a distinct orbit while maintaining a field of mutual consequence. Freedom, therefore, carries responsibility, since every spontaneous gesture changes what is available to the others.

Steve Swallow: Winter Songs (ECM 2879)

| Tyran Grillo

Steve Swallow
Winter Songs

Mike Rodriguez trumpet
Chris Cheek tenor saxophone
Steve Cardenas guitar
Gil Goldstein piano
Steve Swallow bass
Adam Nussbaum drums
Recorded September 2024 at Sear Sound, New York
Engineer: Tyler McDiarmid
Cover photo: Luciano Rossetti
An ECM Production
Release date: June 26, 2026

“I was there when this music was written. In fact, my hand held the pencil. I began with the need to do something to fill each long day, and music rushed forward to sustain me. Before Winter Songs I had given music whatever I could, but as I made this album the tables turned: it gave me what I needed. Music is elemental, like the air we breathe.”
–Steve Swallow

Winter Songs is one of those albums that arrives quietly, carrying the circumstances that shaped it. Steve Swallow’s first true leader date since 2013’s Into The Woodwork, and his first appearance on the label since contributing to John Scofield’s Swallow Tales and Carla Bley’s Life Goes On in 2020, does not present itself as a comeback. Instead, it sounds like music assembled among close friends, with each idea given time to settle into its clearest form. Its restraint, therefore, evokes the confidence of an artist with nothing left to prove.

Swallow is joined by saxophonist Chris Cheek, trumpeter Mike Rodriguez, drummer Adam Nussbaum, guitarist Steve Cardenas, and pianist Gil Goldstein. These longtime collaborators approach the material with patience and mutual trust. The horns add color without crowding the arrangements, Cardenas and Goldstein outline the harmony, and Nussbaum keeps the time flexible. Swallow’s distinctive electric bass moves through the ensemble with unforced grace. He rarely demands the foreground, but the group continually turns around the quiet authority of his phrasing. No one treats space as something that must be filled, and that shared worldview gives the performances much of their character.

Recorded at Sear Sound in New York in September 2024, Winter Songs suggests a warm room in a cold climate. Fluid swing, reflective balladry, and chamber-like precision coexist throughout. The improvisations never mistake intensity for discovery. Instead, the music finds momentum in subtle shifts of weight, tone, and emphasis, with ideas passing naturally between the players. Its calm is active rather than static, sustained by close attention to every change in direction.

The titles, taking simple form as spelled-out numbers, leave the music open to association. “One” and “Nine,” positioned at opposite ends of the sequence, share a luminous tenderness. “One” moves with understated assurance. Rodriguez delivers a sensitive solo, and Cheek follows with what feels like a thoughtful reply. Their exchange shows how two melodic voices can meet without competing. “Nine” carries that generosity into a more spacious setting. Piano and guitar establish a delicate atmosphere before Rodriguez’s trumpet gives the piece direction and weight. Its grace comes from the ensemble’s trust: each musician holds a part of the tangram, but the complete shape emerges from their cumulative outcome.

The more rhythmically driven pieces are equally controlled. “Two” is a midtempo performance whose strengths become clearer with repeated listening. Swallow navigates its shifting harmonies so easily that their complexity feels instinctive. Goldstein finds fresh routes through the composition, while Nussbaum’s cymbals add brightness and motion. Cheek’s concise solo is especially compelling; his pauses give the phrases room to register. “Four” builds on a rounded backbeat and restrained, slow-moving funk. The horns braid their lines naturally before Goldstein explores the harmonic implications of their exchange. The groove is steady but never forceful. “Six” releases more of the energy held in reserve elsewhere, allowing Cheek to stretch across a broader emotional range. Rodriguez takes up that momentum in his own ascending solo. Even at its most animated, however, the ensemble remains disciplined.

Cardenas takes the foreground on “Five,” using light, pastel-toned voicings that add color without unnecessary density. Cheek enters with a solo that builds gradually while preserving the performance’s even keel. On “Eight,” Goldstein creates small openings in the piano texture, and Cheek responds with measured emotion. In both tracks, timbre shapes how the compositions develop.

