Jazz

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.

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

| Tyran Grillo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John Scofield/Dave Holland: Memories of Home (ECM 2860)

| Tyran Grillo

John Scofield
Dave Holland
Memories of Home

John Scofield guitar
Dave Holland double bass
Recorded August 2024 at NRS Recording Studio, Catskill NY
Engineer: Scott Petito
Cover photo: Juan Hitters
Produced by Dave Holland and John Scofield
Release date: November 21, 2025

Guitarist John Scofield and bassist Dave Holland, two musicians with such distinct sonic identities, join forces for a duo album that is as mighty as it is intimate. Despite having crossed paths countless times over the decades, whether onstage with giants like Herbie Hancock and Joe Henderson or in high-octane settings like ScoLoHoFo, Memories of Home marks their first album as a duo.

The idea had lingered for years, even surviving a pandemic-scrapped tour in 2020. When they finally hit the road in late 2021, the chemistry was immediate. By the time they toured again in 2024, making a record felt inevitable. The result mirrors their live sets with its blend of new and revisited originals shaped by decades of shared musical language. Their overlap in taste and technique makes the pairing feel natural, while their differences keep the music alive, alert, and constantly evolving.

A major point of connection, of course, is Miles Davis. Scofield’s mid-80s stint and Holland’s late-60s tenure offer a rare shared lineage, and you hear echoes of that history right away in the opener, “Icons at the Fair.” Built from the chord movement of Herbie Hancock’s version of “Scarborough Fair” (a session both musicians played on), the tune’s wistful intro quickly settles into a buoyant groove. Scofield’s rounded tone is an elegant vehicle for his improvisational flights, and the two musicians trade roles like seasoned copilots, each taking the lead before easing back into support. Holland’s solo radiates that trademark close-eyed smile, matching Scofield’s buoyancy beat for beat.

Scofield revisits several of his own classics here, each transformed by the duo format. “Meant to Be” adopts a darker hue than its earlier incarnations, its fluid changes and easy-living feel revealing two players fully at ease with themselves and each other. Holland pulls his solo seamlessly from the texture, almost as if it had been hiding there the whole time. Later, “Mine Are Blues” brings their full energies to the forefront. The drive is infectious, with the pair finishing each other’s phrases in a display of rhythmic and melodic telepathy. Scofield’s crunchy, tactile tone is on point. “Memorette,” swankier and more rhythmically playful, finds a lovely twang in the guitar and Holland sounding lush and resonant beneath it all.

Holland contributes several reimagined pieces from earlier in his career. “Mr. B,” his tribute to Ray Brown, brings out a delicate, cerebral side of Scofield, who responds to Holland’s writing with gorgeous restraint and curiosity. “Not for Nothin’,” first heard on Holland’s 2001 quintet album of the same name, reveals new secrets when reduced to its essentials. Here, the tune becomes lightning in a bottle—lean, open, and unexpectedly adventurous. Scofield seems newly inspired by the stripped-down setting, exploring bolder shapes and touches of abstraction.

The guitarist’s ballad “Easy for You” emerges as a quiet triumph that carries a gentle energy and a deep love for life. At over eight minutes, it gives both players space to breathe, to stretch, and to enjoy the subtleties of their wholesome interplay.

The album closes with two Holland compositions. “You I Love” is a vivacious romp, brimming with delight, while the contemplative, pastoral mood of the title track draws out the earthy, country-tinged side of Scofield’s playing. Like ending credits to a Western, it rides off slowly, tracing the silhouette of a hero dissolving into sunset. It’s both a musical farewell and a gentle summation of everything the duo shares.

Mal Waldron: Free At Last (Vinyl Reissue)

| Tyran Grillo

“I feel if you look back too much,
you trip when you take a step forward.”
–Mal Waldron

Although Mal Waldron began his career in jazz as an alto saxophonist, playing in the long, tapering shadow of Charlie Parker, fate would soon guide him back to the keyboard. The piano was, for him, not just an instrument but a resonant vessel sailing in the tempests and calms of his cross-hatched personality. His classical training gave him a compass; his improvisational instincts supplied the wind. A prolific writer of tunes—angular yet melodic, pensive yet full of forward motion—he became an indispensable sideman to the luminaries of his era, including John Coltrane, Art Farmer, Jackie McLean, and, above all, Billie Holiday, with whom he shared a natural rapport. Their collaborations seemed to hover between worlds—her voice the smoke, his chords the fire.

But every light casts its own darkness. Waldron’s journey was interrupted by a nervous breakdown that landed him in the hospital. And then, at his seeming lowest point, when he was invited to Paris to score a film. It was more than a job; it was a turning point, a new way of listening. Each city he touched thereafter—from Bologna to Cologne and, ultimately, Munich—became another note in the unfolding score of his reinvention. By 1967, he had settled in Munich. Along the way, he crossed paths with Swiss bassist Isla Eckinger and drummer Clarence Becton, another American expatriate whose trajectory brought him across the pond into a music scene unlike any other.

