Improvisation

Messengers in a Dark Forest: Lucian Ban, John Surman, and Mat Maneri

| Tyran Grillo

Artists often draw their deepest language from the places that first shaped their ears. For Lucian Ban, Mat Maneri, and John Surman, those places lie far apart geographically, culturally, and temperamentally. Yet, they converge in a shared devotion to improvisation and to the long memory carried by folk and classical traditions. Each musician arrives bearing an inheritance that feels less chosen than received. Ban carries the resonance of Transylvanian soil and song, absorbed long before jazz became his working language. Maneri brings an intuitive fluency, shaped by lineage and lived immersion rather than mere instruction. Surman arrives from open landscapes and weathered distances, his voice shaped by wind and horizon, ancient in contour and unsettled in spirit. Together they move as messengers through a forest of inherited material, carrying signals rather than declarations.

That shared path leads to Béla Bartók, whose early 20th-century field recordings in Transylvania revealed a music at once elemental and inexhaustible. Bartók sought preservation through rescue and documentation, gathering what might otherwise vanish. Ban, Maneri, and Surman approach these songs differently. For them, the material functions as a living threshold rather than a dying art, per se. Carols, laments, love songs, and dances do not arrive as artifacts to be handled, but as presences to be encountered, forms capable of friction and renewal.

Rather than fixing these melodies in place, the trio leaves them deliberately open-ended. Transcriptions act as waymarkers rather than maps. Fragments stretch and breathe until new centers of gravity appear. Silences are openings. Roles circulate, dissolve, re-form. What emerges absorbs history without sealing it off, allowing the past to remain porous to the present. Beneath everything runs a current older than borders or schools, a knowledge carried in breath and gesture. Thus, these tunes shelter a human grain, worn smooth by use, whether shaped by peasant hands or bent through jazz.

On Cantica Profana, recorded across three European concerts between November 2022 and November 2023, that grain is fully awakened. The album unfolds like a passage through shadowed terrain, where individual pieces as clearings briefly illuminated. The appearances of “Violin Song I” and “Violin Song II” establish a language of restless intimacy. Their skittering surfaces mask a deep inward focus, as muted piano strings and fragmentary viola lines open space for Surman’s soprano saxophone to move with playful acuity. His voice does not lead so much as observe, circling the material with curiosity. Novelty carries little weight here. These playgrounds are built from old principles and long-held feelings, animated by the freedom with which they are entered.

As the forest deepens, the melodies turn toward absence. “First Return” introduces a somber presence, Surman’s keening soprano a solitary call carried through the night air. That impulse surfaces again in “Last Return,” where wandering itself becomes a form of knowledge. Everything moves in widening circles around silence, the stillness that precedes life and waits beyond it, following not paths marked on maps but traces left by lived experience.

“Dowry Song I,” the first of two such communal clearings along the way, introduces the bass clarinet, its rough fibers weaving textures of interlaced light. Beneath it, Ban’s piano establishes a gentle cadence, enlivening Maneri’s viola until it takes on a copper patina. The trio finds a rocking motion that feels ritualistic, generous, drawing out the melody’s embedded joy before releasing it toward a distant horizon. “Dowry Song II” returns to this space with greater density and color, the voices braided into a resilient weave where each strand strengthens the others.

Other pieces arrive as messages carried from deeper within the trees. “Up There” repeatedly opens with extended bass clarinet meditations, Surman circling the melody until it settles into focus. Around this, Ban and Maneri widen the terrain, giving the line ground and horizon. What follows is often a dance of striking acuity, allowing Maneri room to roam while preserving collective balance. “A Messenger Was Born” distills this sensibility into a quiet prayer and inward dirge for those yet to be lost, for figures glimpsed briefly and never fully named.

“Dark Forest” stands as both setting and invocation. It unfolds as a lush, dreamlike traversal of nocturnal paths, where beauty emerges slowly. Improvisatory spirals coexist with melodic clarity in this, the trio’s deepest attunement. Meanwhile, the title track begins with struck resonance, muted piano notes falling like measured footsteps, before yielding to Maneri’s fluid inflections.

“Evening in the Village” captures darkness as a settling rather than a conclusion. Starlight defines the space as much as shadow. Thoughts, anxieties, romances, and plans continue their quiet circulation. By the time of “Transylvanian Dance,” the accumulated energy breaks open. An anticipatory rhythm gives way to exuberant confluence, Surman’s soprano emerging as a vividly human presence.

