Jazz

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

| Tyran Grillo

Julia Hülsmann Octet
While I Was Away

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Roberto Masotti: Keith Jarrett – A Portrait

| Tyran Grillo

Italian photographer Roberto Masotti (1947-2022) was among the most perceptive visual chroniclers of modern music, a figure whose work shaped the sensibility of ECM Records. His photographs graced nearly two hundred covers and booklets for the label, forming a parallel archive to the music itself. From the austere radiance of Officium to the quietly arresting portrait of John Cage that frames Herbert Henck’s recording of the composer’s early piano works, Masotti played a role in defining how this music would be seen, approached, and remembered. He was not merely a documentarian of studio sessions but a devoted listener whose camera functioned as a secondary instrument, tuned to the inner heartbeat of performance. Nowhere is this fusion of attention more evident than in Keith Jarrett: A Portrait, a volume that reads less as a record of appearances than as an extended act of listening rendered visible.

Masotti’s own words illuminate his method with uncommon clarity. “In this series of photographs that I observe with a retrospective gaze,” he writes, “I play with the concept of presence, that one of the body and the one of the instrument, which appear and disappear in the image.” He speaks not of capture but of exchange, of an intimacy grounded in restraint. These photographs arise from what he calls an “objective attention” shaped by long admiration, yet they are equally the result of Jarrett’s conscious acceptance and active participation. The images are thus collaborative in spirit, not imposed from without but allowed to unfold through mutual recognition. What remains is an archive that resonates with sound even in silence.

To move through the sequence so carefully composed in this book is to encounter a photographer who understands that an artist such as Jarrett cannot be approached through biography or chronology alone. Masotti storytells through a mode of looking that resembles ritual, one without a prescribed outcome, sustained only by attention. For him, photography does not consist of isolated instants but of moments, a distinction that carries ethical weight. Within a moment, an entire accumulation of experience can register itself through posture, gesture, or stillness. This understanding leads naturally to a deeper inquiry: what, after all, constitutes a portrait?

In Masotti’s hands, the portrait ceases to be an act of description. It becomes a site of encounter where identity is neither fixed nor fully disclosed. A portrait does not declare who its subject is; it asks how presence manifests, and under what conditions it withdraws. In this sense, the portrait is not a mirror but a threshold. It holds open the possibility that what is most essential about a person may resist total visibility. Masotti seems keenly aware of this tension. He recognizes the value of distance, of knowing when not to press closer, of allowing the subject’s aura to assemble itself without the insistence of the lens. This discipline is inseparable from his deep admiration for Jarrett, an admiration rooted not in fandom but in experiential listening. He does not set out to check off the pianist’s achievements so much as to dwell within their unfolding.

It was through Jarrett, in fact, that Masotti first came into ECM Records’ orbit. At the pianist’s recommendation, he traveled to Munich in 1973 to present a photo shoot to producer Manfred Eicher. The encounter proved decisive. The images were received enthusiastically and would soon be incorporated into the Bremen/Lausanne release of that same year, marking the beginning of a collaboration that would shape the label’s visual identity for decades to come.

Jarrett’s well-known sensitivity to distraction during performance posed a particular challenge. To photograph him in action required not only technical skill but a form of empathy calibrated to the moment. Masotti met this challenge with a chameleonic tact, adapting himself to the environment rather than imposing upon it. The resulting images often unfold in a montage that feels almost cinematic, though they never lapse into spectacle. Their power lies in continuity, in the quiet accumulation of gestures and expressions that suggest movement beyond the frame.

1971, Miles Davis Group, Philarmonie di Berlino
1973, Monaco di Baviera, America Haus, soundcheck
1974, Pescara, Jazz Festival
1999, Verona, Arena, Jazz Festival, with Manfred Eicher
2002, Lucca, Summer Festival

Taken together, the images chart Jarrett’s evolution from a fiercely expressive sideman in the orbit of Miles Davis to an increasingly enigmatic figure, and finally to a singular presence in solo improvisation. Yet the photographs resist narrative closure. They do not resolve into a story so much as a constellation of states. Among them, one image stands apart. It is the second one above, where Jarrett’s face appears refracted in soft color, suspended between clarity and dissolution. Masotti, a photographer of formidable technical command, rarely indulged in overt manipulation. Here, however, he allows the image to drift toward the spectral. The effect is restrained yet profound. It touches something central to Jarrett’s music, its simultaneous rootedness in the physical act of playing and its persistent reaching beyond the self. The photograph carries within it a residue of sound, an afterimage of music that seems to hover just beyond reach.

Keith Jarrett: A Portrait proposes a way of seeing that honors absence as much as presence. Masotti reminds us that the deepest forms of attention do not seek to possess their subject. They remain open, patient, and receptive. The book closes with a quiet suspension between composition and improvisation, as though the music has not ended but simply moved elsewhere. In that lingering space, photographer and musician meet on equal terms, each attentive to the other, and to the fragile, enduring moment they share.

