Jazz

Alan Pasqua: My New Old Friend

| Tyran Grillo

Time has a peculiar way of inhabiting music, gathering in the hollows between notes and returning through melodies whose origins have long since dissolved into memory. For pianist Alan Pasqua, whose career has traversed the incandescent frontiers of jazz fusion and the intimate architectures of acoustic improvisation, such temporal hauntings find exquisite expression in My New Old Friend. Having studied with Jaki Byard and joined Tony Williams’ New Lifetime following a fateful Carnegie Hall encounter in 1975, Pasqua later lent his harmonic imagination to Bob Dylan and Santana. His celebrated “Proto-Cosmos” remains an emblem of that earlier volcanic vocabulary. Yet beneath the electricity, another language had been quietly ripening, one whose silences carry the sediment of entire lifetimes. Released by Cryptogramophone in 2005, My New Old Friend gathers six originals and five lovingly reconsidered standards into a meditation on remembrance’s peculiar elasticity.

The title acquires particular poignancy through the intertwined histories of its musicians. Pasqua and drummer Peter Erskine first crossed paths at Indiana University, sharing a Bloomington farmhouse in 1971 before their careers carried them across the expanding cartographies of jazz. Bassist Darek Oles, a more recent collaborator, completes this convergence of histories. Recorded at Conway Studios in Hollywood during sessions spanning 2003 and 2004, the album was conceived with almost devotional attention to detail. Pasqua even brought his handcrafted Yamaha S6 into the studio to ensure a particular sound. Oles supplies a supple gravitational center while Erskine’s exquisitely calibrated touch allows rhythm to breathe beyond its own circumference. Companionship becomes a form of listening whose deepest syntax is the freedom to discover something previously unimagined in someone already known.

“You Must Believe in Spring” opens with a lushly articulated piano introduction, an act of emotional architecture whose foundations materialize beneath our feet as we enter. Pasqua’s touch is sensitive yet texturally bold, every harmonic choice carrying a quiet inevitability. Erskine skips with the grace of a waterskater while Oles swings through the gaps in the trees on a vine of utterly melodic fortitude. “All the Things You Are” brings a more spirited gait, Erskine’s cymbals scintillating at the edges of Pasqua’s effortless invention. The trio plays as though it had written the tune, its changes passing through their hands as naturally as breath. “Body and Soul,” meanwhile, locates nostalgia at the microscopic level. You cannot see it with the naked eye, yet you feel it unmistakably in the clothed heart. Pasqua’s solo dips a tentative toe into a river down which the trio’s vessel has been gliding all along. Such hesitation, held within an otherwise unbroken trust, becomes its own measure of beauty. Jimmy Webb’s “Wichita Lineman” spreads its soft, creamy abundance into every nook and cranny of the imagination until it ceases to be visible. Even “Smile,” the balladic offramp, offers something considerably grander than a fond farewell, its tenderness ambulating with an unsettling lucidity.

Pasqua’s originals sit comfortably alongside these tried-and-true companions. From the opening gestures of “Barcelona,” we are in masterful hands, guided through fluid changes of light and scenery. Its urban touch is wonderfully unobtrusive, and Oles’s bubbling solo wells up from someplace deeper than the street beneath it. “Vienna” opens with another masterful introduction, verdant with the tenderness of an embrace postponed for years. As it slides into a mid-tempo anthem, the city of the title seems to surrender its physical coordinates and become an address within.

“Highway 14” extends into motion, with Lina Brunkell’s wordless vocals lending the open road a reflective sheen that doubles the sky along with the possibilities of arrival. Pasqua floats with the ease of a leaf surrendered to its own trajectory. Underneath, Oles shoulders much of the melodic weight while Erskine quietly clears the path, each rhythmic gesture offering reassurance without dictating a destination. The road becomes an unwritten sentence belonging equally to departure and anticipation. Through Brunkell’s voice, language itself momentarily forgets its vocation to explain and evokes the peculiar eloquence of having nothing to prove.

