Jazz

Andy Emler: There Is Another Way (RJAL 397053)

| Tyran Grillo

Andy Emler piano
Claude Tchamitchian double bass
Eric Echampard drums
Recorded July 17-18 and mixed July 21-22, 2026, by Gérard de Haro at Studios La Buissonne
Mastering by Nicolas Baillard at La Buissonne Mastering Studios
Steinway grand piano prepared and tuned by Sylvain Charles
Produced by La Compagnie aime l’air, license to La Buissonne Label
Artistic director Gérard de Haro for La Buissonne Label
Release date: March 20, 2026

The second release on the La Buissonne label for 2026 returns to the ever-fertile terrain of pianist Andy Emler, whose singular compositional language has flourished across a wide range of ensembles, though perhaps nowhere with such distilled intimacy as in this trio alongside bassist Claude Tchamitchian and drummer Eric Echampard. Together, they move as a migratory organism, each gesture altering the trajectory of the next. The album unfolds as a study in divergence itself, a meditation on paths abandoned, rediscovered, then illuminated from impossible angles.

The title track arrives almost imperceptibly, soft-footed and lantern-lit. Piano chords sway between emotional climates, each voicing carrying the grain of uncertainty, as though Emler were testing the architecture of the room before fully stepping inside it. An arco bass line threads through the composition like smoke curling beneath a locked door, while cymbals glint overhead with the brittle shimmer of winter sunlight on river ice. Once Echampard enters in earnest, the horizon widens dramatically. Space itself appears to dilate. The trio suddenly resembles a flock lifting from dark water, each member catching a separate current while remaining bound to the same invisible compass. What emerges is trust of the highest order, proceeding with the calm authority of a river knowing precisely where the mountain ends.

Now that the emotional topography has been revealed, “Incipit” exhales into quieter territory. Its brevity carries the sensation of standing alone in a hallway after difficult news has settled into the walls. Emler allows silence to hover with unusual dignity. The pauses themselves seem composed, alive with suspended meaning. One begins to understand that this album concerns interior motion just as deeply as physical momentum. Beneath the trio’s precision lives something bruised, searching, profoundly human.

The cleverly titled “Drums habits die hard” pivots into kinetic terrain, giving Echampard ample room to fracture and reassemble pulse with characteristic elasticity. His rhythms stagger forward with the elegant imbalance of someone learning how to walk after catastrophe. Against this, Emler builds spiraling ostinatos that seem to rotate around hidden gravitational centers. The trio’s discipline becomes especially vivid here. Apparent hesitations reveal themselves as calculated feints. Sudden detours bloom into new emotional districts. The music behaves as memory itself, nonlinear yet uncannily coherent, forever discovering side streets beneath familiar maps. Sharp punctuation dissolves into tenderness without warning. Intimacy arrives carrying the scent of iron and rain.

Tchamitchian’s groundwork in “Enough,” opening with a magnificently tensile solo, feels painted in oil pastel and charcoal, dense with texture yet vulnerable to the touch. Emler enters carefully, his phrases drifting as chalk dust suspended in late afternoon light. A darker current gradually surfaces beneath the lyricism. Here the trio sketches the anatomy of dissolution, perhaps the ending of a relationship, perhaps the collapse of an older self that can no longer survive intact. One hears exhaustion breathing through the harmonies. Turmoil swells and recedes in long tidal motions until a fragile equilibrium returns. Survival becomes its own muted form of grace.

“The hard way” wrestles directly with the scars left behind. The writing tightens into intricate knots, rhythmic and harmonic tensions pulling against one another. Yet the trio never loses sight of release. Their improvisations carry the rough wisdom of travelers who understand that endurance rarely arrives adorned with triumph. Sometimes revelation limps into view wearing the clothes of failure. Sometimes conviction resembles solitude for a very long time. By the piece’s conclusion, the music has shed its bitterness and uncovered something steadier beneath it, an earned resilience untouched by sentimentality.

A brief interlude follows in “There is our way,” turning the pockets of expectation inside out. Private languages become briefly audible. Half-formed melodies drift through the composition as fragments of overheard prayer. The trio appears to glance at itself from a distance, examining the circuitry that has allowed this collective voice to endure through years of shared intuition and risk.

All of which leads naturally toward the apex of “Mess around the mood.” Deep piano arpeggios unfurl beside soaring arco passages that seem to lift the room several inches off its foundation. Expansive lyricism narrows into inward meditation, delicate cymbal textures flickering at the center of it all. Then comes the resolution, luminous and slow-burning, carrying the quiet exhilaration of dawn arriving after sleeplessness.

By the end, the title, There Is Another Way, reveals itself as more than a phrase of encouragement. It becomes a philosophical proposition. Emler and his trio seem less interested in certainty than in permeability, in the possibility that every apparent conclusion conceals an undiscovered passage. The music rejects the tyranny of fixed direction. It listens for hidden entrances beneath the mechanical repetitions that quietly govern ordinary life. Another way may not promise comfort or redemption in any simplistic sense. Rather, it suggests that existence itself remains unfinished, endlessly revisable, alive with corridors still dark enough to surprise us.

Judith Berkson: Thee They Thy (ECM 2741)

| Tyran Grillo

Judith Berkson
Thee They Thy

Judith Berkson voice, piano
Trevor Dunn double bass
Gerald Cleaver drums
Recorded July 2021
Oktaven Audio Studio
Mount Vernon, NY
Engineer: Ryan Streber
Cover: Fidel Sclavo
Mastering: Christoph Stickel
Album produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: April 24, 2026

Mezzo-soprano, pianist, composer, and improviser Judith Berkson returns to ECM with a compelling new trio project. Conceptual art, liturgical inquiry, chamber abstraction, and jazz formalism: each arrives carrying its own gravity, yet none bends submissively toward a central identity. To call Berkson “multifaceted” feels insufficient, flat in a way her music refuses to be. These practices do not orbit a core. They are neighboring rooms illuminated at different hours of the day. If her 2010 solo album Oylam fashioned a private syntax from fractured song, Thee They Thy inhabits the classical jazz trio format as though entering an ancestral home whose walls still remember fire. Longtime associate Gerald Cleaver joins on drums, alongside new recruit, bassist Trevor Dunn, making his ECM debut with the calm authority of someone stepping into a river already moving beneath his feet.