Free At Last, a title that feels both biographical and prophetic, ended up being one of three studio recordings Waldron made with ECM’s founder, Manfred Eicher, the others being The Call (JAPO) and the elusive Spanish Bitch (Victor Japan). In Waldron’s rhythmic restraint, in his careful placement of silence and tone, surely Eicher glimpsed a growing philosophy of sound, one defined not by density but by depth, not by volume but by presence. Waldron’s subsequent decades would see him traversing genres, yet always with the same chiseling intent: to refine expression until it gleamed with truth.

Now, in this two-LP reissue, gloriously packaged in a gatefold sleeve with all the original artwork, plus new liner notes by Steve Lake (from which I’ve distilled much of the information above), we are granted with both the familiar and the newly unearthed. The 1969 session unfolds again like a memory recalled in sharper resolution, joined by alternate studio takes on sides III and IV. The all-Waldron set list remains startlingly modern. From the very first shimmer of Becton’s cymbals on “Rats Now” to the closing sparkle of “Boo,” Eicher’s curation of space and clarity is already very much alive. Listening to it in 2025 feels less like revisiting an old field and more like standing again in its soil, still fragrant, still fertile, still yielding. To reap this harvest after more than half a century is to marvel at how sound, once released, can resist decay.

As noted in my first-impressions review, the trio’s momentum is undeniable in “1-3-234” and “Rock My Soul.” Both skip across a sunlit surface like stones whipped by practiced hands. Yet it is in the quieter pieces that Waldron reveals his most robust intentions. Whether mixing shadow and sparkle in “Balladina” or masterfully blending poetry and prose in “Willow Weep For Me,” he makes us acutely aware that emotions are points of departure, not destinations. Eckinger’s bass hums with empathy, Becton’s drumming reacts in real time like reflected light, and together they guide the listener on a journey worth savoring.

Among the newly released takes, the extended “Willow” is especially revealing. Each gesture seems to weigh more, to linger longer. One senses them circling not around a song but around a feeling, its perimeter undefined, its center perpetually receding. As in the photograph of the LP I took above, their coming together stands as a testament to the power of a vision that, even as the tide of history swirls and churns around it, remains true to itself to this day.

Steve Tibbetts: Close (ECM 2858)

| Tyran Grillo

Steve Tibbetts
Close

Steve Tibbetts guitar, percussion, piano
Marc Anderson percussion, gongs, handpan, loops
JT Bates drums
Recorded 2021-2024 in St. Paul by Steve Tibbetts
Drums recorded at 8vb Studio, Minneapolis by JT Bates
Mastered by Greg Reierson at Rare Form Mastering
Cover photo: Joel and Norris Tibbetts
An ECM Production
Release date: October 24, 2025

“Music is a twilight language.
The job is to translate some shadow into sound.”
–Steve Tibbetts

On his 11th album for ECM, guitarist Steve Tibbetts returns with his ever-present ally, percussionist Marc Anderson, joined by drummer JT Bates for a session of immense intimacy. If long-standing classics like Exploded View and Big Map Idea have attuned your ears in a certain direction, you can safely put those expectations aside. This time around, Tibbetts offers us imploded views and small map ideas. And while these are meticulously yet organically crafted as per usual, to appreciate their full potential requires meditation, repeat listenings, and an openness to disconnecting oneself from the FOMO of our digital lives in service of something far more subliminal and enduring.

All the more appropriate, then, that the album should take its first steps with “We Begin,” wherein a deep and sinuous sound stretches from horizon to horizon. Like many of the pieces here, it unfolds in multiple numbered parts, each embodying an interlocking experience that builds on the last. In Part 2, for example, the introduction of hand drumming gives traction and earthiness to the proceedings, even as Tibbetts morphs from one register to the next, swapping terrains with the ease of a fox changing the color of its fur without even thinking. The seasons are his compass, trudging through the underbrush as winter approaches. The delicate patter of canine footsteps is audible now and then, marking the forest floor with rhythms older than all of us put together.

In “Away,” another tripartite wonder, hints of distant thunder begin to encroach on our audible view. Without an umbrella, Tibbetts constructs one out of the materials at hand: his strings provide the metal spines, the percussion the webbing between them, and the melodies themselves the rod and handle where they meet. And even though the rain never comes, that’s okay. The beauty was in the anticipation of the downpour.

Not all is ferns and fronds, as “Remember” offers some grittier textures, recalling the solo work of Andy Hawkins. What’s fascinating here is how the title can be read as a metaphor for listening: both require a certain sensitivity to sounds and movements beyond one’s control. There is a sense of flow that exists just outside of time, especially in the piano Tibbetts adds to Part 2, lending an even more nostalgic tinge to the whole.

“Somewhere,” “Anywhere,” and “Everywhere” are something of a triptych in their own right. Consisting mostly of short intakes of breath, they cradle within them the slowest of burns in Part 3 of “Somewhere.” (It’s also a literal burn, as the tubes in Tibbetts’s amp catch fire at the 4’06” mark—listen for their satisfying decay!) Beyond that, one encounters hints of whale song, death knells, and other dark turns, all finding their final rest in “We End.” It’s a flower without a vase, gifted instead to the water’s surface.