The title track is a timeless ballad seemingly created in the moment of its telling. Pasqua’s organic soloing traces the fine line between what has been remembered and what is being invented, until the two become inseparable. “One More Once” occupies a more askew rhythmic terrain, every slide and sudden turn handled with such mastery that even its darker shades feel necessary. Pasqua’s gorgeous runs find every necessary current in the rhythm section. “Stick Slap,” meanwhile, is a romping good time that speaks in smiles, displaying the trio’s coherence at its most exuberant. Even here, virtuosity never becomes a contest for the foreground.

I am admittedly late to the party in placing this recording on my virtual turntable, but perhaps lateness is precisely the point. Those who come to Between Sound and Space for more than ECM should by all means seek this one out. Few recordings make generosity sound quite so rigorously intelligent. What stays with me most is the quiet ethical possibility concealed in the album’s title. To call someone an old friend is to acknowledge a history; to call that same person new is to admit that history can never exhaust a human being. Knowledge of another person can become a beautiful form of captivity. Pasqua and his companions open the door of that captivity from within, allowing recognition to remain open to surprise. Perhaps this is the most difficult kind of fidelity: granting those we love the right to exceed the person we have made of them. The music poses a question whose consequences reach into every human encounter. What if we listened to strangers with the patience we reserve for old friends, and to old friends with the astonishment owed to strangers?

Enrico Rava Fearless Five with Joe Lovano: Corners (ECM 2868)

| Tyran Grillo

Enrico Rava
Fearless Five
with Joe Lovano
Corners

Enrico Rava trumpet, flugelhorn
Joe Lovano tenor saxophone, tarogato
Matteo Paggi trombone
Francesco Diodati guitar
Francesco Ponticelli double bass
Evita Polidoro drums, vocals
Recorded July 2025
Auditorium Parco della Musica
Ennio Morricone, Rome
Recording engineers: Angelo Mincuzzi, Massimiliano Cervini,
and Roberto Catucci (supervision)
Mixing engineer: Stefano Amerio
October 2025, Udine
Cover photo: Max Franosch
Album produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: October 16, 2026

On Corners, Enrico Rava’s lyricism acquires fresh contours in the collective imagination of his Fearless Five. Melody enters a studio whose occupants can move the walls, and the trumpeter’s familiar eloquence discovers unfamiliar dimensions within its own breath. Formed after an impromptu concert outside Rome in 2022, the quintet takes its name from a composition on his 1978 Enrico Rava Quartet. Guitarist Francesco Diodati, trombonist Matteo Paggi, bassist Francesco Ponticelli, and drummer Evita Polidoro bring distinct compositional identities to the ensemble’s ECM debut, joined by guest saxophonist Joe Lovano, whose partnership with Rava yielded Roma in 2019. Diodati alone had worked with Rava in other groups; their intuitive rapport helps make freedom a practical condition of the music. Recorded at Rome’s Auditorium Parco della Musica on July 21–23, 2025, and produced by Manfred Eicher, the album gathers contributions from every participant. Shared authorship becomes an invitation to alter the terms of belonging. Rava’s language passes between generations, acquiring shadows with anatomies of their own.

His flugelhorn introduces “Certi angoli segreti” with a supple assurance that lets the melody reveal itself by degrees. There is something clandestine in its poise, a private staircase descending through the center of a public gesture. Diodati’s delicate marbling deepens the rhythm section’s contours, giving Lovano ample space to carve airborne trajectories without losing the grain of his sound. The tenor’s robust delicacy holds ascent and gravity in the same phrase. Around Rava’s unraveling lines, the ensemble adjusts its proportions, allowing a melodic turn to become an opening through which the whole group can pass. Paggi’s solo burns through that space with exhilarating conviction, its lower register lending physical force to the gathering intensity. Diodati, too, pursues distortion, summoning a brilliance reminiscent of Terje Rypdal: the guitar’s radiance has teeth. Across nearly 12 minutes, the piece establishes how freely this ensemble can change direction while keeping each player’s presence sharply audible. Even the most fugitive line leaves a pressure mark.

