Jazz

Love Longing Loss: At Home with Charles Lloyd During a Year of the Plague – A Film by Dorothy Darr

| Tyran Grillo

Some films document events, while others listen for what lingers after events have passed. Love Longing Loss: At Home with Charles Lloyd During a Year of the Plague belongs to the latter category. It is less a chronicle of pandemic isolation than a meditation on presence, memory, and the unseen currents that move through a life devoted to sound. Dorothy Darr’s portrait of her husband does not attempt to explain Charles Lloyd. Instead, it abides with him, attentive to breath, gesture, silence, and the slow unfolding of thought.

The film opens where many of Lloyd’s musical journeys have always begun: by the ocean. Waves rise and fall with a patient inevitability, an ancient pulse that predates and outlasts any human song. Over this elemental rhythm, the plaintive voice of the tarogato enters, its grainy timbre sounding both archaic and intimate. It feels less like an introduction than a return. The sea is not scenery here but a spiritual coordinate, a reminder that music, like water, moves in cycles of departure and homecoming.

From this threshold, Darr brings us inside. Lloyd sits at the piano, working through “Sky Valley Doll,” testing harmonies, letting phrases hover before committing them to air. The camera drifts across a wall of photographs populated by friends, collaborators, and fellow travelers, many now gone. When Lloyd lifts the melody to the saxophone, the tune exhales. Space becomes part of the composition. It is a moment that encapsulates his lifelong approach to music, one shaped by a metaphysical relationship to sound.

Lloyd speaks sparingly, and when he does, his words feel weighed against silence. “It’s been painful and a blessing,” he says of the time in isolation. The sentence arrives without punctuation, and none is needed. Pain and grace are not opposites here but concurrent states, held in the same body. The film understands this economy of language. It does not rush to interpret but allows feeling to surface on its own terms, trusting that music often articulates what speech cannot.

Throughout the film, Lloyd reflects on the blues of his Mississippi Delta upbringing, describing it as an infusion of ancestral lines rather than a style to be mastered. The blues, for him, is a transmission. It carries the weight of history, the residue of suffering, and the stubborn persistence of joy. His studies with Phineas Newborn, his immersion in Bartók, and his revelatory encounters with Bach are recalled as recognitions of continuity. These musics speak to one another across time because they emerge from similar urgencies. They are responses to being alive under pressure.

This sense of inherited gravity deepens when the film turns toward America’s racial history. Archival images of violence and resistance pass across the screen while Lloyd and his band perform “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” The juxtaposition is stark yet restrained. The music does not comment on the images so much as lay them bare. Lloyd has long understood that every song carries encoded histories, that trauma is not only remembered but inherited. Laments are passed down genetically, he suggests, even when their origins are obscured or denied. To play music honestly is to acknowledge these shadows without surrendering to them.

In one of the film’s most affecting sequences, Lloyd performs “Nanapesa, Ishtahullo-chito,” chanting and shaking maracas before taking up the bass flute. Elsewhere, “Nacheka’s Lament” on tarogato closes a circle begun at the water’s edge. These performances serve as acts of witnessing from someone who has often described himself as both composer and reporter, someone compelled to offer what he sees and hears without embellishment. Reporting, in this sense, is not journalism but testimony.

Darr’s visual approach mirrors this ethos. Shot on modest equipment over several months, the film resists polish in favor of proximity. The domestic setting is never romanticized. It is simply where life happens now. Light shifts across rooms. Instruments wait patiently. Silence accumulates. There is a humility in this gaze that aligns with Lloyd’s own understanding of creative practice. To contribute to the world is not only to raise one’s voice but to know when to step aside, when to leave room for something else to speak.

Placed within the arc of a larger career, the film feels like a distillation. From the groundbreaking work in the 1960s through decades of restless collaboration, spiritual inquiry, and stylistic openness, Lloyd has consistently pursued music as a means of communion. He has never treated genre as a boundary or tradition as a museum. Instead, he has approached sound as a living archive, one in which no music is ever truly lost once it has been made.