“Three” and “Seven” lead into the album’s deepest interior. “Three” unfolds at an unhurried pace under Goldstein’s guidance, with Cardenas adding brief, pointillistic guitar figures near the end. The melody feels patient, lucid, and seasoned without calling attention to its maturity. Its force comes from clarity rather than drama, and the arrangement trusts the listener to meet it at that level. “Seven” brings Swallow most clearly into focus. He states the melody against Goldstein’s soft-pedaled chords and Cardenas’s fluid picking, creating the album’s quiet fulcrum. Swallow makes the tune sound discovered rather than declared, while Goldstein and Cardenas surround it with carefully placed details.

The numerical titles might suggest order, but Swallow uses them to emphasize relationship rather than measurement. Each piece gains meaning through the musicians’ responses to one another. The end effect is an album that is modest in presentation but substantial in feeling, a late-career statement whose assurance lies in how little it needs to insist on itself.

Mick Goodrick/Fred Hersch: Feebles, Fables and Ferns (ECM 2876)

| Tyran Grillo

Mick Goodrick/Fred Hersch
Feebles, Fables and Ferns

Mick Goodrick guitar
Fred Hersch piano
Recorded August 1988 at Classic Sound Studio, NYC
Engineer: A. T. Michael MacDonald
Remixed 2025 by Chris Allen
Original recording produced by Fred Hersch
Cover photo: Jean-Guy Lathuilière
An ECM Production
Release date: June 19, 2026

Recorded at Fred Hersch’s New York studio in August 1988, Feebles, Fables and Ferns documents the only recorded meeting between Hersch and guitarist Mick Goodrick, then fellow fixtures of Boston’s jazz community. Historical circumstance provides the frame, yet the deeper distinction resides in the remarkable ease of their exchange. The session carries almost none of the dust normally associated with an archival recovery. Its present tense remains intact, sealed within every pause and sudden melodic turn. Both musicians develop ideas in real time without crowding the music or steering it toward predetermined conclusions. Their attentiveness suggests a shared space in which each voice can enter fully while leaving the other unclaimed. Goodrick, an influential teacher whose sparse discography never adequately reflected his stature, is especially compelling. His quietly inventive improvising reveals why Julian Lage, Pat Metheny, Wolfgang Muthspiel, and so many other guitarists have regarded him so highly. He seems able to bend a phrase around the interior of a thought, decorating its walls without obscuring their mystery.

That rapport animates a lively program of originals, standards, and one open improvisation. Goodrick’s title composition, first heard on 1979’s In Pas(s)ing, emerges here as a compact study in interlocking lines. Hersch and Goodrick’s melodic phrases remain tight yet fluid, while rhythmically astute changes seem to discover their destination only upon reaching it.

“Falling Grace,” one of two Steve Swallow tunes in the set, brings a livelier angle to that exchange. Retaining its composer’s crooked smile, it folds playfulness into sardonic self-awareness while maintaining considerable lyrical poise. Hersch answers that wit with buoyant precision, while Goodrick phrases across it from oblique vantage points, tugging at the seams without tearing the fabric. Swallow’s “Amazing” later enters through Goodrick’s “Away 10,” moving through dimly illuminated memories that appear to recognize us before we recognize them. What was laid down casually in a studio nearly four decades ago has acquired meanings unavailable to its creators, proving that music can continue thinking after its makers have left the room. Time has not merely preserved these performances but has collaborated with them.

Within that expanding temporal space, “Five Excursions” unfolds as a surreal yet welcoming chain of improvisations. Its tentative beginnings resemble a constellation being plotted by instruments uncertain of the sky behind them. A few pinpointed tones establish provisional coordinates, after which the music opens into interlocking geometries. Hersch and Goodrick appear to reverse-engineer causes for effects already hovering in the air. Silence becomes a working material rather than an interruption, allowing each idea to cast a longer shadow.

As Johnny Green’s “Out of Nowhere” blossoms into the foreground, the album enters a region of crystalline wit evocative of Chick Corea’s ECM classics. Clever syncopation and deft motivic interchange make the performance feel perpetually on the verge of levitation. Hersch rearranges the tune’s internal gravity while Goodrick sends bright phrases skimming along its altered surface, each musician alert to the comic potential inside sophistication.