The album opens with “Slow,” a through-composed prelude that reveals itself with the cold shimmer of arithmetic carved into glass. Beneath its measured surfaces lies an unguarded study of human behavior and the invisible fissures where our most sacred opportunities collapse under the weight of hesitation. Berkson’s voice enters neither as narrator nor confessor. Rather, it touches every object it describes without claiming ownership of any of them. Her words retain an open voltage, charged enough to bring interpretation to its knees. Dissonances bloom at the edges of the arrangement as bruises darkening beneath pale skin, while the trio advances through the piece with the patience of astronomers mapping a dying star.

Then comes “V’shamru,” and the atmosphere pivots completely, as though the record has opened a hidden window inside itself. Berkson’s original cantorial song tears through the stale fabric of expectation, allowing something ancient and inward to cross our eyeline unscathed. Her voice recedes slightly into shadow, gathering resonance from depths untouched by performance instinct. The modal pianism moves tidally, lifting and withdrawing with ritual precision, while Dunn’s arco bass offers a second pair of lungs. For a fleeting instant, one hears an accidental ghost of Chopin’s “Minute Waltz,” though the resemblance dissolves just as quickly into stranger territory, somewhere between prayer and mirage. The words orient the music without pinning it down. Easts and wests gather around the instruments’ norths and souths, forming a compass that points nowhere stable, nowhere singular.

“Torque” returns the listener to geometric terrain. Berkson’s note choices leap and contort like ladders folding back into themselves, each rung briefly becoming a horizon before disappearing. Built around improvisations on 12-tone rows, the piece visualizes cognition in motion, thought discovering fresh corridors while the walls rearrange themselves. Cleaver’s drumming behaves almost tectonically here, creating subtle pressures beneath the trio’s surface language, while Dunn anchors the abstraction with a presence that feels carved from volcanic stone.

“Dust” follows with startling restraint. Based on 19th-century harmonic language yet rendered through a minimalist lens, it carries the quiet devastation of an emptied ballroom after the candles have consumed themselves. Every chord seems suspended in the air a moment too long, as though uncertain whether to continue existing. Berkson understands silence as a living material. She places it beside sound the way a painter leaves bare canvas exposed, permitting absence to complete the image.

“Cleav,” the lone non-Berkson composition, offers Gerald Cleaver a solitary expanse in which rhythm becomes autobiography. His solo drumming circles through traditions without settling permanently inside any of them. Earth tones dominate the piece. One hears soil breaking beneath rain, wood splintering under pressure, iron cooling after contact with flame. The piece possesses a rare humility. Nothing seeks transcendence. Everything seeks honesty. Even at its most expansive, the performance maintains the intimacy of someone speaking quietly to themselves in a dark field.

“Notice,” with its insistent refrain, is the album’s pulse point, while the scat-inspired title track reveals Berkson at her most untethered. Her vocalizations fracture syntax into pure muscular expression. Aphasia becomes a kind of integrity here, a refusal to allow meaning the comfort of fixed borders. Beneath her, the rhythm section creates a living lattice around the piano, supporting angular phrases as they skip and recoil through chains of miniature ascensions.

“Amerika” arrives as a vast instrumental plain of shifting sands and mirage heat. Without voice, the trio communicates through contour alone, and the silence left by absent lyrics becomes strangely eloquent. Dunn contributes one of the record’s most tender passages during his solo. The music evokes impressions without illustrating them directly. Empty highways at dusk. Electrical hum beneath motel signage. The loneliness of fluorescent light.

Voice and text return in “Slowly Walk Into It,” freely improvised alongside Berkson’s piano. The result resembles an anthem for unseen presences, the peripheral shadows trailing human life with patient hunger. Her singing here feels startlingly mortal. Words emerge half-formed, carrying the fragility of thoughts overheard inside dreams. Lastly, in “Sated,” stepwise motions drift through the scales while the vocal lines hover weightlessly above them, neither ascending nor descending so much as evaporating.

Throughout the album, Berkson never conceals her vulnerabilities. She wears them openly, transforming fracture into protection, uncertainty into method. Many singers pursue purity as though it were evidence of transcendence. Berkson seeks the sound of a soul rubbing against its own limitations.

And then there is the title. Three pronouns orbiting one another without grammatical completion, each gesturing toward identity while dissolving certainty around who speaks and who is spoken to. The sequence feels devotional and fragmented at once, intimate enough for liturgy, unstable enough for philosophy. Perhaps Berkson understands personhood itself as a kind of unfinished chord, forever shifting between self, other, and the unnamed force binding both together. Language spends centuries attempting to stabilize the human experience through categories and declarations. Music witnesses how quickly those structures soften in the presence of feeling. By the album’s end, Thee They Thy resembles a doorway left slightly open in the middle of the night, revealing nothing clearly, yet altering the entire shape of the darkness around it.

Miroslav Vitous: Mountain Call (ECM 2673)

| Tyran Grillo

Miroslav Vitous
Mountain Call

Michel Portal clarinet, bass clarinet
Miroslav Vitous double bass
Jack DeJohnette drums
Esperanza Spalding voice
Bob Mintzer bass clarinet
Gary Campbell soprano and tenor saxophones
Gerald Cleaver drums
Members of Czech National Symphony Orchestra
Recorded 2003-2010 at Universal Syncopation Studios, Prague
by Miroslav Vitous
Cover photo: Thomas Wunsch
Produced by Miroslav Vitous and Manfred Eicher
Release date: March 27, 2026

Mountain Call marks the end of a decade-long wait since the last ECM leader date from Miroslav Vitous, who presents us with a program of duets and small ensembles. Recorded between 2003 and 2010, the result is a broad portrait in detailed brushstrokes, showcasing his talents as composer, improviser, and arranger. 