Love Longing Loss does not conclude with resolution. It offers no summation of a life, no closing statement on art in a time of crisis. What it leaves us with instead is a question that feels both ancient and urgent. If music is indeed the biographical record of all who came before, what responsibility do we bear as listeners and makers within that record? Lloyd speaks of swimming away with his stories and his ancestors, an image that suggests movement without escape, continuity without stasis. The film ends in that current, inviting us to consider how we, too, might learn to listen for what persists beneath the noise, and how we might honor the voices that sound through us even when we believe we are alone.

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.

Dine Doneff: Nostos

| Tyran Grillo

Dine Doneff double bass, percussion, lute, classical guitar, tambura, voice
Takis Farazis piano, accordion, voice
Sokratis Sinopoulos lyra
Dimos Dimitriadis flute, saxophone
Dany Hayes trumpet
Melina Kana voice
Maria Thoidou voice
Takis Kanelos drums
Manos Achalinotopoulos clarinet
Dimitris Chalkias clarinet
Dimitris Christidis trumpet
Nikos Kollias Tantsis trombone
Pantelis Benetatos piano
Nikos Sidirokastritis drums
Michalis Siganidis double bass
Recording Engineer: Yannis Tsambazis
Polytropon Studio, Thessaloniki – November 1995
Dany Hayes was recorded in Silverbold Studios, New York (1996)
Work Arranger: Dine Doneff
Cover: Fotini Potamia
Mastering: Chris Hadjistamou, Athens Mastering
First release by LYRA (Athens) June 1999
Producer: Dine Doneff

Nostos marks the opening chapter in a trilogy that has since come to define the mature voice of multi-instrumentalist and composer Dine Doneff. First released in 1999 on the Athens-based LYRA label and later rehomed by Doneff’s own neRED imprint, it is a recording that reveals more of itself with each return. Its thematic concerns, tonal palette, and ethical orientation radiate forward through Rousilvo and culminate in Doudoule. In hindsight, this debut installment feels less like a preface than a generative source.

Its title announces the central concept of return, understood not simply as physical homecoming but as a confrontation with memory, loss, and belonging. Doneff shapes this idea across two broad arcs spanning nine pieces, tracing a passage from encounter to separation and from outward motion toward interior reckoning. In doing so, the recording situates itself within the continuum of world music not as a stylistic mosaic but as a lived conversation, where Balkan, Eastern Mediterranean, jazz, and modal traditions coexist without hierarchy or pastiche.

The opening sequence begins with a spare invocation. A solitary lute establishes an atmosphere of distance and ancestry, carrying a gravity that binds the personal to the collective. From this threshold emerges an intimate convergence of timbres rather than a declarative statement. Doneff’s percussion entwines with the lyra of Sokratis Sinopoulos, while Takis Farazis’s piano follows a parallel route, at times aligning, at times drifting away. Melina Kana’s wordless vocal presence introduces warmth without tethering expression to language. What surfaces here is not certainty, but a shared willingness to move together even as divergence remains inevitable.

As the record broadens, its physical presence becomes more pronounced. Rhythms drawn from tabla and hand percussion root the sound in bodily motion, while winds and brass stretch the frame outward. The flute of Dimos Dimitriadis and the trumpet of Dany Hayes sweep across a textured accordion field shaped by Farazis, until abstraction gives way to something tactile and immediate. The audible stamp of Doneff’s boots on the studio floor, joined by voices and clapping, anchors the performance in lived space. This is tradition not preserved in frame, but reanimated through breath, movement, and communal energy.

That sense of shared experience crests in the dance-centered passages. Supported by Doneff alongside drummer Takis Kanelos, a gathering of horns and reeds conjures a celebration that feels simultaneously rooted and unbounded. Dimitriadis on saxophone and Manos Achalinotopoulos on clarinet take spirited turns as extensions of a collective pulse.

As expected, the trajectory turns toward parting. The midpoint recognizes separation as a necessary counterbalance to union. When the latter half of the program begins, attention shifts inward. With Nikos Sidirokastritis on drums and Doneff on bass, restraint and equilibrium come to the fore, favoring coexistence over confrontation. The ensuing voyage unfolds with patience, introduced by a fragile, minor-key piano figure. Brass and saxophone gain strength through persistence rather than force, their lines etched like accumulated experience into the terrain. Farazis’s solo, supported by Sidirokastritis’s tactile rhythmic foundation, arrives with a sense of earned reflection.