Hersch’s “Heartsong” draws the session toward a more openly radiant center. The composition pumps richness through its chambers, yet its emotional amplitude remains governed by a profound introversion. Goodrick understands how much the tune contains and resists the temptation to excavate everything at once. Even during his fastest lines, every note retains a private place in the larger design. Hersch, for his part, stays within reach, grounding uplift in touch and harmonic clarity.

Mal Waldron’s “Soul Eyes,” originally written with John Coltrane’s sound in mind, offers a final field of inquiry for instruments far removed from that conception. Guitar and piano open from within, allowing secrets to emerge as subtle alterations of perspective. Goodrick homes in on details that another improviser might treat as mere filler. Minute changes in the harmonic terrain acquire enormous consequence beneath his attention, with a bent inflection or delayed resolution suddenly becoming the axis around which the piece turns. Hersch’s lyricism operates simultaneously inside the drama and beyond its frame. He inhabits the melody while quietly altering the conditions under which it can be understood.

Feebles, Fables and Ferns stands as an unusually intimate portrait of two restless musical minds meeting on equal terms. Its archival unearthing offers more than access to a lost session; it returns a form of attention that now feels almost radical. Hersch and Goodrick listen without attempting to absorb one another, preserving difference as the very substance of communion. Their duetting gradually becomes a demonstration that freedom can deepen when another consciousness is fully present.

Ayumi Tanaka: Windflower (ECM 2859)

| Tyran Grillo

Ayumi Tanaka
Windflower

Ayumi Tanaka piano
Thomas Morgan double bass
Thomas Strønen drums
Recorded May 2025, Studios La Buissonne
Engineer: Gérard de Haro
Mixed by Manfred Eicher and Michael Hinreiner (engineer)
in Munich, 2026
Cover photo: Nadia F. Romanini
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: August 21, 2026

The central tension on Windflower arises from our instinct to separate composition from improvisation, a distinction the music quietly renders distant. Japanese pianist Ayumi Tanaka is joined by American bassist Thomas Morgan, while Norwegian drummer Thomas Strønen completes a trio new in configuration yet deeply immersed in a shared exploratory language. Their pieces carry the poise of chamber music without surrendering jazz’s reflexive instincts. Each sound enters as a proposal whose meaning depends upon the answer it receives. Eight tracks were created spontaneously, while the bandleader’s “La Source” is opened like a book being read for the second time.

The title track gathers itself from fragrance and air, an entity whose roots appear to descend into a realm just beyond sight. The musicians stretch the frame until its concealed margins become visible. Strønen’s broad percussive sweep clears a path for Morgan, whose bass advances with the grave patience of footsteps crossing an abandoned interior. Tanaka occupies the unstable space between them. Her notes become shadows cast by objects that have not yet entered the room, and time loses its familiar sequence beneath her touch. Human narrative briefly falls short of consummation, leaving an opening through which another consciousness might discover the courage to live without inherited conclusions.

“La Source” enters that opening and converts it into a wellspring. Tanaka moves through a landscape of paper and ink, revealing the literary temperament at the center of her playing. Her phrases possess character development without characters; their plots become aware of themselves midway through unfolding and quietly revise the conditions of their existence. The trio moves as one body, viscous enough to retain memory yet open enough to admit illumination. Morgan gives the music a subterranean grammar, while Strønen punctuates its margins with marks written in disappearing ink. Above them, Tanaka touches the bellies of clouds only briefly, allowing us to experience descent as a slow-motion revelation.

The arboreal density of “From Us, To You” initially complicates the generosity promised by its title. Its canopy has grown thick with intervals and crosscurrents, yet nothing within it feels oppressive. The track offers shelter through bewilderment, inviting the listener to relinquish the fantasy that clarity must precede belonging. Strønen brushes against the bark of the piece, Morgan works among its roots, and Tanaka sends new shoots into an unseen height. Their revelry remains disciplined by an almost ceremonial attentiveness. When the ending bends toward the blues, it offers a secret door inside an old wound.