The opening tracks with reed virtuoso Michel Portal, who was last heard alongside the Czech bassist on 2009’s Remembering Weather Report, unfold somewhere between what is remembered and what has yet to be. “New Energy” emerges already in motion, clarinet and bass entwining in lines that bend across uneven terrain. It carries a strange familiarity, the sensation of hearing something long forgotten yet intimately known.

“Second Touch” introduces movement of a different kind, a dance grounded in continuation. Modal currents ripple beneath the surface, tinged with distant geographies, suggesting lands both real and imagined. The two instruments circle each other with a quiet understanding, travelers who have never met yet share the same destination etched somewhere on their hearts. Lines coil and uncoil, never colliding, always converging.

By the time “Unexpected Solutions” arrives, rhythm begins to pulse more insistently, Vitous drawing percussive language from the body of his instrument while Portal deepens his tone into something almost primal. The feeling is grounded and tactile. Confidence emerges here through direction, a sense that the journey requires no explanation.

That latent need for propulsion finds its answer in “Tribal Dance,” a brief yet luminous duet with Jack DeJohnette. Knowing this performance lands among DeJohnette’s final released statements lends the piece an unspoken gravity. Each cymbal touch lingers as a fading footprint, implying both immediacy and permanence. The brevity sharpens its impact, a final glance exchanged between companions before diverging paths.

The subsequent duets with Portal on bass clarinet drift inward, their abstraction guiding a descent. These pieces fill quiet spaces between landmarks, where reflection takes precedence over motion. From this interiority emerges “Epilog,” a work that expands outward while retaining its core. The orchestral sampling transforms Vitous’s voice into a chorus of selves layered across time.

With “Evolution,” the landscape widens dramatically. Joined by Bob Mintzer and the Czech National Symphony Orchestra, Vitous constructs a triptych of transformations. Strings tremble with distant force, while timpani resonate with deep structural weight beneath the surface. The music unfolds with cinematic inevitability, guided by forces that seem larger than the individuals involved. Within this expanse, the dialogue between Vitous and DeJohnette remains the axis around which everything turns (so much so that everything else feels peripheral).

“Rhapsody” introduces the voice of Esperanza Spalding, whose presence alters the album’s emotional temperature. Her singing carries intimacy and radiance, inhabiting the music from within. Vitous’s compositional touch becomes painterly here, each gesture placed with care yet open to reinterpretation. “Africa” pulses with a soulful urgency, a call that feels both personal and collective, while the closing “Lullaby” compresses an entire day’s passage into a fleeting moment, light folding into shadow with quiet inevitability.

These two larger-scale pieces are framed by duets with Portal on bass clarinet. “Delusion” pushes the mechanics of improvisation. Here, melody becomes a question, one that both musicians address in fleeting alignments that dissolve as quickly as they form. The title track concludes the journey with a return to the elemental. Vitous’s bow draws out tones that are forthright and resonant, the instrument revealing its own hidden history. There is no ornament here, no excess, only the raw exchange of sound and intent. Each phrase feels necessary, each silence earned.

These are musicians who understand that sound is produced and received in equal measure, shaped by what lies between intention and perception. Thus, the true subject of Mountain Call concerns the strange continuity that binds time together. Old paths travel with us, reconfigured with each step. Beginnings carry traces of what came before, endings open toward what cannot yet be named. Somewhere between stasis and motion, identity loosens its grip, and in that loosening, something wider than self begins to listen back.

Marilyn Crispell/Anders Jormin: Memento (ECM 2867)

| Tyran Grillo

Marilyn Crispell
Anders Jormin
Memento

Marilyn Crispell piano
Anders Jormin double bass
Recorded July 2025
Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI, Lugano
Engineer: Stefano Amerio
Cover photo: Thomas Wunsch
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: March 20, 2026

Memento arrives with quiet poetry, the kind that settles into the human heart of its own volition. In this first duo encounter between Marilyn Crispell and Anders Jormin, collaboration feels secondary to recognition, as if two long-circling orbits have finally aligned. Both artists carry histories that run through the ECM tapestry, yet what unfolds here feels more essential than lineage or style.

The opening sequence of improvisations awakens the album with a fragile sense of recall. Each gesture conveys the hesitancy of memory surfacing, not fully formed, yet insistent. A tender gravity settles over these exchanges, one that avoids declaration and favors suggestion. Crispell’s piano hovers at the edge of articulation, tracing lines that seem both discovered and surrendered, while Jormin’s bass responds with near-instinctive sensitivity. Their interplay unfolds like a language stripped to its essence, where every note feels earned, released only when it can no longer remain unspoken. Even moments of lightness retain a delicate restraint, a shared understanding that silence is an equal partner in the unfolding.

As the album deepens, this sensitivity becomes its guiding principle, especially in its treatment of memory. The pieces shift and refract, less like fixed compositions than terrains revisited under changing skies. Jormin’s “Three Shades of a House” embodies this quiet transformation. Its dual incarnations feel like glimpses through different windows of the same interior. The “Morning” version carries a tentative warmth, while the “Evening” rendering withdraws into solitude, its contours softened by introspection. Time alters not only the surface of the music but its inner weight, revealing how experience reshapes even the most familiar forms.

The album also gestures outward, though always through an inward gaze. “The Beach at Newquay” evokes place through atmosphere rather than description, a coastline suggested in fragments of tone and texture. Jormin’s bass releases distant calls that dissolve before they can settle, while Crispell’s piano glides like shifting light across water. The scene feels steeped in night yet illuminated from within.