That expansiveness makes the intimacy of Diodati’s “Sin peso” especially arresting. Its cinematic sensibility allows the open distances of a western to fold into noir’s troubled interiors. Rava’s muted trumpet moves with the composure of a figure carrying an undisclosed past; each phrase seems to know which door would be dangerous to open. The guitar supplies a landscape whose horizon has been confiscated, leaving the melody to negotiate distance through touch. Polidoro’s “Le mie gambe” draws that inward movement closer to the body. Sung by its composer, it is one of the album’s most affecting performances, her voice finding a passage through the instruments that seems scarcely wide enough for speech. Slinking guitar and tender bass give the song a palpable warmth, while the horns bring its emotional implications forward through their intimate harmonies. Feeling becomes audible at the point where the individual timbres begin to soften into one another. The voice inhabits that threshold, lending the ensemble’s abstraction a pulse beneath the skin.

Lovano’s “Sun Rava” unsettles the ground again. Its abstract blues opens onto freer exchanges, with momentum repeatedly finding and relinquishing its footing. The tenor’s conversation with drums and bass is particularly enthralling: Polidoro and Ponticelli make motion responsive enough to accommodate Lovano’s changing inflections, so that each rhythmic decision has consequences for the next breath. Freedom here involves the vertigo of being heard with such precision that an impulse can alter the entire group’s direction. Rava’s “Hitchcock at the Beach” concentrates its drama into a much shorter span, Polidoro’s vocals adding a silver sheen to its nostalgic atmosphere. Lovano’s melancholy points toward tragedy with remarkable restraint, leaving grief suspended at the threshold of articulation. The ache resides in that withheld disclosure. On “Tone, Shape and Colours,” a collective improvisation sparked by a Lovano motif, the tarogato gives contemplation a reedier edge. Bells and gongs float across the surface as tensions gather beneath them. Their eventual surrender to rest feels almost anatomical, a clenched hand discovering the space inside its palm.

Ponticelli’s brief “Ça va sans dire” distills these roaming impulses into a melodic aphorism. Its nocturnal wanderings leave Diodati a generous surface on which to work, the guitar giving depth to a statement whose brevity invites close attention. Rava’s “Bowery Dance” then turns toward the remembered streets of his New York years. Guitar fuzz and pliant bass introduce an abstract opening before a harder groove assembles itself, interrupted by stops and starts that keep its momentum alert. Lovano and Rava exchange phrases with lived experience in their jaws, allowing memory to find fresh musculature in the present tense. Their ease carries the knowledge of musicians who can recognize an opening before it has fully formed. Paggi’s “Mamma” brings this restless company into a tender close. Its gentleness gives the ensemble’s responsiveness an unexpectedly vulnerable meaning, reaching beyond the bandstand toward the strange beginnings of personhood. A child enters a language already in progress, addressed long before it can answer. Someone lends significance to a cry; a sound acquires a place in another person’s life. The musicians’ mutual attention gives that ancient transaction an adult complexity, their experience deepening the risk of allowing a phrase to need an answer. Fearlessness becomes unexpectedly fragile here, entrusted to another pair of hands. Rava’s lyricism, so articulate throughout Corners, approaches the obscure tenderness from which articulation first emerges. The first person begins in the second.

Christy Doran Review for All About Jazz

| Tyran Grillo

Christy Doran’s history with ECM traces a restless path through the guitar’s expressive possibilities, from OM’s combustible blend of rock and free improvisation on sister label JAPO to the intimate experiments of his later collaborations. Throughout, his playing reveals an ear equally attuned to abrasion and delicacy, finding unexpected colors where acoustic resonance meets electronic transformation. A quintessential example is Red Twist & Tuned Arrow, recorded with fellow guitarist Stephan Wittwer and drummer Fredy Studer: a music of intricate exchanges and sudden openings, whose adventurousness carries an unmistakable sense of joy. That spirit continues in his latest record, Disambiguation, a collaboration with tabla player Imran Khan. I have just published my review on All About Jazz, and I invite you to read it and discover where Doran’s ever-curious imagination has taken him next. Click the cover below.