The closing stretch resists easy resolution. Interlaced basses, voice, piano, and accordion form a slow, shadowed progression that edges toward closure even as it slips away. Maria Thoidou’s vocal presence hovers between lament and affirmation, acknowledging that return is never a simple reversal. What follows is an uncertain space where meaning remains unsettled.

The final gesture stands alone, with Farazis at the piano. In a brief span, the closing piece compresses entire lives into touch and resonance. It suggests solitude without despair, remembrance without sentimentality. If Nostos offers a lesson, it is that return does not restore what has vanished, nor does it annul distance traveled. Instead, it proposes a way of carrying lived experience forward.

Within the wider terrain of world music, Nostos already signals Doneff’s refusal to exoticize tradition or flatten difference. His evolution as a composer and performer begins here with an ethic of attention, treating sound as a site of encounter rather than assertion. The recording does not argue for unity as sameness or identity as enclosure. It gestures toward something quieter and more enduring: that belonging is shaped through movement, through departure as much as arrival, and through the humility to return altered. In that sense, Nostos remains deliberately open-ended, continuing to resonate wherever listeners recognize themselves in its unfolding path.

Dine Doneff: Roden Voden (neRED/6)

| Tyran Grillo

Dine Doneff double bass, guitar, mandola, tambura, piano, organ, percussion, and tapes
Kyriakos Gouventas violin on “Flow”
Main corpus of recordings: MK Studio, Munich
Müncher Kammerspiele – December 29, 2018
Engineer: Johann Jürgen Koch
Additional recordings: Vertekop Studio – 2019
Engineer: Pande Noushin
Mixed and edited by Dine Doneff
Domagk Cell 27, Munich – May 2025
Mastering: Christoph Stickel
Cover artwork: Fotini Potamia
Produced by Dine Doneff

We Macedonians
will not live in fear
The time will come,
and we’ll sing
our old song, again.

Those lines run through Roden Voden like roots growing in the earth. They function neither as a slogan nor as a promise easily fulfilled, sounding instead as something learned under pressure, after history has already exacted its toll. In this sense, Dine Doneff’s concluding chapter in a trilogy that began with Nostos in 1995 and continued through Rousilvo in 2004 does not simply present music. It stages a reckoning. The album listens backward into time, gathering voices recorded between 1991 and 2009 in Rousilvo, Ostrovo, Ts’rnessovo, and Voden, Greece, and carries them forward into the present, where memory, erasure, and survival collide.

Macedonia’s modern history is marked by fragmentation, forced silences, renamings, and borders drawn without regard for the lives lived along them. Languages were pressured into retreat. Songs were sung quietly, or only at home, if at all. Roden Voden treats these conditions as active forces shaping every sound. Doneff’s original compositions do not dominate the archival material. They surround it, support it, and sometimes unsettle it, as though the music itself were asking how an inheritance scarred by violence can be carried without being embalmed.

The album opens its first vocal threshold with “Spell,” voiced and written by Vane Indiff (b. 1944). The poem abandons narrative in favor of invocation. Natural forces, measures of time, mythic presences, and ancestral peoples accumulate in a relentless cadence that feels closer to ritual than to verse. Language becomes a circle drawn to awaken a world that has been dispersed. The poem does not describe resurrection. It attempts it, using repetition and breath as tools of release.

Such ritual gravity strengthens with “Zhalaj me Majko,” sung by Slava Pop’va (b. 1927). This folk song unfolds as a quiet lament shaped by exile and unspoken longing. Its melody lilts and never fully settles, searching for reassurance of love in a land that does not recognize her. Addressed to a distant mother, the song carries the weight of a year spent loving in silence. Devotion here is intense but unseen, and by the final lines, it is no longer an emotion but a fatal condition. What remains is a spare, devastating cry that transforms private despair into communal mourning.