What binds Memento together is its understanding of relationships as living presences, shaped as much by absence as by proximity. Crispell’s compositions, especially “Song” and the title piece, carry a clarity that resists sentimentality while remaining deeply felt. Affection moves through these works with a measured grace, tempered by the knowledge that connection always harbors the answer to its own vanishing. Jormin responds with a tone that approaches the human voice. Together, they form a grammar of care that finds strength in vulnerability, itself a source of resonance.

By the time “Dragonfly” emerges, the album has settled into something less like a sequence and more like a state of being. Crispell’s elegy for Gary Peacock allows the past to move freely within the present. The closing moments feel like a gentle release, a soft shift in the air. What remains is something akin to a shadow that no longer belongs to an object. It suggests a world where presence is always in the process of becoming something else, where even disappearance holds authorship.

Mark Turner: Patternmaster (ECM 2835)

| Tyran Grillo

Mark Turner
Patternmaster

Mark Turner tenor saxophone
Jason Palmer trumpet
Joe Martin double bass
Jonathan Pinson drums
Recorded April 2024 at Studios La Buissonne
Engineer: Gérard de Haro
Mastering: Nicolas Baillard and Christoph Stickel
Cover photo: Max Franosch
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: March 13, 2026

Following in the footsteps of 2022’s Return from the Stars, which found saxophonist Mark Turner gazing past the horizon of earthly jazz into a more cosmic register, his quartet with trumpeter Jason Palmer, bassist Joe Martin, and drummer Jonathan Pinson returns with the aptly titled Patternmaster. If its predecessor charted a voyage outward, this record feels like the mapping of constellations discovered along the way. Lines weave and bob with adroit precision while maintaining a pliant freedom that lets the occasional jab of surprise land with force. Turner and Palmer operate as simpatico melodic leads, their phrases joining and separating like a quasar whose pulse cannot be predicted but somehow feels inevitable. Turner has long been a paragon of control in tone, technical craft, and compositional balance. Yet something in these performances carries the gravity of accumulated time. The music speaks with an elder’s clarity without surrendering its curiosity. One hears not only mastery but also a widening orbit of possibility.

The album’s title reaches outward into literature through the first book of science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler’s Patternist series, a saga in which telepaths form intricate networks of shared consciousness. Butler imagined communities linked by invisible threads of perception, individuals whose thoughts reverberate through an unseen lattice of awareness. Her fiction often asked difficult questions about power, responsibility, and the fragile architectures that bind societies together. Turner’s quartet mirrors that speculative vision through sound. Each musician senses the others before the note fully arrives, improvisation functioning as a kind of musical telepathy. Melodies propagate through the ensemble like signals traveling through Butler’s imagined psychic web. Turner also gestures toward Wayne Shorter, whose own compositions often seemed to arise from dimensions beyond surface-level perception. In that lineage, Patternmasterproposes jazz as a field of relational intelligence. Ideas migrate from instrument to instrument, forming configurations that only exist because several minds are listening at once.

The title track makes that premise audible from its opening measures. A buoyant groove sets the stage while the horns present their theme with geometric clarity, every interval placed like a star plotted on a navigational chart. The rhythm section hums beneath them with gravitational assurance. The piece casts the listener’s gaze skyward toward something outer-spatial, yet its deeper pull leads inward. The connection it suggests cannot be quantified in apparent magnitude or spectral analysis. It registers in a quieter register of experience, the realm where recognition occurs before language intervenes.

From there, the bass monologue that opens “Trece Ocho” arrives like a lone satellite sending its first transmissions home. Joe Martin traces thoughtful arcs through silence, as though recording data that must still be interpreted. The tune unfolds in stages of perception, moving gradually from solitary voice to collective emergence. Each solo alters the musical environment that follows. Turner’s improvisation resembles an elegant algorithm, cascading through possibilities with luminous logic. Palmer answers with lines that tighten the weave, bringing a sharper contour to the harmonic field. Just when the music appears to settle into contemplative quiet, it erupts in a radiant final flare. Martin’s arco passages slice across the ensemble grain with exquisite articulation, a supernova of sound that briefly illuminates every corner of the quartet’s shared cosmos.

“It Very Well May Be” ventures furthest into the unknown. The groove leans toward the future with persuasive momentum, as though propelled by engines still being invented. Pinson and Martin ignite the rhythmic atmosphere with an intensity that feels both grounded and volatile. Palmer’s trumpet thrives in that oxygen, stretching its phrases with expressive daring while Turner threads agile countercurrents through the harmonic stream. Martin’s solo cools the embers and tends the kindling anew. His dialogue with Pinson’s cymbals suggests two lungs breathing through a single body of rhythm. In the wake of such combustion, “Lehman’s Lair,” named for saxophonist Steve Lehman, relaxes the tempo slightly while preserving its inner electricity. The musicians exchange impulses with the ease of charged particles colliding inside an invisible chamber. Stardust seems to enter the room, settling gently across the architecture of the tune.

“The Happiest Man On Earth” reveals another dimension of the quartet’s sensitivity. Its slow burn unfolds with patient grace, motifs drifting into alignment like planets discovering a shared orbit. Turner and Palmer circle one another with remarkable courtesy. Each phrase opens space for the other to extend its wingspan. Nothing intrudes upon the song’s unfolding. What emerges instead is a profound sense of trust, a musical atmosphere where melody can breathe without hurry.

This mood prepares the way for “Supersister,” a composition that longtime listeners may recall from Turner’s 2009 Fly Trio recording Sky & Country. Here, the piece expands into a sprawling landscape exceeding 12 minutes, with ample terrain to explore. Martin and Pinson construct intricate tessellations that support the horns’ luminous harmonies. Pinson’s extended solo deserves special mention, proliferating as it does with a kind of microbial brilliance, rhythms multiplying and mutating before being gathered back into the bloodstream. The effect resembles a cellular organism discovering new forms of life within itself. Each section of the tune carries its own perspective, its own microcosm of meaning. By the end, those fragments cohere into something larger than the sum of their parts. Martin’s bass returns to cradle the central rhythmic flame, leaving traces of abstraction that gradually resolve into a calm and congruent landing.

