Arild Andersen: Landloper (2826)

| Tyran Grillo

Arild Andersen
Landloper

Arild Andersen double bass, electronics
Recorded live June 18, 2020, Victoria Nasjonal Jazzscene, Oslo
Engineer: Espen Høydalsvik
Mixed June 2024 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo
by Arild Andersen and Martin Abrahamsen (engineer)
“Peace Universal” recorded at home
Cover photo: Jean-Guy Lathuilière
Executive producer: Manfred Eicher
Release date: November 29, 2024

Even after an ECM recording career spanning half a century, Arild Andersen continues to surprise and does so brilliantly with his first solo album. Recorded live at the 2020 Victoria Nasjonal Jazzscene in Oslo, the program is as varied as the Norwegian bassist’s influence is wide. Despite being alone on stage, he is accompanied by an application of electronic loops in real time (courtesy of a Gibson Echoplex Pro Plus loop machine and a TC Electronic M 2000 signal processor). In that sense, it makes the album a sublime companion to Eberhard Weber’s Once Upon A Time and is just as important as a latter-day document.

The marriage of live electronic treatments isn’t new to Andersen, whose ensemble recordings have featured it in various contexts. With nothing else but the road ahead to guide—and the road behind to encourage—he makes classics from his own and others’ songbooks feel as relevant as when they were first committed to memory. From his canon, we get the sturdy “Dreamhorse,” a tune that arose from a solo improvisation he performed at the Kongsberg Festival in 1994 (and which has appeared on ECM on his trio album, Live At Belleville). With tapping providing the rhythmic undercurrent it needs to gallop, a fluid overlay gives us an ever-expanding image of travel and landscapes. “Mira” (a nod to another trio album of the same name) boasts a comparable wingspan.

Andersen always has a way about him that makes us feel duly situated, making the title track (harking all the way back to 1981’s Lifelines) all the more lucid as a lens of interpretation. The playful dissonances therein emerge from two interconnected pieces: “Ghosts” by Albert Ayler and “Old Stev,” a traditional Norwegian folk song that Arild learned in his Sagn project with singer Kirsten Bråten Berg. In both, we find a soul perfectly at home in stretches of atmosphere where ends and beginnings become indistinguishable. His instrument represents points in time, while the electronics are the horizon in which they rise and fall like briefest lights of life.

The overall effect is such that even evergreens like “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square” (written by Manning Sherwin for the 1940 musical, New Faces) and Ornette Coleman’s “Lonely Woman” find kinship at the touch of fingers and strings. The latter meshes beautifully with Charlie Haden’s “Song for Che,” where con legno tracings ring forth as a call to action. However, as I alluded to at the beginning of this review, we must look to where we came from to know where we are going, which is why I close with where the album opens: in “Peace Universal.” Ra-Kalam Bob Moses’s timeless hymn gives rise to birds, animal calls, and forest stirrings, its mist alive with intimations of ancestors whose lives were never recorded in the annals of history yet whose legacy lives on in the very earth. Each reverberation gives up the ghost even as it downloads a melody for the ages from the ether.

Tord Gustavsen Trio: Seeing (ECM 2820)

| Tyran Grillo

Tord Gustavsen Trio
Seeing

Tord Gustavsen piano, electronics
Jarle Vespestad drums
Steinar Raknes double bass
Recorded October 2023 at Studios La Buissone
Engineer: Gérard de Haro
Mastering: Nicolas Baillard
Cover photo: Fotini Potamia
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: September 20, 2024

Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path.
–Psalm 119:105

Each new recording by the Tord Gustavsen Trio constructs an unassuming waystation for the ECM listener, and on Seeing, we are given the most rustic lodging yet. In addition to the usual attention to detail one has come to expect from this venture, there is a certain plasticity to the sound that, while always humming at the core, now rises to the surface after patiently compressing its diamond light beneath the earth. Thus, the album’s title is more than an equation of listening with how the eyes take in the world around them; it is also an expression of the music’s indefinite state of being.