Björn Meyer: Convergence (ECM 2844)

| Tyran Grillo

Björn Meyer
Convergence

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alessandro Sgobbio: Piano Music 3

| Tyran Grillo

To say that Piano Music 3 continues where Alessandro Sgobbio left off on Piano Music 2 would be misleading, since this record feels less a step forward than a careful turning back toward the source, a reversal that reveals new truths by retracing old paths. The electronics remain, but rather than projecting momentum they seem to seep inward, extracting hidden ligaments from the piano’s body and letting them fall gently into the past. In “De Dei Dono,” barely discernible voices hover at the threshold of language, murmuring reminders that intention and consequence are often separated by a breath, that meaning arrives only after action has already passed. This dissolves seamlessly into the fragile radiance of “Red Gold,” an acoustic meditation whose quiet grandeur carries the weight of countless unnamed lives, each one lifted briefly from the archive of history and consigned to its fire, not to be erased but transmuted. “Echoes” reopens the digital aperture, arranging time with almost devotional care, as if memory itself were being sorted and polished in a dream. When the world outside feels uninhabitable, the music invites retreat into an interior sanctuary where despair still sings and hope persists despite knowing better, each phrase reaching upward while slowly collapsing. Within this tension, “Dogs On 5th Avenue” arrives with startling clarity, a cinematic reverie steeped in nostalgia that gestures toward a vanished geography preserved only on fragile film. Each return to it wears away more detail, faces softening into abstraction, footsteps advancing with quiet resolve while already suspecting the promise of arrival. As “Dawns (صور)” unfurls, beauty and grief become inseparable, and the act of listening feels perilously close to mourning, an unguarded response to the daily violence done to faith and empathy by a world addicted to fear. In such a climate, music offers not escape but a rare form of repair. “Veils” draws the self inward with measured grace, its flowing arpeggios and subtle electronic pulses converging into something revelatory, shedding concealment rather than enforcing it, blooming into nocturnal tenderness and the possibility of love. “Forte Rocca,” Sgobbio’s reimagining of Martin Luther’s “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” speaks with austere urgency, reframing the piano as a structure of shelter and resistance. At last, “Alang” advances carefully into first light, bearing the quiet residue of what has been lost so that something else may endure, leaving the listener suspended between fragility and resolve, uncertain yet unwilling to surrender the hope that survival itself can still be an act of grace.

Alessandro Sgobbio: Piano Music 2

| Tyran Grillo

After the intimate unveiling of Piano Music, Alessandro Sgobbio returns to place his instrument’s confessional power in a wider field of air and signal. This new work feels like a continuation of the same diary, only now the pages have been left open by a window. Live electronics enter not as ornament or distraction but as a means of listening more deeply. They clarify rather than obscure, giving the emotional truths at hand a longer reach, a resonance that lingers beyond the touch of the keys. What emerges is music that invites the listener to sit with it, inhabit its spaces, and recognize healing as slow, attentive, and unfinished.

From the outset, the album announces itself as a journey. “Keys And Returns” drifts with a sense of cautious freedom, as if learning to trust its own motion again. The surrounding sounds resemble nocturnal life, insects and birds rendered as soft static, not imitations of nature but its memory. These textures frame longer shadows, suggesting movement without urgency. It is the first step outside after a long confinement, when the world is still strange and full of promise.

That sense of tentative grace deepens in “Modular Circles,” where time itself seems to loosen its grip. Here, the added layers feel inseparable from the instrument’s inner life, as if dreaming aloud. Reflections wobble gently, disturbed just enough to remind us that memory is never still. Through subtle live manipulations, Sgobbio traces the outlines of absence and presence, ghosts that do not haunt so much as accompany. There is urgency, but it is the urgency of care, of knowing that attention itself is an ethical act.

Healing takes the form of water in “The River,” which salves a wound trembling in the night air. The music flows inward before opening outward, carrying introspection toward release, bearing the promise of another morning. It is not triumph that is offered here, but continuity. The simple assurance that movement, however gentle, is still movement.

Moments of restraint are equally vital. “Fondamenta De La Tana,” stripped of digital decoration, arrives like a hymn. Its solitude feels intentional, a reminder that healing also requires silence and unadorned speech. “Tula” follows with similar tenderness, notes hovering in reverie while distant traces flutter at the edges, as if the world were listening back. These pieces do not interrupt the album’s arc but ground it, reinforcing that the electronics are a choice among many ways of speaking.

The twin invocations of “Asker” feel like messages transmitted across thresholds. In “Asker (Light),” distant signals glow with the promise of peace earned through endurance. It acknowledges hardship without sanctification, offering instead a fragile hope that gives direction to wandering. Later, in “Asker (Trees),” that dialogue becomes almost conversational. Echoes are transformed into melodies, and melodies into the possibility of renewal.

“Îlot Chalon” briefly unsettles the calm, pairing pulsing undercurrents with a lyrical surface. Distortion presses upward, threatening to fracture the flow, yet beauty prevails, not by force but by persistence. It is a reminder that conflict is not foreign to healing, but part of its texture. The album closes with “Einhausung,” a fleeting moment of intimacy that feels like a hand resting on the shoulder. Nothing is resolved, yet everything is held.