The result of all this suggests that patterns govern more than melody or rhythm. They shape the ways minds encounter one another, the ways attention moves through time, the ways imagination stitches together distant points of experience. Perhaps that is the quiet lesson at play. The universe may be vast beyond comprehension, yet meaning arises wherever perception forms a network. A few listeners in a room. Four musicians in conversation. Vibrations in air that momentarily align. From such fleeting constellations, whole worlds become thinkable.

Soaring into a Cloudy Sky: The Köln Concert at 50

| Tyran Grillo

On December 12, 2025, ECM released a 50th anniversary edition of pianist Keith Jarrett’s The Köln Concert, returning one of the most unlikely landmarks in recorded music to the present age. Half a century after its first appearance in 1975, the recording remains the best-selling solo piano album in history and a resilient beacon within the ECM catalogue, an improvisation captured under circumstances so fragile that its survival feels almost miraculous. But the deeper significance of the reissue lies elsewhere. It invites listeners back to the site of a transformation. What once seemed like a fleeting document of a single evening now feels closer to a permanent warm front in the cultural atmosphere. The music continues to circulate through time, condensing into private revelations whenever someone lowers the needle or presses play.

The legend surrounding the performance is familiar. Jarrett arrived in Cologne exhausted from touring. The piano provided for the concert was smaller than expected and in poor condition, with weak bass notes and uneven action. The hour was late. But the constraints became an engine. Jarrett reshaped his approach in response to these limitations, leaning toward the middle register, carving rhythmic patterns that could carry the music forward without relying on the instrument’s wounded depths. What followed, then, was a sustained act of adaptation, a musician turning difficulty into propulsion. The result has since become one of the most widely heard recordings in jazz, classical crossover, and improvised music, though it belongs comfortably to none of those categories.

In a new essay for the edition, German journalist Thomas Steinfeld recalls how there was little to distinguish the concerts surrounding the famed Köln performance and that all of them were “an expression of a will toward aesthetic emancipation.” United under that humble, if not humbling, banner was Jarrett’s commitment to improvised-only concerts, which allowed for the fullness of nothingness to make itself heard in real time. Each evening began with an empty field and ended with a configuration that had not existed before the first note. And yet, what emerged in the confines of the Cologne Opera House on that fateful date of January 24, 1975 seemed to cut out a new eyehole in the mask of history through which a new perspective on what was achievable at the piano was revealed in a way that perhaps no musician has before or since.

Steinfeld is quick to caution us against the gravitational pull of myth. This concert was one night within a longer tour and within a longer life of music. To isolate it too completely risks freezing Jarrett in a single pose, as though the artist were merely the vessel for this one improbable event. In truth, the Köln performance was a turning point along a broader arc that led to the monumental Sun Bear Concerts, whose vast landscapes of improvisation would extend Jarrett’s language even further. What we hear in Cologne is therefore not a conclusion but a threshold, the moment when one door swings open and the wind of possibility pours through.

There is something timeless about this music precisely because it is so firmly entrenched in time, documented on tape but composed in air. The opening of Part I arrives already in motion, like a river glimpsed from a bridge rather than a spring discovered at its source. Phrases rise and fall with the tentative confidence of a bird learning the currents of the sky. The melody circles overhead, close enough that its shadow passes over us. Jarrett’s left hand begins with the quiet determination of a traveler testing unfamiliar ground. A rhythm forms beneath the surface, hesitant at first, then increasingly sure of its own footsteps.

Before long, the music finds a pulse that seems older than the instrument itself. The piano becomes a breathing creature. Harmonic light flickers across the surface while deeper currents move beneath. When the famous vamp emerges just after the seven-minute mark, it feels like a clearing in the forest where everything suddenly gathers.

Yet any sense of grandeur refuses to settle into monumentality. Jarrett dismantles the structure almost as soon as it rises, examining it from within, turning it gently in the light like an object whose inner workings remain mysterious. The music behaves as a living cell. We witness its movement, its expansion, its ability to replicate feeling from one listener to another. Its mechanisms remain hidden. The effect spreads nonetheless.

The expansive final passage of Part I, with its thick block chords and surging textures, greets the listener not as a goodbye but as a hello.

Part IIa begins with a different temperament. What began as an aerial survey of the imagination now feels grounded in the body. A rhythmic pattern settles in with irresistible buoyancy. One hears the echo of gospel, the sway of folk dance, the bright elasticity of American vernacular music filtering through Jarrett’s internal vocabulary. The audience’s energy becomes part of the current. The music dances, stumbles briefly into contemplation, then rises again with renewed vitality.

This trajectory feels inevitable, as though following a path that had always existed beneath the floorboards of the hall. The music quiets into reflection before lifting itself once more with a blues-tinged warmth. Jarrett’s playing here carries the sensation of a traveler pausing beside a river before continuing onward.

Part IIb deepens the inward pull. The left hand coils into a spiraling figure that suggests a single direction of travel. Not outward but inward. Each repetition tightens the circle until the music finds an opening at its center. From there it rises into a fierce, sunlit expanse. The harmony burns with an almost desert brightness. One senses the pianist squinting into that light, moving forward despite the glare.

Such bravery animates the entire performance. Improvisation always contains the possibility of failure. Here that risk becomes the music’s secret fuel, as each phrase steps onto uncertain ground and finds footing just in time.

Part IIc arrives like a quiet epilogue whispered after the main story has ended. Its intimacy carries a gentle radiance. The closing gestures resemble a warm hand on the shoulder, a kiss on the cheek of a wanderer about to continue down the road. What remains is a small bundle of warmth carried forward into whatever lies ahead.