From the stained glass scintillations of “Jesus, gjør meg stille” (a Norwegian traditional) to the bass-driven road trip of the bandleader’s own “Seattle Song,” we find ourselves in territories at once familiar and freshly rendered for the soul. Soul is precisely what the band has more than enough to spare in its artful blend of gospel pastels and jazzier charcoal. “The Old Church” is a prime example of how beautifully these mesh together and is distinct for bassist Steinar Raknes’s solo, which stands out in an album largely focused on the group’s collective vibe. It’s also a running spiritual theme in a context where such classic hymns as Lowell Mason’s “Nearer My God, To Thee” (rendered so beautifully alone at the piano) and the Bach chorales “Christ lag in Todesbanden” and “Auf meinen lieben Gott” feel just as much of the here and now as Gustavsen’s originals feel curated from some old codex. The lushness of Johann Sebastian’s creations is matched only by their brevity. Like Bible verses that cut right to the core when one needs them, each lays sins bare on the altar of forgiveness, cutting them into smaller and smaller pieces until they disappear from view. Thus, faith is shown also to be creative, so that touch becomes a way of life.

Among the remaining selections by Gustavsen, if “Piano Interlude – Meditation” is made of stone and wood, then the title track travels on the wind, knowing one’s place in the world by dislocation. As in “Extended Circle,” we know this embrace the moment we feel it, having encountered it in dreams, in memories, and in hopes for the future. And here they are before us, welcoming and forgiving, waiting for life to unfold with philosophical humility. This leaves us only with “Beneath Your Wisdom,” which is the heart of the band, in which opens a door to whatever may burn in the depths of human regard.

The pianist notes a theme of “cherishing” in this music. Thus, as a return to form, Seeing proves itself to be an affirmation. The quieter the play, the more we feel revived, ready to take on the demons of this world. As the psalmist says above, God shows us only a few steps ahead. The rest is for Him to know.

Nitai Hershkovits: Call on the old wise (ECM 2779)

| Tyran Grillo

Nitai Hershkovits
Call on the old wise

Nitai Hershkovits piano
Recorded June 2022 at Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI, Lugano
Engineer: Stefano Amerio
Mastering: Christoph Stickel
Cover photo: Jean-Guy Lathuilère
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: November 10, 2023

After playing as a sideman in Oded Tzur’s quartet, pianist Nitai Hershkovits makes his solo ECM debut in a largely improvised recital. Its title pays homage to his former piano teacher, Suzan Cohen (the penultimate “For Suzan” bears her name), resulting in a total of 18 vignettes, each a variation on the theme of gratitude, heritage, and the creative spirit. From the first blush of “The Old Wise,” one feels a blend of past and future colors blending across the canvas of the present. Like much of what transpires thereafter, moments of sheer synchronicity give way to hints of breakdown, yet always manage to stay together. As cycles of commentary swirl around each other in one larger mixture of memories, feelings at once familiar and unfathomable dance in the foreground. Whether in the chromatic embrace of “A Rooftop Minuet” or the delightful games of “Intermezzo No. 4” and “Intermezzo No. 3,” Hershkovits fuses classical and jazz impulses. The latter sprout up even higher in “Majestic Steps Glow Far” and “Dream Your Dreams,” where desert flowers bloom. Whereas one sounds like a lost standard translated from fragments of memory into a coherent whole, the other (by Molly Drake) is only one of two covers (the other being Duke Ellington’s “Single Petal Of A Rose”) to grace the program.

In tracks like “Enough To Say I Will,” tender beginnings give way to subtle leaps of faith, each lasting the length of a breath or two, before gentle dissonances prevent us from falling into fantasy. The reality of things becomes clearer as virtuosity sheds one snake skin after another, texture taking precedence over key. “Mode Antigona” is among the set’s most lyrical turns (the others being “Of Trust And Remorse,” “Late Blossom,” and “In Satin”). Like the rest, however, it’s never content to stay in one place but rather gives itself over to the whims of the air currents in the room. It’s as if the flow of time itself were a conductor treating every deviation of the score as an opportunity for discovery. Further treasures abound in the rushing river of “Mode Brilliante” and the smoky piano bar vibes of “This You Mean To Me.” And in the quiet exuberance of “Of Mentorship,” we find remnants of all that came before, joy reigning supreme.

Zsófia Boros: El último aliento (ECM New Series 2769)

| Tyran Grillo

Zsófia Boros
El último aliento

Zsófia Boros classical guitar, ronroco
Recorded March/April 2022, Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI, Lugano
Engineer: Stefano Amerio
Cover photo: Fotini Potamia
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: April 14, 2023

Guitarist Zsófia Boros returns with her third program for ECM’s New Series. Pairing selections from Argentina with those of French composer Mathias Duplessy, the result may just be her most meticulously constructed dollhouse yet. Indeed, it’s as if every track were either a room or a piece of miniature furniture placed artfully within it.