Throughout this mellifluous journey, we are guided by two distinct voices. One is the 12-string, which Tibbetts strings in double courses rather than the standard octaves; the other, his acoustic and electric six-strings, on which he drops the low A and E down to G and C, respectively. “There’s always a bass drone available,” he notes of the effect. “That tends to keep all the tunes in the same key. I’m comfortable with that, having spent some time around gamelan ensembles, Tibetan longhorns, court music from Java, Hardangar fiddle from Norway. Most of the world’s music stays in one key or another.” True, and all the more reason to appreciate the yearning, keening quality of his touch. Like the sitar, so much happens after contact has been made.

This is by far the most delicate of Tibbetts’s albums, but for that reason, it speaks more directly to the heart. There is something uniquely tensile here such as only he can articulate. He is a master of suspensions: even in silence, one feels the slack in his gut. The cumulative effect borders on an autonomous sensory meridian response, where the creaking of strings and frets makes the very spine of the universe tingle. A shooting star in slow motion, it possesses time-lapse qualities. And just when you think Tibbetts will lift off and leave you behind, he touches down back on the soil and ensures your safe travels.

Sokratis Sinopoulos/Yann Keerim: Topos (ECM 2847)

| Tyran Grillo

Sokratis Sinopoulos
Yann Keerim
Topos

Sokratis Sinopoulos lyra
Yann Keerim piano
Recorded February 2024
Sierra Studios, Athens
Engineer: Giorgos Kariotis
Cover photo: Jean-Marc Dellac
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: October 17, 2025

There is nothing quite like the sound of the lyra when Sokratis Sinopoulos takes it in hand. The instrument exhales an ancient soul into the modern air, and few musicians draw from its strings such a fusion of myth and immediacy. From his quartet recordings, Eight Winds and Metamodal, this more intimate duo with pianist Yann Keerim distills their chemistry into an even deeper alchemy of tone and silence. Their collaboration of nearly twenty years has ripened into an art of pure intuition, where melody and freedom speak the same language.

At the album’s heart lies Béla Bartók, whose Romanian Folk Dances serve as both axis and atmosphere. Yet it is in “Vlachia,” one of four original pieces inspired by the Hungarian composer, where their vision truly unfolds, as melancholy and art relate like light through water. The piano’s chords rock gently, a cradle of memory, while the lyra hovers between waking and dreaming, resisting the lull of its own tenderness. “Valley,” by contrast, opens like a watercolor, the soul of the landscape awakening at dawn, when even the smallest stones remember their own luminosity. Between the modally inflected interlude “Mountain Path,” with its blues-tinted horizons, and the quietly breathing “Forest Glade,” the musicians walk among elderly oak, beech, and elm, each exhaling the voices of forgotten peoples, their songs hanging in the air.

The Romanian Folk Dances themselves are reimagined here as meditations on time’s elasticity. “In One Spot,” normally brief and fleeting, becomes a slow unfurling, each phrase examined as though through a magnifying glass instead of a telescope. What was once a dance is now an act of remembrance, a transmission through hands, hearts, and breath. Keerim’s improvisations shimmer with restraint, unveiling the dance as a living organism rather than a set of steps. “Sash Dance” begins like a gift being unwrapped, its introduction a flowering reverie, before the familiar theme emerges, tender as an heirloom passed from parent to child. Sinopoulos’s harmonic touch is radiant, his bow tracing lines that dissolve as soon as they are drawn, while Keerim decorates with the grace of rain gathering on the edge of a leaf.

A solo lyra ushers us into “Dance from Bucsum,” its lament carrying the weight of centuries. Gradually, it finds vitality again, as if memory itself were relearning its steps. The piano’s entrance is light breaking through foliage. “Romanian Polka” delights in this interplay, its bowings and pluckings coaxing the piano into a rhythmic embrace. The music feels rooted in the soil, yet perpetually on the verge of flight. “Fast Dance” is not so much quickened as transfigured. What was once earthy now becomes spectral, its pulse sifted through the mesh between moments.

“Stick Dance” closes the circle, beginning in abstraction before broadening into a spacious terrain of inspiration. There is such reverence here that one hesitates to call it an ending at all. In returning to the first of Bartók’s dances, the album folds time in upon itself, reviving what it has just allowed to rest. It becomes not a conclusion, but a threshold, suggesting that each listening might return us to the beginning with altered ears.

As Sinopoulos and Keerim write in the album’s booklet:

“Our Topos is where tradition meets the present, the Balkan Mountains meet urban space, the music of the countryside meets contemporary creation. Our Topos is where we meet and interact, shaping our individual and common identities.”

Indeed, Topos is less a location than a living field, a place where listening itself becomes part of the composition. Between the lines of melody and silence, we, too, are invited to breathe, to dwell, to remember. And as the final tone recedes, one wonders whether the music has ended at all or merely crossed into another realm, where echoes continue to shape the clouds, unseen but never lost.