It’s easy to forget that Jarrett’s performance began just before midnight, after the opera audience had already departed and the city had slipped into a quieter rhythm. Jarrett stepped onto the stage at precisely that hour when the imagination becomes receptive to rarer signals. Perhaps this is why the music radiates with such unusual clarity. Under those conditions, suspended between today and tomorrow, even the smallest musical gesture appeared luminous.

All of which leads back to the peculiar solitude at the center of the recording. A lone pianist sits before a flawed instrument and invents an entire landscape from nothing. No bandmates share the burden. No written score provides direction. The artist listens to the room, to the objects at his disposal, to the faint murmurs of possibility that hover just beyond hearing. Music emerges like mist from a valley floor.

As is evident from my first attempt to describe this music in mere human language, the recording eludes definitive characterization. Words are the cloudy sky into which it has soared over the years. However, what language fails to capture finds perfect expression in sound. The piano speaks with a fluency that criticism can only admire from a distance.

Jean-Marie Machado: Como as Flores (RJAL 397052)

| Tyran Grillo

Jean-Marie Machado piano
Claude Tchamitchian double bass
Zé Luis Nascimento drums, percussion
Recording, mixing, mastering at Studios la Buissonne, Pernes-les-Fontaines, France
Recorded April 2024 and mixed May 2024 by Gérard de Haro, assisted by Matteo Fontaine
Mastered by Nicolas Baillard at La Buissonne Mastering Studio
Steinway grand piano prepared and tuned by Sylvain Charles
Produced by Cantabile and Gérard de Haro with RJAL for La Buissonne 
Release date: January 23, 2026

After a series of ambitious, large-scale projects that stretched outward in many directions, pianist and composer Jean-Marie Machado turns inward and returns to the elemental with this luminous trio recording. The gesture feels less like a reduction than a distillation, as if years of orchestral color and structural ambition have been pressed slowly into a sweet-smelling essence. The album’s title, Como as Flores, translated from Portuguese as “Like Flowers,” names the guiding metaphor with quiet elegance. A flower does not argue for its beauty. It opens. Fragrance spreads through the air without instruction, invisible yet unmistakable. In much the same way, Machado’s music unfolds here with an unforced grace, each note blooming from the last, each phrase releasing a delicate aroma of feeling. With Brazilian percussionist Zé Luis Nascimento and bassist Claude Tchamitchian beside him, Machado enters a kind of musical relativity where gravity and flight continually exchange roles.

“Romantic Spell” begins like the moment one falls into a lover’s arms and forgets where the body ends. The opening breath carries warmth and ease, a gentle suspension that seems to hover between waking and dream. Piano chords drift like petals across still water. Tchamitchian’s bass speaks in soft murmurs, grounding the trio in a tender gravity. Nascimento introduces colors that shimmer at the edges of perception. Curtains sway in moonlight somewhere within the music. A slow tide of emotion gathers its strength. Everything feels receptive, open, full of promise.

From this intimate beginning, “Valsa Ouriço” arrives with a sudden brightness that resembles the first flash of morning light through an open window. Energy crackles through the trio’s playing. Machado’s piano lines spiral and leap with the exhilaration of new affection. The piece carries the buoyancy of ocean waves, rising and falling with a natural elasticity. Nascimento’s percussion reveals astonishing sensitivity here. Each gesture lands with the precision of a brushstroke in a finely detailed painting. The rhythmic patterns do more than support the melody. They sing alongside it, adding hues that feel melodic in their own right. His hands seem to conjure entire landscapes with the lightest touch.

In “De Memorias e de Saudade,” time slows until each note lingers in warm air. Nostalgia inhabits the space without turning heavy. The music resembles the quiet contemplation of an old garden where memory and present sensation mingle freely. Machado allows silence to bloom between phrases. The ascent begins with “Le Voleur de Fleurs,” a piece that climbs with patient determination before releasing itself into radiant flight. One hears echoes of wandering through fields thick with color, the senses saturated by scent and sunlight. Nascimento becomes particularly vivid here, his playing lush and expansive. A few strokes across skin or wood seem capable of summoning vast distances. The percussion glows with a deep golden warmth. One could almost imagine pollen drifting through the air.

Shadows appear briefly in “Our Tears Never Cried,” where slight dissonances introduce a delicate ache. Even flowers contain a kind of fragility. Their beauty persists beside the knowledge of how easily they can wilt and detach from their stems. Machado leans into that ambiguity, shaping phrases that hover between sweetness and sorrow. The trio then turns toward Miles Davis with a supple and groove-laden interpretation of “Nardis.” Familiar territory becomes fertile soil for improvisation. Machado’s touch balances clarity and mystery, while Tchamitchian and Nascimento weave a rhythmic fabric that moves with graceful inevitability.

“Piuma,” performed as a piano solo, offers one of the album’s coziest moments. The title suggests a feather, something light enough to drift through the air. Machado plays with remarkable restraint, allowing tenderness to accumulate slowly. Beneath the softness lies a quiet melancholy, the subtle awareness that love carries its own permeability. Feelings pass through us like wind through branches, leaving movement long after the breeze itself has gone.

Tchamitchian then steps forward with his arco introduction to “Perdido em Clareza.” The bowed bass opens a clearing within the album’s poignant terrain. When the trio joins together, they settle into a mid-tempo dance marked by playful curiosity. There is a childlike wonder in the way the themes unfold, as though the musicians are discovering their shapes in real time.

“Transvida” turns the spotlight toward Nascimento in a percussion showcase that reveals the full breadth of his expressive vocabulary. His playing suggests rain striking leaves, wind traveling across dry earth, and footsteps crossing hidden paths through a forest.

The closing piece, “L’Endormi,” inhabits a more dreamlike register. Frame drum pulses softly beneath harmonic bowing from Tchamitchian. Machado’s piano carries a darker hue, as if twilight has settled over the garden that opened at the beginning of the album. The music drifts through strange and beautiful terrain where shadows possess their own quiet luminosity.