Throughout, Sgobbio’s care is evident in every note and every silence. These are not performances designed to impress; they are reflections offered with humility. The electronics never cloud the piano’s voice but instead sharpen its emotional lucidity, extending feeling into space where it can be shared. By the end, the listener is handed something more generous than closure: time.

Craig Taborn/Tomeka Reid/Ches Smith: Dream Archives (ECM 2833)

| Tyran Grillo

Craig Taborn
Tomeka Reid
Ches Smith
Dream Archives

Craig Taborn piano, keyboard, electronics
Tomeka Reid violoncello
Ches Smith drums, vibraphone, percussion, electronics
Recorded January 2024
Firehouse 12, New Haven
Engineer: Nick Lloyd
Mixed by Craig Taborn, Manfred Eicher, and Michael Hinreiner (engineer)
Bavaria Musikstudios, München, July 2025
Cover photo: Thomas Wunsch
Album produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: January 16, 2026

After beguiling audiences during their 2025 German tour in anticipation of the album at hand, pianist Craig Taborn, cellist Tomeka Reid, and percussionist Ches Smith align their trio for ECM’s first release of 2026. The title, Dream Archives, frames the music in the most charming of contradictions. Does it propose a vault where dreams can be stored, catalogued, and retrieved at will, filed away under emotional subject headings? Or does it imply that dreams themselves function as archives, containing versions of ourselves we would never dare to perform while awake? The answer seems to flicker between both states, never settling, always indexing something just out of reach.
 
The opening lines of “Coordinates For The Absent” lean toward the former interpretation through their careful laying down of intent. Subtle electronic signals hang in the air, suspended as if awaiting authorization, and the piece offers itself as a puzzle box of possibility, one that opens only when the correct sequence of ambient gestures is entered. Each removal reveals another chamber until a nexus of musicianship appears that feels parthenogenetic. What unfolds is a system waking up, blinking itself into awareness.
 
From this tender pile of ashes rises “Feeding Maps To The Fire,” a phoenix song rendered with turn-on-a-dime precision and lightning-fast cognition. Reid circles the square, squaring the circle even, granting Taborn and Smith a territory they can claim equally with hands and feet. Her transitions from declaration to sublimation arrive with uncanny grace, functioning as a single conductive wire of intention that transmits thought across the studio in real time. Direction is fed directly into combustion here, and nothing burns without learning something new about its own heat.
 
“Dream Archive” opens with Smith on vibraphone doubling Taborn while Reid recalibrates the internal circuitry with a quiet furiosity that hums beneath the surface. Some of the session’s most intimate connections are forged in this space. An intelligent system comes online, discovering its cellular reality one line of musical code at a time. Still, the music never forgets the hand that writes the algorithm. There is a constant searching for connections that only breath, skin, and intention can provide. Motifs bend themselves into a twisted ballad before being pushed off a cliff, tumbling across jagged terrain, landing improbably intact, scuffed but smiling.
 
“Enchant” turns the night sky inside out and offers it as a writable surface, a palimpsest of the heart rendered in constellation and groove. Reid’s ostinato summons further digital traces, as though the hairs of her bow were the threads to which these signals cling, pulled magnetically toward a pulse that knows how to moonwalk away from expectation.
 
Set within this sea of Taborn originals are pieces by two of his guiding lights. Geri Allen’s “When Kabuya Dances” blossoms with the utmost delicacy, unfolding as a textile woven from shadow and intention. It searches for illumination in Taborn’s pianism and finds it as Reid and Smith combine their energies into ground, horizon, and sky. A stomping denouement introduces phenomenally geometric trio work, Reid on pizzicato assuming the role of bassist while Smith’s drumming speaks in joyful, articulated angles. The music smiles openly here, happiness not hinted at but announced, stamped, and joyfully notarized.
 
Paul Motian’s “Mumbo Jumbo” continues that spirit of play, revealing a compositional singularity in which Taborn clearly recognizes a kindred mind. Its angular melody opens the door to some of the trio’s most delicately adventurous exchanges. The tune carries a faint echo of Tchaikovsky’s “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy,” refracted through beat poetry, stripped of words, and filtered back into breath and wood and skin. Smith’s use of gong and timpani lends a ceremonial grandeur that never tips into pretension, offering Reid a tender surface upon which to draw her confident, decisive lines.
 
Ultimately, the dreamlike quality of Dream Archives does not arise from its unpredictability, nor from the way it renders the surreal inevitable. It emerges instead from the album’s theatrical intelligence. These performances understand that dreaming is an act, one that requires commitment, timing, and a willingness to forget oneself mid-gesture. The trio performs with the concentration of method actors who never break character because the character is the moment itself. In doing so, they blur the line between performer and listener, pulling us into their private syntax of meaning.
 
By the album’s close, the archive no longer feels like a place of storage but a living institution, one that rewrites itself each time it is entered. The dreams here are not preserved so much as rehearsed, practiced until they become fluent. When the final notes fade, it feels less as though the music has ended than as though we have woken up holding fragments we cannot fully explain. These are the kinds of dreams that follow you into daylight, that annotate your memory without permission, that insist on being remembered even as they refuse full recall. In that sense, we are reminded of how to keep dreaming with our eyes open, filing experience under wonder, and leaving the cabinet unlocked.

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.