“Kirka,” another text by Indiff, fractures time and meaning even further. The poem constructs its logic from color, the everyday, and the body rather than from a story. An almost childlike order is established before being obliterated by the abrupt fact of death as the self is reduced to wood, fire, and branches. Innocence and physicality collide without romanticism. Loss is rendered through disjointed fragments that resist consolation, insisting instead on the rawness of what remains.

Collective tragedy takes center stage in “Dve Tri Poushki,” rendered by Neshka Ts’rnessova (b. 1925). The song distills catastrophe into stark repetition. Rifles are counted. Fallen youths are counted. Grieving mothers are counted. Loss is now the only measure, allowing the song to move from sudden violence toward an enduring lament that binds faith and pain.

The political heart of the album asserts itself most directly in “Censored Memory,” to which Doneff contributes percussion, strings, and a poem in Greek. At the center lies “Oj Lele Brate mi Tane,” a song about Tane Stojchev Kljandzev (1874-1907) from Gornitschevo, leader of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation in Lerin (Florina). Memory here is not merely fragile. It is actively suppressed. By layering languages, voices, and historical reference, the track refuses singular authority and exposes history as something perpetually contested, shaped as much by silence as by speech.

“Nubeti” returns to the terrain of intimate loss. The folk song that follows unfolds as a dialogue between generations. A young widow carries her wedding crown as a relic of happiness interrupted. The mother speaks in the cadence of continuity and social expectation, while the daughter rejects comfort, insisting on the singularity of her grief. Survival and fidelity are placed in quiet opposition, and the song refuses to resolve the tension between them.

“Prikazni” unfolds as a dense, dreamlike collage where landscape, memory, and lament bleed into one another. Mountains, lakes, and weather respond like wounded witnesses to human violence and erasure. Personal cries of love and death interrupt the natural imagery, giving way again to familial grief and village memory. The verses move by emotional association rather than linear sense, capturing a world fractured by loss, where love, labor, war, and dispossession sound together for both the living and the dead.

“Narrative” gathers three texts into a single arc. “Stojna,” voiced by Stojan Gjorgiff (b. 1913), compresses catastrophe into a stark moral tableau where reproach and irreversible action collide in a single breath. Its restraint leaves the listener suspended in an unresolved aftermath. “Stara Panoukla,” sung by T’rpa Tanva Noushna (b. 1905), begins with pastoral tenderness before revealing a plague disguised as an old woman, death entering through the most ordinary gestures. “Dzemo,” sung by Tome Bojn (b. 1929), recounts the revenge killing of Dzhemail Aga, grounding historical violence in personal memory and inherited grievance. Together, these songs demonstrate how folk tradition carries ethics, fear, and justice as lived knowledge.

Threaded between these exhalations are extended wordless spaces where Doneff’s instrumental pieces function as corridors between testimonies. “Flow” opens this terrain with a radiant spread of piano, laying out a landscape where the living and the dead move together. Mandola and tombak provide traction, while a violin lifts memory skyward toward something unforgotten. “Prism” refracts emotion into color, turning sound into touch, a moment of fragile wonder. “Monologue,” an arco double bass solo, is a meditation on loss already named, allowing sorrow to resonate and slowly quiet. “Ghosts of Freedom” lingers with spectral patience, giving shape to implications too heavy for words. “Meglen” serves as connective tissue, bass and percussion sketching a passage rather than a destination. The title track itself emerges from ambient sounds recorded at the cemetery of Rousilvo, dissolving the boundary between presence and absence. “Ni Tvoj Ni Moj,” also rendered via the bow, strips a traditional ballad to its emotional bone. “Pepel” closes the album with classical guitar, light percussion, and the sound of locals speaking bilingually in Macedonian and Greek about atrocities suffered in Edessa Voden during the late 1940s. These unpolished voices do not seek resolution. They exist as ash does, settled, persistent, unavoidable.