Yet the deeper resonance of Como as Flores extends beyond individual tracks. Flowers appear here not simply as decoration but as a philosophy of form. Each composition grows organically, rooted in attentive listening and mutual responsiveness. Nothing is forced open. Each musical gesture unfolds in its proper season. One hears the trio tending their sound the way a gardener tends living soil, trusting the invisible processes that allow life to emerge.

Perhaps that is the quiet wisdom contained in Machado’s return to the trio format. Creation often resembles cultivation rather than construction. One prepares the ground, listens carefully to the conditions of light and rain, then waits with patience for something unexpected to appear. A garden cannot be commanded into bloom. It answers only to care, curiosity, and time. In that sense, music and flowers share a secret. Both reveal how beauty enters the world without force, rising gently from hidden roots that continue their work long beneath the surface.

Vincent Courtois/Robin Fincker/Daniel Erdmann: Lines for Lions (RJAL 397051)

| Tyran Grillo

Vincent Courtois cello
Daniel Erdmann tenor saxophone
Robin Fincker clarinet and tenor saxophone
Recorded, mixed, and mastered at La Buissonne Studios, Pernes-les-Fontaines, France
Recorded November 25-26 and mixed December 2024 by Gérard de Haro
Mastering at La Buissonne Mastering Studio by Nicolas Baillard
Release date: November 7, 2025

Cellist Vincent Courtois returns in the company of tenor saxophonists Daniel Erdmann and Robin Fincker, forming a trio that feels at once improbable and inevitable. Three voices that might easily collide instead interweave, tracing bright arcs through open air. The instrumentation alone promises unusual geometry. Two reeds converse above the dark grain of cello, a chamber ensemble with the pulse of jazz and the curiosity of explorers who have misplaced their compass on purpose.

The album’s title gestures toward the tune Gerry Mulligan wrote in 1952 as a tribute to Jimmy Lyons, a figure closely tied to the legacy of the Monterey Jazz Festival. That piece eventually became a touchstone of West Coast jazz, known for its luminous melodic contour and breezy contrapuntal motion. Those qualities hover like a distant ancestor throughout this recording. The trio does not imitate that tradition. Instead, they treat it as a horizon, a place toward which melodic clarity travels even while the music wanders through stranger terrain.

The group thrives on the friction of difference. Erdmann’s tenor carries a weathered edge, a tone where breath scratches against metal and every note seems carved from bark. Fincker offers a contrasting ease, especially when he turns to clarinet and lets its rounded voice float through the ensemble like a ribbon of smoke. Courtois stands at the center of this triangulation. His cello provides gravity, yet it refuses to remain merely foundational. At one moment it functions as bass, grounding the harmony with muscular pizzicato. At another it becomes a singer, bow drawing long shadows across the musical landscape. Through this constant transformation the trio achieves a peculiar equilibrium. The music feels airborne while remaining tethered to a deep structural spine. We can see all of these qualities reflected in their writing, which is fairly well distributed throughout the set.

Vincent Courtois: Architectures of Motion

Courtois composes as someone who thinks orchestrally even within the tight confines of a trio. His pieces often hinge on physical movement. Lines stretch, recoil, then leap again as if guided by invisible pulleys.

“Alone in Fast Lane” opens the album with an immediate surge of energy. The two tenors ignite like twin flares, each tracing its own spiraling path while the cello pulses beneath them with restless purpose. Courtois’s pizzicato acts as both skeleton and engine. The sound possesses a remarkable clarity. One hears the music’s anatomy in real time. Nerves spark through the reeds while the cello functions as spinal cord, transmitting impulses that set the whole organism in motion. The result is a texture both taut and exuberant, a kind of high velocity counterpoint that never loses its center.

“Seven Lines for Old Mediums” inhabits a different climate. The music becomes pointillistic, almost painterly. Notes appear like small constellations rather than extended phrases. Courtois allows silence to speak with unusual authority. Each gesture hangs in the air for a moment before dissolving, inviting the listener to lean closer. The piece suggests a quiet meditation on the past, not through nostalgia but through delicate fragments that recall older languages without repeating them.

“Adios Body (Hello Soul)” carries a melody built on a gentle octave leap, a motif that first arrives with lullaby tenderness. Gradually the texture thickens. The tenors begin to growl and circle each other in animated debate while the cello intervenes with calm authority, a mediator guiding two spirited interlocutors toward uneasy harmony. What begins in repose evolves into something almost theatrical. The music sheds its skin and reveals a more restless spirit beneath.

Daniel Erdmann: Conversations with a Crooked Smile

Erdmann’s writing introduces a playful angularity. His pieces often feel conversational, as though the ensemble has stumbled into a lively discussion at a café where every participant insists on finishing the other’s sentences.

“Mulholland Coffee Break” evokes exactly that sort of moment. The tune unfolds with relaxed swagger, a melody that seems to lean back in its chair while still maintaining a sly sense of rhythm. Courtois takes full advantage of the mood. His improvisation dives into unexpected harmonic corners, bow and fingers shifting roles with effortless agility. When Fincker’s clarinet arrives, it pours a warm gloss over the scene, thick with ease. One can almost imagine sunlight slanting through a window onto a cluttered tabletop of cups and scribbled notes.

“Finally Giovanni” thrives on whimsy. The two tenors chatter above Courtois’s buoyant pizzicato, their lines hopping and sidestepping like dancers improvising steps across a wooden floor. The tune’s charm lies in its elasticity. Themes stretch then snap back into place with mischievous delight. What might have been merely jaunty becomes something richer through the trio’s shared instinct for balance. Humor and precision coexist without strain.

Robin Fincker: Blues Through a Kaleidoscope

Fincker’s contributions bring a blues sensibility filtered through an exploratory imagination. His pieces often begin in recognizable territory before opening unexpected doors.

“There and Then” highlights the clarinet’s expressive warmth. A call and response emerges between it, tenor, and cello, each voice stepping forward then retreating into the weave. The blues inflection runs deep but never feels conventional. Courtois again proves a formidable improviser, his cello singing with both grit and tenderness.