Enzo Favata: Ritornare (ECM 2883)

| Tyran Grillo

Enzo Favata
Ritornare

Enzo Favata soprano saxophone, clarinet, bass clarinet
Daniele di Bonaventura bandoneón
Marcello Peghin ten-string guitar
Salvatore Maltana double bass
U.T. Gandhi drums
Recorded January 2026
Bavaria Musikstudios, Munich
Engineer: Stefano Amerio
Cover photo: Jan Kricke
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: September 18, 2026

Every return contains a betrayal. The place may remain where it was, yet the person approaching has been revised by distance, while memory has moved the streets. On Ritornare, Enzo Favata treats return as imaginative recovery that transforms whatever it retrieves. Music carries landscape within experience, with literature serving as a compass across waters whose histories mingle beneath imposed names. The title points backward, though the album keeps opening forward. Home survives as an activity of attention and belonging that has quietly learned a foreign language in one’s absence.

Favata has long listened for submerged connections. Born in Alghero, Sardinia, in 1956, the saxophonist and clarinetist developed a musical language shaped by his native island, then widened it through the greater Mediterranean and distant shores. Atlantico, formed in 1999, gathered impressions during South American travels while attending to African inheritances across the ocean. “Tukuman” makes this migratory history palpable. Brushed drums and double bass establish a softly revolving ground, soon deepened by Daniel di Bonaventura’s bandoneón. Marcello Peghin’s guitar rises through it, and Favata’s soprano traces the theme in lucid arcs. The tune begins in transit, already pondering somewhere beyond its horizon.

Such movement never requires Atlantico to surrender its center. Favata and Peghin share decades of collaboration rooted in southern Italy, while bassist Salvatore Maltana and drummer U.T. Gandhi join di Bonaventura in a collective whose music expands without compromising its infrastructure. On the above-mentioned “Tukuman,” Favata dances through sudden turns as di Bonaventura weaves through a zoetrope of half-recovered scenes. A locomotive pulse gathers below the surface; elsewhere, the ensemble skims forward on the tensile calm of open water. Their travel is purposeful without submitting to destination, driven by the joy of motion itself.

The album’s journeys are as much literary as they are musical. Favata has recognized portions of his imaginative territory in Isabel Allende and Jorge Luis Borges, whose visible worlds admit secret laws. Gabriel García Márquez occupies another canopy in this forest of affinities. Favata describes Atlantico’s music as suspended between dream and reality, and “El Sur” dwells within that tension. Its melody seems to have waited inside the listener for years, requiring these musicians to pronounce it. Favata’s soprano carries a warm tone through each key change, altering its shape as the harmony breaks into tessellated color. No player merely accompanies another. The music passes among them as collective evidence from a dream whose witnesses recall different aspects of the same event.

That equality of attention gives the album much of its emotional authority. “Escuchame” brings Favata’s clarinet forward with grave tenderness, carrying a winding theme that seems to hold dust in its mouth and an old key beneath its tongue. Gandhi places minute percussive touches around it, while Maltana’s bass turns through the harmony with unforced intelligence. Di Bonaventura and Peghin shelter the theme without enclosing it. The performance reveals an ethical awareness in which each voice makes space for another to become more fully itself. Such intimacy rises from years spent hearing the fraction of a second before a friend decides where to place a note.

The quintet’s history therefore enters the recording as an invisible player. In “Donde nace el viento,” Peghin’s delicate strumming draws reverie into three dimensions, each chord swaying above an imagined Mediterranean courtyard. Favata’s soprano gives the moving air a throat, while marine salt flavors every unspoken word with distant relatives and childhoods spent along the shore. Recorded at Bavaria Studios in Munich in January 2026 with Manfred Eicher producing, Ritornare is Favata’s first album for ECM and Atlantico’s most finely illuminated acoustic statement. Eicher allows silence to acquire mass while every tone retains its contour. Sardinia remains audible beneath the compositions, and other continents move within their rhythmic memory as currents rather than destinations.