“Tree of Stars” passes through that door and discovers the canopy opening onto a vast celestial field. The title collapses the distance between root and constellation, giving the heavens a dark trunk through which their light can travel. Morgan’s sleepwalking bass acquires an oneiric eloquence, wandering without losing the invisible thread that binds it to the ensemble. Tanaka offers the melodic calm of a lullaby remembered by someone who never heard it in childhood. Along the periphery, Strønen’s accents shape time through delicate pressure, preventing repose from becoming stasis. The trio seems to understand that tenderness requires structure, since even a dream needs a body sturdy enough to contain its impossible architecture.

“Weaving” carries this architecture into finer and stranger materials. Its web refuses symmetry, behaving instead as a stained-glass window whose only pigment is air. There is no fixed center. Meaning travels across the strands whenever an opportunity for nourishment draws the whole design into sudden focus. Strønen’s delicate yet restless brushing becomes the vibration of a trapped insect transmitting distress through an instrument of extraordinary beauty. Within that signal lies a stubborn promise of life. Tanaka answers with fragments that catch the light, while Morgan lends anchorage to a structure built from near-weightlessness. The performance turns fragility into a method of perception: what trembles most intensely may also be what understands its surroundings best.

That sensitivity reaches a more turbulent form in “The Sea Is Still.” Strønen’s gift for color and texture rises to the surface, inspiring richly unsettled pianism from Tanaka. The title’s stillness becomes an irony too immense to remain verbal. Every wave appears to contain its own disappearance, and Tanaka follows each crest toward the point where motion begins to erase its maker. Morgan descends beneath the agitation, sounding out depths the piano can reveal only through pressure. The waters eventually yield treasure without value, an object freed from commerce because no language can decide what it is.

“Spring” turns the album’s flowing imagery toward ambiguity. Its title hovers between season and source, while the music inhabits both meanings without selecting one. Renewal emerges as pressure beneath the surface, a force searching for the smallest fissure through which to become visible. Tanaka’s phrases rise with lucid delicacy, then disperse before their outlines can be claimed. Morgan and Strønen give the piece an earthen resistance, ensuring that every emergence retains some knowledge of what confined it. In the final droplets, a rock formation appears bereft of foothold. Suspension becomes a destination in its own right, a ledge constructed from the absence of ground.

“Driftwood” begins with Morgan’s lumbering bass calling the other instruments into earshot. The image develops at the pace of an old film learning to adapt to new projectors. Energy accumulates until a nearly grooving current takes hold, though settlement remains impossible. Tanaka wanders across it with sovereign uncertainty, resisting every invitation to make the track more obedient than it wishes to be. Her independence never fractures the ensemble. Instead, it gives the shared motion a deeper integrity, since togetherness here depends upon each musician preserving the solitude from which genuine response becomes possible. Driftwood carries a history of forests without remaining a tree. The trio similarly allows form to remember its origins while releasing any obligation to return to them.

“The Dissolving Sun” brings the album’s inquiry into its most tender and unsettling light. Tanaka’s beautifully angular pianism loosens by degrees. A forlorn finality hovers at the fringe of consciousness, prepared to extinguish itself before the moon can formulate an objection. Morgan gives the vanishing body a final gravity, while Strønen traces the delicate perimeter where radiance relinquishes its name. Yet dissolution here carries no promise of transcendence. Instead, it must give itself over to the possibility that its veracity depends on another’s awareness.

In that surrender, Windflower reveals an ethical dimension within. Improvisation becomes the practice of entering another person’s uncertainty without colonizing it, while composition offers a structure strong enough to protect that encounter. Perhaps every life arrives as written material and survives through the ways others decline to play it exactly. The trio’s deepest lesson concerns neither freedom nor fate alone, but the care required to touch an incomplete statement without deciding how it must end.