We begin at the entrance with Duplessy’s “De rêve et de pluie.” The use of harmonics here, alternating with liquid arpeggios, evokes an architectural awareness of the surroundings. Boros traces the contour of the doorway, takes her shoes off in the foyer, and steps carefully inside to take it all in. Next, she tiptoes up the stairs built by Joaquin Alem, whose “Salir adentro” cradles a brief rhythmic tapping in its tenderness. It breathes almost dramatically despite the near-stillness, burrowing as an animal preparing for hibernation. From this dreamy escape, we enter the reality of the nursery, in which Quique Sinesi’s “El abrazo” crochets its lullaby. For this, Boros wraps a rubber band around the guitar strings—a muting technique she developed to allow her to practice while her children were sleeping. The effect is warm and familiar.

From there, Boros recedes into the kitchen, where Alberto Ginastera is cooking lovingly at the stove. His take on the “Milonga” is a spider-webbed tango, as savory as it is sweet. Moving on, we are led into the study, where two books bound by Duplessy lie open for our scrutiny. Whereas “Le secret d’Hiroshigé” recalls the sound of the Japanese koto, moving through paper screens as if they were made of air, “Perle de Rosée” is more botanical. With an understated quality that eschews the pitfalls of virtuosity in favor of its grace, it navigates fields of crops on the verge of being harvested. Meanwhile, a fire burns softly in the fireplace, where the kindling of Sinesi’s “Tormenta de ilusión” leaves us to regard some more unexpected turns of phrase. Played on the ronroco (the 10-stringed instrument for which it was originally written), it destroys memories of the past the tighter it tries to hold to them.

As we wander into the gallery, Duplessy treats us to a modest yet captivating private collection. In “Le labyrinthe de Vermeer,” we can sense oils, pigments, and brushstrokes coalescing into a coherent image. Each section has its own fragrance and distinct perspective. His “Berceuse,” the album’s pinnacle, draws a poignant ebb and flow, while “Valse pour Camille” expresses childlike wonder, coming of age in resonant strums.

We end in the greenhouse, where the album’s title piece by Carlos Moscardini casts its light on a bonsai tree. As a marvel of curation, it doesn’t so much mimic its larger cousins but shows what music is capable of at its most cellular level.

Mette Henriette: Drifting (ECM 2766)

| Tyran Grillo

Mette Henriette
Drifting

Mette Henriette tenor saxophone
Johan Lindvall piano
Judith Hamann violoncello
Recorded 2020-2022
Munchmuseet, Oslo
Engineer: Peer Espen Ursfjord
Mixed April 2022
Studios La Buissonne
by Manfred Eicher, Mette Henriette, and Gérard de Haro (engineer)
Mastering: Christoph Stickel
Cover photo: Ørjan Marakatt Bertelsen
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: January 20, 2023

Eight years after making her self-titled ECM debut in 2015, saxophonist Mette Henriette returns to the label with her anticipated follow-up: the aptly titled Drifting. While the word has for us delicate connotations, it stems etymologically from the Proto-Indo-European dhreibh. Thus, it originally implied moving a large number of things, such as driving sheep. The present program of 15 pieces, spun into three-dimensional webs with pianist Johan Lindvall and cellist Judith Hamann, welcomes both meanings, along with many magnitudes between.

Henriette describes the present material as oriented toward growing, and it’s effortless to see why. Beyond the initial seeds, much can be discovered in subsequent waterings. Her distinctive register is no less powerful for its quietude and perhaps even more so for its forays into virtuosic flashes. Put another way, she is interested not in nouns and verbs but in the indefinite articles and prepositions that give them direction. Once again, the intensity of understatement reigns supreme.

Choosing favorites is fruitless, not only because they’re all so beautiful in their way, but also because the narrative unfurls as one connected sequence of events. For while “The 7th” introduces with a brief, stepwise introduction and “Solsnu” completes the circle with a creaking of wood, breath, and string, the text that binds them is written in starlight and wind. Much of what we encounter within ends just as it begins to take shape, letting the rest of its life travel of its own volition. This self-sufficiency is the profoundest remainder of Drifting, wherein dreams of birds (“Čađat”) and icy breath (“0 º”) kiss the cheek of non-existence.