The standalone vinyl The Athenaeum Concert, recorded in June 2024 at the Romanian Athenaeum in Bucharest, extends this language with an even deeper patience. Where Cantica Profana often reads like a gathering of poems or stories, this companion album unfolds more like a life remembered in long form. “Evening in the Village (Bitter Love)” opens with a mournful viola that sounds like an extinct instrument briefly summoned back into breath. Wrinkled yet supple, it enters bearing generational weight. As dampened piano footsteps join and the bass clarinet emerges, the music takes on the temperament of weather itself, fog and time moving across the land, before slowly turning toward dance.

The present version of “Dowry Song” leaps immediately into motion, raining promises with the force of embodied love. The bass clarinet grounds itself, inviting participation, while the viola lifts free, buoyed by Ban’s steady, turning pianism. “Up There” again traces a river’s course, winding through brush under historical pressure, moving from insistence to reverie across its span. “Violin Song” builds gradually from quiet stirrings until Surman’s soprano takes flight, migrating toward warmth. Joy radiates through the exchange, though darkness lingers beneath, a reminder that wonder and struggle remain entwined.

Taken together, the two albums read as studies in ethical listening, in how sound is allowed to appear rather than be summoned by force. Their connection lies partly in shared source material, but more decisively in the trio’s instinct to remain inside unfolding time. Duration becomes a form of care. Attention turns toward relationship, toward the ways voices breathe around one another, and toward the responsibility carried by each choice. Folk material is treated as lived terrain, entered with awareness of what has already passed through it and what may yet arrive. From this stance emerges a vision of tradition shaped by patience and watchfulness, where meaning rises slowly from sustained uncertainty.

Maneri is often described as a microtonal improviser, yet the music pursued here feels macrotonal in spirit, resisting borders and divisions in favor of a broader resonance. Ban serves as both anchor and instigator, shaping time without enclosing it, anchoring the ensemble while inviting risk. Surman contributes a voice that feels elemental rather than ornamental, his reeds acting as carriers of weather and message, passing freely through the ensemble like breath through leaves. And so, the distance between Bartók’s Edison phonograph and now collapses into a single resonant gesture, fulfilling his quiet prophecy from 1921, that future musicians might uncover truths the original collectors could not yet hear.

Both albums are available from Sunnyside Records.

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

| Tyran Grillo

Thomas Strønen/Time Is A Blind Guide
Off Stillness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

| Tyran Grillo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

| Tyran Grillo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BlankFor.ms/Jason Moran/Marcus Gilmore: Refract

| Tyran Grillo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Thomas Strønen: Relations (ECM 2771)

| Tyran Grillo

Thomas Strønen
Relations

Thomas Strønen drums, percussion
Craig Taborn piano
Chris Potter soprano and tenor saxophones
Sinikka Langeland kantele, voice
Jorge Rossy piano
This album was recorded and assembled between 2018 and 2022, with Thomas Strønen, the project’s initiator, inviting the featured musicians to join him from different locations across Europe and the US.
Thomas Strønen, Lugano
Craig Taborn, New York
Chris Potter, New York
Sinikka Langeland, Oslo
Jorge Rossy, Basel
Engineers: Lara Persia, Martin Abrahamsen, and Patrik Zosso
Mixed February 2023 by Manfred Eicher, Thomas Strønen, and Michael Hinreiner (engineer)
at Bavaria Musikstudios, Munich
Photo: Dániel Vass
Album produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: November 29, 2024

Four years in the making, Thomas Strønen’s Relations locates the drummer in virtual duets with Craig Taborn and Jorge Rossy on piano, Chris Potter on soprano and tenor saxophones, and Sinikka Langeland on kantele and voice. After recording Bayou, producer Manfred Eicher invited Strønen to play solo percussion for the remaining studio time. Taking a decidedly classical approach (one might easily recognize shades of Edgard Varèse in here), and already being in the Lugano space where the Orchestra della Svizzera italiana is based, he was able to expand his usual drum kit with a variety of instruments—the only stipulation being that he could not have worked with them before. In response to the pandemic, he sent tracks to other musicians for long-distance collaboration. After a final mix, the result was an album of striking intimacy, timely messaging, and understated humanity.

We open with “Confronting Silence,” one of two tracks featuring Strønen alone (the other being the more sparkling “Arc For Drums”). The initiatory gong sounds nothing like the kickstart of commerce, the welcoming of royalty, or even the peace of meditation. It sings for no other reason than to be a vibration for all creation. Meanwhile, the gran casa rumbles within the soul of things.

Following this is “The Axiom Of Equality,” for which he is virtually joined by Taborn (as also in the diurnal “Pentagonal Garden”). The cellular metamorphosis between them is astonishing for being rendered from opposite sides of the pond, each motif a love letter to the ether.