Joe Lovano: Paramount Quartet (ECM 2855)

| Tyran Grillo

Joe Lovano
Paramount Quartet

Joe Lovano tenor and G mezzo soprano saxophones, tarogato
Julian Lage guitar
Asante Santi Debriano double bass
Will Calhoun drums
Recorded February 2025 at Studios La Buissone
Engineer: Gérard de Haro
Mastering: Nicolas Baillard
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: May 29, 2026

Since making his ECM debut on Paul Motian’s Psalm in 1981, saxophonist Joe Lovano has carried himself like an artist forever standing at the threshold of another doorway, one hand still touching the past while the other disappears into a future no one can predict. His discography refuses the comfort of a straight line. One hears instead a constellation, each recording illuminating a different contour of the same restless spirit. Whether navigating post-bop abstraction, folk lyricism, or the broad geometry that ECM has so often cultivated as its own secret dialect, Lovano approaches reinvention as a moral condition. Paramount Quartet, his new collaboration with guitarist Julian Lage, bassist Asante Santi Debriano, and drummer Will Calhoun, deepens that philosophy into something cartographic. The music feels concerned with passage itself: migration between traditions, between cities, between inwardness and communion. Lovano has described the ensemble as carrying “a real global awareness,” yet the phrase barely contains the sensation of listening to these musicians move through one another’s instincts. After meeting Debriano and Calhoun at a 2023 fundraiser for Puerto Rican hurricane relief, Lovano recognized a current already running beneath the conversation. Bringing Lage into the fold, after nearly two decades of imagined possibilities, completed the circuit with uncanny inevitability.

Lage, making his own ECM debut here, plays with remarkable translucence. His guitar rarely announces itself as accompaniment because it is atmosphere incarnate, altering the temperature of every phrase around it. Sometimes he arrives as a flicker in the corner of the eye, a filament of thought stretching across Lovano’s meditations. Elsewhere, he becomes startlingly corporeal, dragging steel across silence until the music smells faintly of rain striking hot pavement. There is an almost frightening sincerity in his touch.

Lovano’s longstanding affection for Charlie Haden’s “First Song” finally finds its ideal habitat here. The performance opens with Lage casting chords into the darkness like silver coins into black water, each ripple widening across the band’s collective breath. Lovano enters without ceremony, his tenor carrying the grain of memory itself. The sound feels lived in, rain-stained, touched by years that no longer separate grief from tenderness. He does not merely interpret the melody so much as trace his fingers across the cracks in its walls. Debriano and Calhoun move beneath him with exquisite patience, allowing an underlying emotional gravity to reveal itself slowly. What lingers is not melancholy exactly, but the strange warmth of realizing how loneliness can preserve the shape of love long after language has failed it.

“Amsterdam” shifts the perspective dramatically, opening onto a landscape of reflective surfaces and impossible angles. The quartet navigates the piece as nocturnal pedestrians crossing bridges slick with electric glow. Lovano’s improvisational logic slithers through the composition with reptilian elegance, hugging corners, vanishing into harmonic crevices before reappearing somewhere unforeseen. Debriano’s solo unfolds with muscular lyricism against Calhoun’s finely threaded percussion, each note carrying the heft of wrought iron suspended above moving canals. Lage responds by loosening the tune’s internal knots until his phrases spiral outward in widening rings. The titular city gradually ceases to feel geographical, becoming a psychic terrain assembled from fragments and sleepless reflections.

“The Call” draws us inward again. The chamber-like interplay between saxophone and guitar generates harmonies of microscopic precision whose emotional consequences feel almost cosmic. Debriano’s arco bass darkens the atmosphere with strokes that resemble charcoal dragged across damp stone. Lovano’s movement between reeds produces ghostly impressions at the edge of perception, subtle hauntings that alter the barometric pressure of the room without announcing their arrival. Ideas dissolve before they can fully materialize, replaced by others equally transient. Listening becomes an act of wandering through unfinished corridors where every open door reveals another unanswered question waiting patiently in half-light.

“Fanfare for Unity” erupts with kinetic exuberance, though even at its most rhythmically charged, the quartet avoids simple catharsis. Calhoun presides over the track with dazzling elasticity, shaping pulse into something simultaneously grounded and volatile. Beneath Lovano’s acrobatic phrasing, Lage stretches harmonic thread into intricate lattices that shimmer on the verge of collapse. His solo arrives like a sudden burst of graffiti across concrete, angular and luminous and impossible to ignore. Yet what makes the performance resonate beyond technical brilliance is the sense of collective trust animating every turn. The musicians lean toward one another with fearless attentiveness, creating a music that swings hard while retaining the vulnerability of open conversation.