This spacious acoustic world carries echoes of classic ECM sessions without collapsing into homage. Ralph Towner and Egberto Gismonti can be sensed in its meeting of lyricism and space. John Surman occupies a nearby constellation, his shadow passing across the low reeds. “Sine nomine” opens a cinematic chamber where Dino Saluzzi’s tenderness meets the patient visual imagination associated with Theo Angelopoulos. Yet influence behaves as nourishment rather than costume. Associations surface and blur into Atlantico’s own language, one assembled from human contact and therefore resistant to distillation. The composition’s title, therefore, feels apt. It moves through identities without accepting permanent residence in any of them, leaving an outline that the mind continues to fill with speculation.

“Milonga del Sol” extends that cinematic feeling through a haunted dance, holding sweetness near an ache it never attempts to cure. Eleni Karaindrou’s bittersweet gravity hovers at the edge, then Favata veers into improvisational flight and loosens the reference’s claim. His phrases persuade gravity to reconsider its loyalties while the band maintains an exquisite balance between ritual and surprise. Di Bonaventura compresses whole lifetimes of longing into the bellows, and Peghin answers with translucent chords. Gandhi and Maltana keep the dance moving from centuries beneath their feet.

Such ambiguity gives Ritornare its peculiar attraction. The music recognizes places the listener has never visited, awakening the impression of a past that belongs to no single lineage. “Ventana” sharpens that paradox through an unprecedented view of a landscape already seen through other eyes. Its window also examines the act of looking, the secret appetite through which attention changes its object. Favata frames the view, then disrupts it, before the ensemble follows him into a terrain where recognition morphs into estrangement. Familiar materials are angled until their concealed surfaces catch the light. The piece asks how long a life can contain beauty before the mind finally notices, leaving a window open inside the question and the observer exposed to an answering gaze.

“Albatros” gathers the album’s virtues into a final statement of astonishing restraint. The tender throatiness of bass clarinet gives the piece an earthbound gait that brightens from within. When the soprano opens above it, the instrument spreads a wing across the morning and calls toward the sea, a prayer for the hidden catch to rise. The ensemble avoids spectacle, allowing desire to lose its dominion in favor of something selfless. Impeccably performed and recorded, Ritornare contains some of the most enduring melodies to emerge from a Manfred Eicher production in recent years, making it a persuasive contender for ECM album of the year. Its deeper triumph resists ranking. Perhaps the self is only the harbor’s temporary arrangement of ropes and salt-worn voices, held together long enough for one vessel to recognize another. Far beneath that exchange, the drowned map turns over in its sleep, and every border drawn upon it opens a patient ear.

V/A: Peace Anthems

| Tyran Grillo

At a moment when peace can feel less a condition than a distant country, Peace Anthems asks where the journey toward it might begin. Conceived by producer Sun Chung to mark the fifth anniversary of Red Hook Records, the album gathers artists from across the label’s community around that urgent question. Their answers offer no settled definition and make no claim to resolution. Instead, they open a field of possibilities in which peace becomes connection and reconciliation, transformation and repair. It emerges as the difficult practice of listening to what cannot readily be resolved, then remaining present once certainty has withdrawn.

Across these pieces, notes and silences become measures of shared time. Musical elders travel beside restless sonic architects before the forces of history carry them toward their own fruitful destinations. Qasim Naqvi’s modular synthesizer enters into conversation with the trumpet of Wadada Leo Smith, while Taylor Deupree’s sound design enfolds Kalia Vandever’s trombone and Thomas Morgan’s bass. BlankFor.ms creates electronic architectures for Moor Mother’s voice; Sungjae Son draws tenor saxophone and bass clarinet into the earthly respiration of a pump organ. Elsewhere, Martha Deribe and Simone Maggio cultivate intimacy through voice and Fender Rhodes, Amina Claudine Myers joins Smith at the volatile border between composition and improvisation, and Andrew Cyrille gives rhythm the force of embodied memory. Kit Downes, alone at the pipe organ, searches its vast interior for signals that may never reach their intended recipients. Each artist stretches time toward a place where another relation to one another, and to the land beneath us, might become imaginable. This music does not retreat into an untouched sanctuary. It works for armistice while wars rage, binding breath to breath and carrying hope beyond abstraction.