Because Strønen often leaves moments of pause, letting others dialogue with him and populate the gaps with complementary grammar feels effortless. This is especially true of the tracks with Potter, whose tenor is a voice in the night in “Weaving Loom,” while in “Ephemeral,” he expresses himself internally despite the extroverted and free-wheeling playing, diving with humility into every moment for all it’s worth.

The more we immerse ourselves in the unique sound of this record, the more we settle into the illusion that every duo configuration is in the same room. Strønen’s three dances with Langeland are especially vivid in this regard. In “Koyasan,” the kantele is somehow not an extension of the percussion but the other way around, while in “Beginners Guide To Simplicity,” Langeland’s voice is a call to heart. And in “Nemesis,” brushed drums added an earthy texture that perfectly matches the aural surroundings.

Rossy also joins for three outings, examining linguistic morphologies in “Nonduality” and dropping stones into the waters of “Ishi.” Last is “KMJ,” the most melodic of the set. Every gesture between them is as clear as one’s reflection in a newly polished mirror, and Strønen’s heightened awareness leaves palpable traces behind for us to cross-hatch with the instrument of our listening.

Qasim Naqvi/Wadada Leo Smith/Andrew Cyrille: Two Centuries

| Tyran Grillo

Two Centuries is the second album from former ECM producer Sun Chung’s Red Hook label and may one day be regarded as its most defining release. As electronic musician Qasim Naqvi, trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith and drummer Andrew Cyrille put 11 of Naqvi’s tunes under their triangular microscope, the cells of our listening are magnified.

“For D.F.” opens with a political charge. Written for Darnella Frazier, who captured George Floyd’s murder, it uses distortions to evoke the white noise of our collective trauma. As subtle as this music is, with its near-comforting swells and honest lyricism, it offers not a moment of reflection but the reflection of a moment, a vivid gaze at a life lost on the brink of a society in turmoil. This is, perhaps, the deepest nuance of the titular centuries, the dividing line of which is drawn not numerically but on the shifting sands of justice.

What follows is a veritable tilling of melodies made possible as much through listening as playing. The foundation is often forged between Cyrille’s tools and Naqvi’s febrile choices of color. In fortifying each for harvest, they dip into disparate references. Hear, for example, the influence of Bryn Jones in “Sadden Upbeat,” while “Tympanic” recalls Sofia Gubaidulina’s String Quartet No. 4.

Contrasts in mood abound, ranging from sunlit (“Palaver”) to brooding (“Wraith”). “Bypass Decay” is of special note, chugging like a train against (and ultimately losing to) an encroaching night. Throughout, Smith speaks (e.g., “Spiritual is 150”) and sings (e.g., “Organum”) in equal measure, but always with a message to convey in the role of griot, reminding us of something spiritual, though severed from any particular tradition. As is evident in “Orion Ave,” where the free-floating hymn reigns supreme, faith walks these empty streets alone, trailing its shadow like a burden of care.

Craig Taborn: Shadow Plays (ECM 2693)

| Tyran Grillo

Craig Taborn
Shadow Plays

Craig Taborn piano
Concert recording, March 2, 2020
Wiener Konzerthaus
Engineer: Stefano Amerio
Cover photo: Thomas Wunsch
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: October 8, 2021

Since releasing Avenging Angel, Craig Taborn’s first spontaneous recital for ECM, a decade ago, the pianist’s traversal on the label has brought him to collective enterprises with the likes of Roscoe Mitchell, Thomas Morgan, and Chris Potter. All the while, his language has been as much his own as it has been a force of adaptation to contexts big and small. If that earlier effort can be said to evoke disembodiment, then let Shadow Plays be its embodied other half. From the gestures that open “Bird Templars,” one gets the sense that each of Taborn’s hands is a traveler engaged in a slow-motion contest for a single path ahead. And yet, there is no feeling of animosity—instead, a sense of wonder, especially as the music quiets in the left, allowing the right to offer its soliloquy in the spirit of accompaniment. If it is possible to whisper through a piano, then Taborn has accomplished that here. “Discordia Concors” and “Concordia Discors” both offer frantic searches for meaning balanced by the jauntier rhythms of “Conspiracy Of Things” between them. These pieces find themselves pulled to the keys by a gravitational force they cannot quite escape.

The jazziest inflections await interpretation through “A Code With Spells” and the concluding “Now In Hope,” both of which convey honeyed textures with cinematic sensibilities, each coated by resistance against the storms that have barraged us over the past year and a half. The most epic stretches are reserved for “Shadow Play,” in which chords resuscitate the possibility of harmony. As one of the cleanest concert recordings I’ve heard, it felt like I was the only one in the room: an intimacy we need more of than ever.

(This review originally appeared in the January 2022 issue of The New York City Jazz Record, a full PDF of which is available here.)