Wayne Shorter’s “Lady Day” receives perhaps the album’s most psychologically expansive reading. Lage introduces the piece with reverential restraint, leaving enough space around each chord for silence to gather its own emotional residue. Lovano responds with phrasing that feels almost autobiographical, every note carrying the weight of private reckonings never fully disclosed. The quartet approaches the composition from within its emotional bloodstream rather than from its exterior form. Seasons seem to pass through in miniature, tiny climates of sorrow and resilience blooming and fading in the same breath. Lage’s counterpoint hovers beside Lovano like a second soul, intimate without imitation, shadowing the saxophonist’s movements while preserving the integrity of his own distinct language.

“The Great Outdoors” channels a life force unmistakably indebted to Motian, though the influence surfaces less in imitation than in attitude. The tune drifts with loose-limbed intuition. Each musician contributes with striking equality, allowing the composition to evolve communally rather than hierarchically. Lage sounds especially liberated here, his lines bouncing with almost childlike wonder, while Lovano pulls rougher-hewn textures from his horn. The music evokes open air without lapsing into pastoral cliché. One hears instead the wilderness of consciousness itself, untamed pathways winding through instinct and recollection.

By the time “Congregation” arrives, the album has already transformed fellowship into something sacred without ever announcing sacredness as its destination. The track glides forward with disarming warmth, its rhythmic ease carrying the listener into an atmosphere of genuine collective presence. There is joy here, certainly, though it is the kind born from survival rather than naïveté. The quartet sounds profoundly at ease inside one another’s company, every gesture shaped by trust accumulated in real time. Yet beneath the celebratory surface runs a quieter revelation. As the music fades, one begins to sense that the album has never truly been about collaboration at all. What Lovano and company uncover across these performances is the fragile miracle of permeability, the terrifying possibility that identity itself may only exist through continual exchange with others. Every solo becomes a temporary shelter built inside another person’s listening. Every rhythm carries fingerprints from elsewhere. By the end, the quartet no longer resembles four musicians negotiating shared space. They sound like evidence that self-awareness may itself be communal, that somewhere beneath the noise of individuality there exists a deeper reservoir where all voices dissolve into one trembling human breath moving through darkness toward whatever waits beyond it.

Judith Berkson: Thee They Thy (ECM 2741)

| Tyran Grillo

Judith Berkson
Thee They Thy

Judith Berkson voice, piano
Trevor Dunn double bass
Gerald Cleaver drums
Recorded July 2021
Oktaven Audio Studio
Mount Vernon, NY
Engineer: Ryan Streber
Cover: Fidel Sclavo
Mastering: Christoph Stickel
Album produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: April 24, 2026

Mezzo-soprano, pianist, composer, and improviser Judith Berkson returns to ECM with a compelling new trio project. Conceptual art, liturgical inquiry, chamber abstraction, and jazz formalism: each arrives carrying its own gravity, yet none bends submissively toward a central identity. To call Berkson “multifaceted” feels insufficient, flat in a way her music refuses to be. These practices do not orbit a core. They are neighboring rooms illuminated at different hours of the day. If her 2010 solo album Oylam fashioned a private syntax from fractured song, Thee They Thy inhabits the classical jazz trio format as though entering an ancestral home whose walls still remember fire. Longtime associate Gerald Cleaver joins on drums, alongside new recruit, bassist Trevor Dunn, making his ECM debut with the calm authority of someone stepping into a river already moving beneath his feet.

The album opens with “Slow,” a through-composed prelude that reveals itself with the cold shimmer of arithmetic carved into glass. Beneath its measured surfaces lies an unguarded study of human behavior and the invisible fissures where our most sacred opportunities collapse under the weight of hesitation. Berkson’s voice enters neither as narrator nor confessor. Rather, it touches every object it describes without claiming ownership of any of them. Her words retain an open voltage, charged enough to bring interpretation to its knees. Dissonances bloom at the edges of the arrangement as bruises darkening beneath pale skin, while the trio advances through the piece with the patience of astronomers mapping a dying star.