Roden Voden matters because it refuses to let history become abstraction. These recordings are not artifacts sealed behind glass. They breathe, falter, contradict, and endure. By interweaving them with contemporary composition, Doneff does not attempt to heal the past. The album suggests that remembrance is not about closure or reclaiming a pure origin. It is about staying with what is difficult, listening without impatience, and recognizing that perseverance often sounds like an unfinished song. In the end, the album does not ask us to remember more clearly but more honestly and to accept that even in fear, even in silence, the old song awaits.

Dine Doneff: Doudoule (neRED/5)

| Tyran Grillo

Tom Arthurs trumpet
Antonis Anissegos piano, prepared piano
Stamatis Pasopoulos bayan
Dine Doneff double bass, guitar, percussion, vocals
Recorded live at Stadtkirche, Rudolstadt
July 6, 2014
Editing: Tome Rapovina
Mastering: Kostas Kontos
Cover/Design: Fotini Potamia
Produced by Dine Doneff

Doudoule begins as a quiet act of assembly, four distinct presences finding one another in real time. Dine Doneff’s bass sets the initial pulse, opening space rather than filling it. Tom Arthurs’ trumpet waits, listening before speaking, attentive to what is already forming around him. Antonis Anissegos approaches from another angle, his piano ready to shift the ground beneath with a single chord or sudden flight. Stamatis Pasopoulos completes the circle with the bayan, an instrument that breathes history and air into the room. Together, they sound less like a band stepping onstage than a conversation already underway, one the listener joins midway, aware that something patient, communal, and deeply human is about to unfold.

“Faces” opens the path. The bass speaks first, soft yet resolute, shaping a malleable mood. It carries light and shade together, suggesting that resolution and doubt are not opposites but companions. Piano chords appear as careful steps across uncertain terrain, each one placed with trust. When the trumpet finally enters, it does so without force, a gradual illumination rather than a flare. The bayan stirs, completing a scene that feels rural and inward, as if fields and sky were meeting inside the music. Nothing fully resolves. The clouds linger at the edges, a reminder of unfinished thoughts and unarticulated concerns. Anissegos’s piano moves between closeness and distance, shifting the listener’s vantage point again and again, teaching us how easily perspective can change without warning.

“Meglen” follows with a different posture. The bass intro here is more angular, almost architectural, yet it breathes freely, allowing swing to bend its lines. From this foundation, a broad and generous theme blooms. The quartet sounds fully assembled now. The trumpet rises with clarity and calm assurance, drawing the listener into a melodic current that feels warming and protective. There is a sense of shelter in this piece, of sound offered as refuge during a cold season. The group’s union becomes palpable, each instrument reinforcing the others without obscuring their character.

The title track moves the goal post once more. It opens playfully, the bass again leading, but this time with a more elastic, inviting tone. Rhythm loosens its grip, allowing the bayan and piano to dance into view. The music becomes communal and animated, buoyed by chant-like vocalizations. There is joy here, but it is grounded rather than ecstatic. Arthurs takes flight above the rhythm, yet never loses contact with what lies below. His trumpet feels like a collective voice lifted skyward. Form and feeling intertwine so closely that they become indistinguishable.

With “Rite of Passage,” the album turns inward. Bass and bayan blend into a more somber hue, their lines tinged with reflection and quiet gravity. A dialogue emerges between bass and trumpet, intimate and exposed, as if the music were speaking directly to its own origins. This exchange reaches toward something essential in Doneff’s musical ethos, a belief in honesty over ornament, in vulnerability as strength. The piece then transforms, slipping into a dreamlike terrain shaped by prepared piano and percussive textures. The familiar dissolves, and what remains is a sense of standing between what has been known and what has yet to take shape.

Last is “Prolet,” where the surreal elements continue to expand before slowly converging. Themes gather as if guided by an unseen gravity, aligning themselves into a closing statement that feels earned rather than imposed. Doneff’s guitar and subtle percussion trace fleeting highlights through the texture, like sunlight catching on distant landscapes glimpsed in sleep. These sounds do not point backward so much as outward, toward places imagined and possibilities still forming.

