Jazz

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.

Elina Duni/Rob Luft: Reaching for the Moon (ECM 2866)

| Tyran Grillo

Elina Duni
Rob Luft
Reaching for the Moon

Elina Duni voice, percussion
Rob Luft guitars, electronics
Recorded June 2025 at Studios La Buissonne
Engineer: Gérard de Haro
Cover photo: Jean-Guy Lathuilière
Mastering: Christoph Stickel
Album produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: April 24, 2026

Stranger is the heart
In the shadows it has grown apart
Lonely dancer, lonely lark
Your song is lost, adrift from the start

For her sixth foray into the ever-expanding territory of ECM records, singer Elina Duni returns alongside her most intuitive counterpart, guitarist Rob Luft, shaping a shared breath sustained across time. This meeting dispenses with the quartet format of their previous studio collaborations and settles into a two-person orbit, where every gesture carries even greater weight of intention. The result is a listening experience in which language itself becomes a constellation, each tongue a different shade of twilight, flickering against the dark. Italian, French, English, Albanian, and Arabic drift as migrating birds, presence the invisible translator between them.

The title track by Irving Berlin already bears the fingerprints of history, yet here it sheds its familiarity. Luft lays down chords that feel weathered by recall, soft as footsteps on a path that no longer exists, while Duni’s voice rises in quiet illumination. There is a sensation of recognition without name, of sketching a horizon that recedes as one approaches, inviting pursuit rather than arrival.

From this invocation, “Cammina Cammina,” by Italian singer-songwriter Pino Daniele, deepens the album’s nocturnal terrain. The old man it pictures wandering through the past becomes less a character than a mirror held up to the listener’s own sediment of experience. Duni traces his solitude with exquisite restraint, allowing each syllable to carry the weight of absence. The moonlight here feels tangible, something one might gather in the hands only to watch it dissolve. Luft bends toward fragility, his phrases hovering at the edge of dissolution.

The duo’s thematic commitment is further unraveled in “Les Berceaux.” This setting of René-François Sully-Prudhomme to the music of Gabriel Fauré embodies the rocking motion of its title (French for “The Cradles”), allowing us respite in the warmth of a lullaby. Speaking of lullabies, we are treated to two further examples of this ancient art. First is “Leili Lullaby” by Mahsa Vahdat, the astronomically talented Persian singer in whose lineage I might easily place Duni in terms of psychological acuity and somatic transferrence, breathes with a rhythm all its own. Second is “Sleep Safe and Warm” by Krzysztof Komeda, a haunting piece of art from Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby that, despite being relieved of its cinematic veneer, reminds us that a mother’s song is sung only to become a memory in her eventual absence. The latter is paired with “Yumeji’s Theme” by Shigeru Umebayashi, which references the 1991 Seijun Suzuki film, Yumeji. Both are offered with Duni’s voice as pure instrument.

Two Kosovar songs introduce the pulse of the earth. “Ani More Nuse” conveys vitality, its rhythmic foundation grounding the album’s more ethereal tendencies. Duni’s percussion adds a tactile dimension, a reminder of the body’s presence within this otherwise weightless landscape. “Zambaku I Prizrenit” by composer Akil Koci blooms with a different energy, its melodic contours unfolding under an unseen sun. Luft navigates its modal terrain with a sense of curiosity.

Three originals serve as emotional waypoints within this journey. “Foolish Flame” flickers with restless energy, its chromatic lines tracing the unpredictable path of desire. There is vulnerability here, though it is not offered as confession but as an open question. “Magnolia” answers with certainty, a rootedness that feels earned rather than assumed. The voice carries a newfound steadiness, an acceptance of the self’s shifting contours. “Your Arms” extends this feeling outward, exploring the architecture of intimacy. Luft’s solo glows with the warmth of a fire one might sit beside in the depths of winter.

The inevitable farewell comes in the form of “Lonely Woman.” The Ornette Coleman standard, paired with lyrics by Margo Guryan, brings us back into the fold of night, allowing the hesitations of life to wander free from the trappings of the flesh, so that they might achieve the spiritual journeying that human ways so often tarnish.

Throughout, there are moments when Duni abandons words altogether, allowing vocalese to emerge as a self-sustaining channel of communication. These passages offer glimpses into fragments of thought and feeling that resist translation. Luft’s subtly altered arpeggios lay down tectonic plates beneath them, creating a sense of movement even in stillness. It is here that the album reveals its deepest truth, not as a statement but as an experience.

Ultimately, we are left with a sensation akin to standing beneath a sky so vast it erases the boundaries of the self. Indeed, music invites a willingness to dissolve into something larger, where the distinction between listener and sound becomes irrelevant. What remains is the fragile yet enduring glow of a star whose light continues long after its source has vanished.

Miroslav Vitous: Mountain Call (ECM 2673)

| Tyran Grillo

Miroslav Vitous
Mountain Call

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marilyn Crispell/Anders Jormin: Memento (ECM 2867)

| Tyran Grillo

Marilyn Crispell
Anders Jormin
Memento

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mark Turner: Patternmaster (ECM 2835)

| Tyran Grillo

Mark Turner
Patternmaster

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Soaring into a Cloudy Sky: The Köln Concert at 50

| Tyran Grillo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

| Tyran Grillo

Julia Hülsmann Octet
While I Was Away

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Björn Meyer: Convergence (ECM 2844)

| Tyran Grillo

Björn Meyer
Convergence

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

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

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

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

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

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