Then comes “V’shamru,” and the atmosphere pivots completely, as though the record has opened a hidden window inside itself. Berkson’s original cantorial song tears through the stale fabric of expectation, allowing something ancient and inward to cross our eyeline unscathed. Her voice recedes slightly into shadow, gathering resonance from depths untouched by performance instinct. The modal pianism moves tidally, lifting and withdrawing with ritual precision, while Dunn’s arco bass offers a second pair of lungs. For a fleeting instant, one hears an accidental ghost of Chopin’s “Minute Waltz,” though the resemblance dissolves just as quickly into stranger territory, somewhere between prayer and mirage. The words orient the music without pinning it down. Easts and wests gather around the instruments’ norths and souths, forming a compass that points nowhere stable, nowhere singular.

“Torque” returns the listener to geometric terrain. Berkson’s note choices leap and contort like ladders folding back into themselves, each rung briefly becoming a horizon before disappearing. Built around improvisations on 12-tone rows, the piece visualizes cognition in motion, thought discovering fresh corridors while the walls rearrange themselves. Cleaver’s drumming behaves almost tectonically here, creating subtle pressures beneath the trio’s surface language, while Dunn anchors the abstraction with a presence that feels carved from volcanic stone.

“Dust” follows with startling restraint. Based on 19th-century harmonic language yet rendered through a minimalist lens, it carries the quiet devastation of an emptied ballroom after the candles have consumed themselves. Every chord seems suspended in the air a moment too long, as though uncertain whether to continue existing. Berkson understands silence as a living material. She places it beside sound the way a painter leaves bare canvas exposed, permitting absence to complete the image.

“Cleav,” the lone non-Berkson composition, offers Gerald Cleaver a solitary expanse in which rhythm becomes autobiography. His solo drumming circles through traditions without settling permanently inside any of them. Earth tones dominate the piece. One hears soil breaking beneath rain, wood splintering under pressure, iron cooling after contact with flame. The piece possesses a rare humility. Nothing seeks transcendence. Everything seeks honesty. Even at its most expansive, the performance maintains the intimacy of someone speaking quietly to themselves in a dark field.

“Notice,” with its insistent refrain, is the album’s pulse point, while the scat-inspired title track reveals Berkson at her most untethered. Her vocalizations fracture syntax into pure muscular expression. Aphasia becomes a kind of integrity here, a refusal to allow meaning the comfort of fixed borders. Beneath her, the rhythm section creates a living lattice around the piano, supporting angular phrases as they skip and recoil through chains of miniature ascensions.

“Amerika” arrives as a vast instrumental plain of shifting sands and mirage heat. Without voice, the trio communicates through contour alone, and the silence left by absent lyrics becomes strangely eloquent. Dunn contributes one of the record’s most tender passages during his solo. The music evokes impressions without illustrating them directly. Empty highways at dusk. Electrical hum beneath motel signage. The loneliness of fluorescent light.

Voice and text return in “Slowly Walk Into It,” freely improvised alongside Berkson’s piano. The result resembles an anthem for unseen presences, the peripheral shadows trailing human life with patient hunger. Her singing here feels startlingly mortal. Words emerge half-formed, carrying the fragility of thoughts overheard inside dreams. Lastly, in “Sated,” stepwise motions drift through the scales while the vocal lines hover weightlessly above them, neither ascending nor descending so much as evaporating.

Throughout the album, Berkson never conceals her vulnerabilities. She wears them openly, transforming fracture into protection, uncertainty into method. Many singers pursue purity as though it were evidence of transcendence. Berkson seeks the sound of a soul rubbing against its own limitations.

And then there is the title. Three pronouns orbiting one another without grammatical completion, each gesturing toward identity while dissolving certainty around who speaks and who is spoken to. The sequence feels devotional and fragmented at once, intimate enough for liturgy, unstable enough for philosophy. Perhaps Berkson understands personhood itself as a kind of unfinished chord, forever shifting between self, other, and the unnamed force binding both together. Language spends centuries attempting to stabilize the human experience through categories and declarations. Music witnesses how quickly those structures soften in the presence of feeling. By the album’s end, Thee They Thy resembles a doorway left slightly open in the middle of the night, revealing nothing clearly, yet altering the entire shape of the darkness around it.