As brief as some pieces are, including the haunts of “Čieđđa, fas,” “Crescent,” “Divining,” to call them vignettes feels wrong, as this implies there is some form of restriction at play. Rather, these are cells in the act of division, each iteration more exponential than the last. As such, change is always waiting around every corner. This is why even the more playful “Chassé” and “A Choo” (the latter a deconstruction of “The Knuckle Song”) so organically twist themselves into something other than themselves. Because they are not bound by time, neither are they committed to a specific form. As in “Indrifting you,” the music is always on the verge of falling one way or another. The instruments sway in and out of frame as a woven instrument in aggregate. At their center is the title track, which holds the moonlight like a tether to some longed-for dream and never letting go, even in adulthood. It makes you want to cry, wondering why you just stood there watching yours float until it popped like a dying star overhead…

Ludwig van Beethoven: The Piano Concertos (ECM New Series 2753-55)

| Tyran Grillo

Alexander Lonquich
Münchener Kammerorchester
Ludwig van Beethoven: The Piano Conceros

Alexander Lonquich piano, direction
Münchener Kammerorchester
Daniel Giglberger concertmaster
Recorded January 2022
Rathausprunksaal, Landshut
Engineer: Markus Heiland
Cover: Fidel Sclavo
An ECM Production
Release date: November 8, 2024

After a years-long relationship with the Munich Chamber Orchestra, pianist Alexander Lonquich had an opportunity to perform Beethoven’s entire cycle of piano concertos over the course of an autumn evening in 2019. The present recording draws upon that collaboration as a gesture of preservation. Composed between 1790 and 1809, the five completed concertos are what the pianist calls “outward-looking creations” and give us insight into the composer’s depth and breadth of mind. 

Lonquich begins, naturally, with the Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat major, op. 19, given that it was written first but published second due to Beethoven’s initial displeasure with it. Although its opening movement immediately calls Mozart to mind, there are plenty of distinctive colorations to enjoy in its ferocious ebullience, and its central departure into more delicate textures is a marvel. The Adagio is haunting for its sustain-pedaled penultima, setting up the final Rondo, which introduces a veritable horse race of energy to reckon with.

The Mozartian flavors continue in both the Piano Concerto No. 1 in C major, op. 15, and Piano Concerto No. 3 in c minor, op. 37. Whereas the former’s martial beginnings (bordering on overbearing with the occasional blast of timpani and brass) and symphonic conclusion speak with the inflection of a true Classicalist, the second movement adopts a romantic sway. Its soliloquy drips from Lonquich’s fingers like moonlit water, while the surrounding brushwork lends dimension to the scene. The wind writing is especially poignant, blending with the soloist as organically as a forest envelops every tree. The op. 37 mirrors this format almost to a T, beginning with another garagantuan Allegro con brio. At 17 minutes, it’s nothing to take lightly and flows more comfortably to my ears than its op. 15 counterpart. Perhaps it’s the minor key, the more mature writing, or a combination of the two, but whatever the formula, it is bursting at the seams with inspiration and invention, not least of all in the cadenza. (It also seems to foreshadow the Fifth Symphony in the same key, to be written five years later.) Between it and the foot-tappingly engaging third act is cradled another beautiful Largo. As an inward turn, it looks to itself as if through a glass darkly. Yearning for the future, it glows like an ember of possibility.

The Piano Concerto No. 4 in G major, op. 58, opens with even more resolutely symphonic textures, as winds and brass weave a tapestry of pastoral imagery. At 20 minutes, it is half the length of the average symphony and deserves regard as a universe unto itself. The piano’s entrance is timid, almost mocking, before it exuberantly courts the orchestra in a dance of ambitious proportions. Like the Rondo at the other end of the tunnel, it emerges confident, almost brash, in its virtuosity. The Andante con moto operates at a whole other level at their center. Originally conceived with the Orpheus myth in mind, it is by turns agitated and contemplative. This push and pull continues until the piano unfurls its grief alone in a tangled catharsis.

In his liner notes for the album, Lonquich conceives a title for the Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat major, op. 73: “Battle, Prayer and Folk Festival.” For while the opening joys seem set in stone, they quickly crumble as more desperate convolutions come to the fore before the piano moves to its highest registers in a rousing meta statement. The Adagio un poco moto, perhaps the most recognizable movement of the collection, is easily heard anew in the present rendering, so crisp are its articulations that the smoothness of their skin feels real to the touch. Beethoven himself in the score marks the piano’s entrance “like the break of dawn,” but as Lonquich notes, what follows “feels to me like the attraction of a nocturnal source of light, which seems to be robbed of its radiance just five bars before the end.” And in that regression, we feel all sorts of trepidations shuffling through the mind until we land on the rousing third movement, where the sun indeed has the last word. Despite its many asides, tempering the sense of victory with that of retrospection, the music moves forward with confidence. Beethoven holds the flowing arpeggios and boisterous dances in constant check so as not to let time rule over space. With a brief yet inspiring finale, it sweeps us away in its arms and runs as far as its legs will carry us.

