Amina Claudine Myers

Amina Claudine Myers: Solace of the Mind

| Tyran Grillo

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

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

| Tyran Grillo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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