“Lion’s Den” returns the trio to a denser thicket of interaction. A hint of bop flickers through the rhythmic undergrowth, yet the structure refuses to settle into predictable grooves. At the center, Courtois delivers a remarkable solo passage, a monologue that seems to narrate its own unfolding. Each phrase arrives with quiet agency, like a thought discovering its own meaning while being spoken.

“Hobo Clown” closes the album with a buoyant sense of motion. Playfulness becomes the guiding principle. The ensemble glides through shifting textures fluidly, revealing the full breadth of its dynamic and technical range. The music smiles without losing its intelligence. Every gesture feels alive to possibility.

In this sense the trio suggests a quiet philosophical lesson. Music does not merely express individuality. It also reveals how individuality expands when placed in conversation. Perhaps creativity resembles a kind of listening. One waits for another presence to enter the room, uncertain what it will change, curious about the space that will appear between the sounds. In that small interval something unexpected begins to breathe.

Jean-Marie Machado & Danzas Orchestra: Sinfonia (RJAL 397050)

| Tyran Grillo

Jean-Marie Machado piano
Jean-Charles Richard chief conductor
Cécile Grassi viola
Cécile Grenier viola
Gwenola Morin viola
Guillaume Martigné cello
Clara Zaoui cello
Marc Buronfosse double bass
Élodie Pasquier clarinets
Stéphane Guillaume flutes, tenor saxophone
Renan Richard soprano and baritone saxophones
Tom Caudelle saxhorn
François Thuillier tuba
Didier Ithursarry accordion
Joachim Machado guitar
Marion Frétigny percussion, marimba, glockenspiel
Aubérie Dimpre percussion, vibraphone, glockenspiel
Recording, mixing, mastering at Studios la Buissonne, Pernes-les-Fontaines, France
Recorded November and December 2023 and mixed April and June 2024 by Gérard de Haro, assisted by Matteo Fontaine
Mastered by Nicolas Baillard at La Buissonne Mastering Studio
Steinway grand piano prepared and tuned by Sylvain Charles
Produced by Cantabile and Gérard de Haro & RJAL for La Buissonne
All tracks composed and arranged by Jean-Marie Machado
Release date: January 24, 2025

Jean-Marie Machado has long composed as if mapping a living geography, each work another inlet along a coastline he continues to discover. Sinfonia, written for his Danzas Orchestra, arrives like a new tide upon that shore. Across more than three decades and thirty albums, from solitary piano meditations to the breadth of large ensembles, Machado has cultivated a language where jazz breathes with classical lungs. The celebrated Cantos Brujos revealed the power of this synthesis. Sinfonia deepens that current.

“Ria Largo” opens with gentle inevitability. Stepwise motifs shimmer like sunlight across tidal water while the glockenspiel scatters small sparks of brightness through the orchestral surface. The music glances backward through salt air toward older voyages and half-remembered ages, a harbor scene where departure feels imminent but the ropes have not yet been cast free.

From this threshold emerge three diptychs that move like successive swells. “Tanghoule” enters beneath a dimmer sky, its atmosphere shaped by the shadowed viola of Cécile Grenier. Didier Ithursarry’s accordion spreads a soft harmonic glow while Marc Buronfosse’s bass walks with deliberate tenderness. Renan Richard’s soprano saxophone floats through with poised lyricism, suspended between inward reflection and outward motion.

“Barcaronde” turns the vessel toward open water. Guitarist Joachim Machado begins amid flowing piano figures whose ripples widen across the ensemble. The cello of Guillaume Martigné gradually assumes the foreground, unfolding a patient monologue that draws surrounding voices into a finely woven tapestry. What begins as solitary expression becomes shared narrative. In “L’écume des rires,” vitality breaks through as accordion, clarinet, and tuba form a lively trio. Their quicksilver dialogue opens a chamber of inspired improvisation. The second half reveals a different character altogether, one that is brittle in appearance yet strangely resilient, like shells shaped by relentless tides.

“Barque magnétique” introduces a deeper nocturne through the baritone saxophone of Richard, whose dark buoyancy drifts across the ensemble like a lantern gliding over black water. Magic lingers here in quiet form, a subtle phosphorescence. “Dérive des cinq pas” centers on violist Cécile Grassi, whose line wanders through the ensemble with contemplative patience. Fragments of melody appear like objects discovered in tidal pools after the sea withdraws. The mood remains intimate, inviting the listener to lean closer.

Energy brightens with “Volte Flamme.” Stéphane Guillaume’s flute darts through the ensemble with birdlike agility while percussionists Marion Frétigny and Aubérie Dimpre construct an intricate terrain of rhythm. The electric guitar flashes through the texture with bright sparks, its voice cutting momentarily through the orchestral weave. Afterward, “Tréhourhant” offers a pause of quiet reflection. The piano speaks alone in restrained, mournful phrases that seem to measure the distance traveled.

The closing “Jig Raz” gathers the ensemble into a surge of unity. A geometric groove forms beneath wordless vocals that rise from the orchestral body like wind filling a sail. The music spirals upward with exuberant force, lifting itself like a waterspout climbing toward the clouds and carrying the listener into open air.

Yet the lasting resonance of Sinfonia lies deeper than imagery. Machado understands that the sea offers a way of thinking about sound itself. Music resembles water in its refusal of permanence. A phrase appears, glimmers briefly, then dissolves into the larger motion surrounding it. Improvisation becomes an act of listening to the present moment rather than attempting to capture it.

Standing before the ocean, one senses how small gestures participate in immense processes that began long before us and will continue long after. Machado and his orchestra seem content with that truth. They do not attempt to master the tide. They simply enter its rhythm and allow the music to move as it must. Perhaps that is the quiet lesson of Sinfonia. Meaning does not always arrive as a destination. Sometimes it reveals itself only while we drift.