Naqvi’s “Al Badawi” establishes the album’s moral hue through lush, droning synthesizer pads whose gradual movement makes stillness feel hard won. Tranquility appears here as a human baseline that daily friction and global violence repeatedly disturb. The scale may change, but the rupture remains recognizable: an interruption at the edge of thought, a misunderstanding allowed to harden, a conflict granted enough authority to consume entire lives. Naqvi gathers the scattered self without pretending it can remain whole indefinitely. Calm is held close through the night, only to be discovered missing at dawn. Yet the piece refuses despair. Within its suspended harmonies, the world’s talons are shaved down to harmless nubs, and danger briefly loses the grammar through which it makes itself understood. That reprieve carries ethical weight. Rest becomes preparation rather than escape, a way of restoring the attention required to recognize another person’s suffering.

The stillness of “Al Badawi” passes almost imperceptibly into the more unsettled suspension of “Wither Light and Airy,” where Deupree, Vandever, and Morgan occupy the interval between oppression and liberation. No one can tell whether the music is about to rise or surrender to gravity. Vandever’s trombone mourns the loss of its own innocence against the glittering ash of circumstance and time, its phrases opening into spaces that Deupree handles with meticulous care. Morgan’s bass moves through fields of memory, finding pathways among what has survived and what can no longer be recovered. Their restraint protects the piece from easy consolation. Freedom remains close enough to sense yet too fragile to claim, and the uncertainty gives every gesture consequence. A tone may become a hand extended across distance; the surrounding silence may expose how far that hand still has to travel.

Language enters this unstable territory through “Imaginary Lines,” the collaboration between Moor Mother and BlankFor.ms. Moor Mother’s spoken meditations fracture across electronic textures, while words are torn and restored in the image of political movements whose promises of restitution arrive incomplete. The piece recalls the emotional surgery of early Laurie Anderson but also the sisterhood of Gloria Anzaldúa, sidestepping the evasions of gentle vocabulary by allowing darkness to speak in its own register. Questions of responsibility coil through watery electronic wormholes, pursuing resolutions that remain beyond reach. Underneath them lies a meditation on birth and on those who make birth possible, whether by care or sacrifice. The title exposes the lethal authority granted to invented boundaries. A line conceived in the mind can be enforced upon a body; an abstraction can divide a riverbank or turn a neighbor into an enemy. BlankFor.ms makes those borders audible as distortions in the signal, while Moor Mother searches the damaged transmission for a vocabulary capable of reaching the living.

That search continues in the two collaborations between Smith and Myers, whose respect for inhalation gives every exhalation the gravity of testimony. “Sonic Requiem” hangs in space among the bodies it seeks to acknowledge before diplomacy sweeps them beneath its mound-laden rug. Smith’s trumpet arrives gravelly and worn, bearing the abrasion of a voice required to repeat what power has chosen not to hear. Myers responds with a pianistic touch of extraordinary delicacy, offering sincerity without sentimentality. Their pauses carry names that official parlance has reduced to figures. “Reflections on Palestine” brings a deeper fire to the surface, clarifying its melodic intentions early while preserving the risk of improvisation. Smith and Myers approach grief as a living organism rather than a classified document. The music refuses to turn suffering into scenery. It asks who receives the privilege of being mourned as an individual, then searches for forms spacious enough to restore singularity to the dead.

Sungjae Son’s “The River of Imjin” shifts the album’s center toward a landscape marked by division. Reeds and pump organ generate an inward-facing hymnody drawn from the soil, as though the earth has absorbed every border imposed upon it and begun quietly revising the map. Son touches the harmonic satisfaction of a physiognomy in motion before the music settles upon a countenance recognizably our own, filled with wonder at our capacity for love and shock at the selfishness that so often accompanies it. The river bears memory across jurisdictions that insist memory must stop at the checkpoint. Its current exposes the arrogance of borders by continuing through them, preserving an older knowledge of connection without erasing the pain accumulated along its banks.