In its final moments, Doudoule resists the temptation to summarize itself. Instead, it opens a quiet question: How does a shared journey reshape those who walk it together? The music suggests that meaning is found in the very act of listening, in remaining attentive to change and to one another. As the last tones fade, what lingers is awareness, a sense that the path continues beyond the performance, carried forward in memory and in the next act of collective creation.

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.

Masabumi Kikuchi: Hanamichi – The Final Recording Vol. II

| Tyran Grillo

Red Hook Records began its journey with pianist Masabumi Kikuchi’s final studio recording, and now, for the label’s eighth release, we are given more of a revelation than a sequel. If that first album was a door half open, this one is the room beyond it: dimly lit, shadows stretching toward us with quiet familiarity. Drawn from the same December 2013 sessions, these seven tracks seem to have steeped longer in the vessels of memory and time. They arrive seasoned by the sort of emotional oxidation that turns recollection into something rarer and more useful. If saving the best for last were a novel, then this album would not simply be the final chapter; it would be the codex hidden in the spine, the annotation that changes the tone of everything preceding it.

The standards here were formative ones in Kikuchi’s student days, and he approaches them as an elder returning to the foundational texts of his own becoming. They are less songs than mirrors that have aged with him, warped by years of touching, of looking, and of looking away.

“Manhã de Carnaval,” for instance, unfolds as a dream freshly slipped from its cocoon. Kikuchi walks tenderly across its terrain, each step testing the integrity of a world that seems to be forming beneath him even as he treads it. There is the sense of waking from a coma, unsure of what has changed most: the world outside, or the one within. As he coaxes the theme into coherence, it resembles memory grafting itself onto the present. Notes reach upward as fingertips toward a moon that has watched over him for decades, asking silent questions about the knots forming in the threads of existence below.

This pathos is his signature, and it reveals itself early, already pulsing under the surface of “Alone Together,” in which confidence is not announced but revealed slowly, the way a photograph emerges through chemical baths. Kikuchi does not so much play the tune as breathe through it. By the time we arrive at “I Loves You, Porgy,” the emotional stakes have deepened. The opening chords blush across time as if receiving a first kiss from a future that will never fully arrive. He settles into its changes with a kind of practiced vulnerability, proving that tenderness need not be fragile. His quietude carries drama the way a lantern carries flame, not ostentatiously but with an understanding of its purpose.

“My Ship” drifts into view as if slowed by the gravitational pull of recollection. Time is not a river but a weight, and living requires the steady muscle of acceptance. The ship does not simply approach; it gathers the currents of decades, reminding us that history is not always something the world gives us but grows in the chambers of the heart.

Faro-shuffled into these standards are three improvisations, astonishing in their immediacy and yet strangely timeless. As Ben Ratliff so beautifully puts it in his liner notes, they “can sound like instant ballads from another planet,” and together they form a kind of secret autobiography, spoken in a language only the subconscious fully understands. The first of them, “Improvisation II,” opens the door with a dark playfulness, as though Kikuchi were tugging at the piano’s hidden wiring, testing where resistance might give way to confession. What at first sounds abstract begins to gather logic the longer one listens. In “Improvisation III,” the music flips itself inside out. Small fragments swell into whole lifetimes, while emotional atoms compress into diamonds of feeling that shimmer before being tossed into the river of time. “Improvisation IV” climbs stairways within stairways, each gesture reaching for a rung made of breath and hesitation. A rhythm struggles to be born, faltering yet fiercely sane, as though meaning rises from the very fractures that threaten to undo it.

What is ultimately astonishing about this album is that it never feels tired or cynical, never weighted by the knowledge that these would be among his final recorded breaths. Instead, it is a witness: someone channeling truth in the moment, as though the body knows something that words and plans and even melodies cannot fully grasp. This is not farewell music. It is presence music, created by a human being who understands that honesty requires discipline.

To listen to this album is to feel the pulse of time through someone else’s fingertips, understanding at last that the deepest truths are not contained in beginnings or endings, but in the trembling line that connects them. In these tender and fractured meditations, Kikuchi offers not closure but permeability. The circle remains open, as all living circles do, inviting us to step through and find ourselves changed on the other side. Artistic life begins where the tape stops.

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.

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.