Stephan Micus: Thunder (ECM 2757)

| Tyran Grillo

Stephan Micus
Thunder

Stephan Micus frame drum, storm drum, dung chen, Burmese temple bells, Himalayan horse bells, ki un ki, bass zither, bowed dinding, kyeezee, shakuhachi, sarangi, nyckelharpa, kaukas, sapeh, voice, nohkan
Recorded 2020-2022 at MCM Studios
Cover art: Eduard Micus (1925-2000)
An ECM Production
Release date: January 20, 2023

Multi-instrumentalist Stephan Micus goes bigger than he ever has before on Thunder, his 25th solo album for ECM. Inspired by the dung chen, a four-meter-long trumpet heard booming from monasteries during his travels to Tibet, he long dreamed of incorporating it into a series of compositions. After immersing himself in its depths (only in Kathmandu did he find someone willing to teach him how to play this instrument normally reserved for monks), he settled on the ki un ki (a cane stalk common among the Udegey people of Siberia played by inhaling) and the nohkan (a transverse bamboo flute from the Japanese Noh theatre). From this trinity arose a series of nine compositions, each dedicated to a different god of thunder from different world traditions.

Despite the album’s concept, however, and the decidedly spiritual overtones, there is something undeniably elemental about the music itself. For while there are certainly far-reaching moments of great drama and development, others are intimate spirals of reflection that are just as content in staying where they are. Of the former persuasion are pieces like “A Song For Thor,” “A Song For Vajrapani,” and “A Song For Perun.” All three make use of dung chen, frame drums, Burmese temple bells, Himalayan horse bells, bass zither, and either the ki un ki or nohkan. The drums are the heartfelt griots of this primal tale, evoking the sound of footsteps on dirt and stone. The ki un ki moves with an eagle’s precision, so determined that every clod seems to get out of its way as it barrels through with a human soul firmly in its sights. As it traverses the landscape, passing through every dead object as if it were made of air, it finds its way to life itself. Through this transformation, it lingers on the edge of speech. Meanwhile, the dung chen move like elephants across the plains, each carrying a virtue known only by its ancestors.

So much of what we encounter here, however, is as reflective as a pond in moonlight. For example, “A Song For Raijin” and “A Song For Leigong” feature the storm drum, which, despite its name, betrays only the slightest hint of a climatic disturbance on the horizon. Both tracks also feature bowed sinding (a West African harp), kyeezee (bronze chimes from the Buddhist temples of Burma), and shakuhachi. With so much tenderness between them, each wrapped in the arms of a subcutaneous drone, the Japanese bamboo flute can only plant its prayers in whispers. It is a frail warrior that would be torn in the next violent rainfall, the possibility of which haunts every dream.

Of those dreams, we get two glimpses through the lenses of “A Song For Armazi” and “A Song For Zeus.” These share the same scoring (3 sarangi, 2 bass zithers, and nyckelharpa), opening spaces of translucent incantation. Speaking of which, Micus’s voice enters magnified in “A Song For Shango” and “A Song For Ishkur.” Accompanied by the sapeh (a lute from Borneo) and kaukas (a five-string lyre of the San people in Southern Africa), he traces the aftermath of nature’s fury. We can feel the humidity in the air, the sweet musk of precipitation in the nostrils, and the tang of love on the tongue. The sapeh shimmers, while the singing rolls across the mountains, flattening everything it touches with quiet power—not a ritual but a revelation that manifests itself as a footnote on the page of time.

Trygve Seim/Frode Haltli: Our Time (ECM 2813)

| Tyran Grillo

Trygve Seim
Frode Haltli
Our Time

Trygve Seim soprano and tenor saxophones
Frode Haltli accordion
Recorded June 2023, Himmelfahrtskirche, Munich
Engineer: Stefano Amerio
Cover photo: Thomas Wunsch
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: September 13, 2024

For the past 25 years, saxophonist Trygve Seim and accordionist Frode Haltli have compacted dirt together as musical allies one step at a time. In this successor to 2008’s Yeraz, the duo opens a new door of their advent calendar into a world of freshly tilled land.

The set is pillared by four improvisations, each of which blends into a through-composed selection. Across this spectrum, they carve into introspection and extroversion, and back again. Seim has such an ancient approach to the modern reed, which at his lips sounds like a duduk, as Haltli’s wingflaps take his uplift to heart. Delicacy abounds, along with mature textural contrasts, each of which elicits a mood, a picture, a song. In “Shyama Sundara Madana Mohana,” a North Indian folk song, higher notes seek transcendence, while colors come alive in Igor Stravinsky’s “Les Cinq Doigts No. 5.”

Aside from “Oy Khodyt’ Son, Kolo Vikon,” a traditional Ukrainian lullaby rendered with just as much freedom and love as anything unscripted between them, the album is largely self-composed. From Haltli’s “Du, mi tid” to Seim’s “Elegi,” they plant one careful seed after another, watering with patient listening. The gradualness of their hindsight pays commensurate deference to the subject matters at hand. It is as if theirs was a world of shadows whose existence is discernible only because of the light they carry. Although we cannot know for sure where they are going, the music hints at a destination known only to the subconscious mind. Rising tensions mingle with artful release as the landscape feels warmer and less distant, more human than before. Amid all of this emotional shading, “Arabian Tango” feels like a once-in-a-lifetime joy. The most delicate tenor notes from its composer mesh beautifully with Haltli’s solo of sorts, while the space of the room itself lends a voice to this dance of emergence and recession.

Taken as a whole, Our Time is a mountain compressed into breath and exhaled in words of snow.

Norma Winstone/Kit Downes: Outpost of Dreams (ECM 2811)

| Tyran Grillo

Norma Winstone
Kit Downes
Outpost

Norma Winstone voice
Kit Downes piano
Recorded April 2023 at Artesuono Recording Studio, Udine
Engineer: Stefano Amerio
Mixed January 2024
by Manfred Eicher and Stefano Amerio
at Bavaria Musikstudios, Munich
Cover photo: Fotini Potamia
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: July 5, 2024

The duo on this recording of vocalist Norma Winstone and pianist Kit Downes came about by chance when Winstone’s go-to accompanist, Nikki Iles, was unable to participate in a London gig, resulting in Downes sitting in as a last-minute replacement. And yet, one would never guess at such a backstory given the openness of heart and communication shared between these two luminaries in their own right. The resulting binary star of their collaboration makes for a tender yet powerful examination of emotional landscapes that feels like it has been around for aeons.

Especially revelatory is hearing Downes’ settings of Winstone’s characteristically astute words. The first of four, “El,” opens the set with the piano’s inner resonance, extended by a faint shimmer from a Hammond B3 organ. The lyrics, written for Downes’ daughter, turn the environment into a reflection of the inner self—and vice versa. Her voice is one of a kind, not only because it belongs to her, body and soul, but also because she gives it so freely to the bodies and souls of her listeners. It exposes its strengths and vulnerabilities in equal measure, knowing that each needs the other in mutual regard. Nowhere is this clearer than in “The Steppe,” where what she calls the “slow drip, drip of a fantasy” becomes the time signature of our existence. Downes expands on this in an instrumental passage, as if the only way out is the path leading back to itself. “Nocturne” peeks beyond the curtain of human folly to the core of truth it so often obscures, while the spoken word of “In Search Of Sleep” touches the darkness with its psychological acuity. Between them is “Black Is the Colour,” one of two traditionals on the album. Winstone digs deep into her vocal register, exploring that ashen beauty she carries inside. Downes makes it all the more poignant with his adventurous harmonizing. The Scandinavian folk tune, “Rowing Home” (in an arrangement by Bob Cornford) becomes a song of desire. Winstone carries its fire into the foreground, casting a shadow over the face of fate.

But just as these feel as fresh as yesterday, the application of her wordcraft turns modern themes into timeless constructions. The music of John Taylor takes center stage in “Fly The Wind,” showing that the late pianist’s spirit is still very much alive in Winstone’s heart. For Carla Bley’s “Jesus Maria,” she replaces the original lyrics with those of her own making, telling of a man whose presence defies the laws of physics by working through the narrowest emotional crevices toward solace from misguided worlds. Winstone’s ability to draw out scenes that feel so inevitable speaks to her connection to melody, not as an aesthetic necessity but as a narrative skeleton to which her words are seamless flesh. In “Beneath An Evening Sky” (Ralph Towner), two lovers find their hearts intertwined no matter the distance between them. Meanwhile, in “Out Of The Dancing Sea” (Aidan O’Rourke), the inner self becomes a map to unfold in the outside world. With that as our guide, the more we travel, the more we begin to know ourselves as we inhabit different places of residence along the way.