Human tenderness acquires a more intimate scale in “War Is Over,” where Deribe’s voice meets Maggio’s Fender Rhodes with remarkable restraint. Anger remains present, but the performers refuse to let it become the only mouthpiece available to the wounded. Their quietness anticipates the labor awaiting everyone once the wreckage reveals itself through clearing smoke. Deribe sings from within the protective space of a lullaby, and maternal care becomes a form of resistance against forces that regard vulnerability as expendable. Maggio supplies warmth without disguising the damage. The title, therefore, reads less as a declaration than as a responsibility. Ending combat cannot repair a nervous system trained to fear the next explosion, return the missing to their families, rebuild a home, or persuade a child that sleep is safe. Peace must enter the smallest rooms and relearn the weight of an unguarded body.

“Three Years Later,” performed by Naqvi, Smith, and Cyrille, confronts the endurance contained within that responsibility. Cyrille’s Afro-Caribbean-inflected pattern on cowbell and toms expands the album’s geographic consciousness, making rhythm a vessel for histories that official borders cannot contain. Naqvi’s electronics inhabit the fundament, while Smith’s trumpet addresses the firmament with a cry shaped by survival. The title recognizes time’s failure to guarantee healing. Three years may mark recovery or merely measure how long an injury has gone unanswered. Cyrille’s pulse keeps both possibilities in motion. Memory does not stand still here but travels through the body and teaches the hands a different way to count.

Kit Downes inscribes the collection’s musical arc with two solo pipe organ works that push the instrument beyond its inherited associations with ceremony and permanence. “Into the Woods – 3 Weary Calls” suggests animals dying beyond human sight, their fluted swan songs thinning through the darkness. The organ becomes habitat as much as instrument, its pipes opening hollows where exhausted voices seek shelter. In “Closing Meditation for OM,” a train whistle enters the imagination as a breath of life while higher callings burn through their brief trajectories, leaving the sky emptied of reassurance. Downes finds frailty inside the organ’s immensity. Air moves through engineered chambers, yet the result feels mortal, uncertain of its destination and aware that every call depends upon someone choosing to answer.

With all proceeds benefiting the International Red Cross, Peace Anthems converts contemplation into material aid. Its modest scale enlarges its purpose, joining aesthetic attention to the practical work of sustaining lives. The album understands that peace cannot remain an attractive principle preserved beyond the reach of consequence. It requires maintenance, protection, and a willingness to recognize whose security has been purchased at the expense of another person’s fear. These musicians provide no anthem that a crowd could sing without complication. They offer something more demanding: a rehearsal for attention, conducted in tones porous enough to admit grief and disciplined enough to keep grief from becoming destiny.

Perhaps peace begins where imagination accepts responsibility for what it has imagined. Every border started as a thought. So did every refuge. These artists, each a force of good in their own right, leave us with that unnerving symmetry, placing creation and destruction frighteningly close together. The same human faculty that invents a reason to exclude can conceive a door, then build it wide enough for the stranger carrying the name we have not yet learned. An anthem earns its name by making room for voices history tried to render posthumous. Here, that space becomes an empty altar, upon which listening lays the first stone.

(For more on Sun Chung and the Red Hook label, see my recent interview with him for All About Jazz here.)

Andy Sheppard: Salt Catchers (ECM 2856)

| Tyran Grillo

Andy Sheppard
Salt Catchers

Andy Sheppard tenor and soprano saxophones
Rita Marcotulli piano
Michel Benita double bass
Recorded March 2025, Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI, Lugano
Engineer: Stefano Amerio
Cover photo: Jan Kricke
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: September 11, 2026

Across six ECM releases, Andy Sheppard has treated ensemble form as an instrument in and of itself, altering the ambient details around his reeds so each setting reveals a different nuance of his breath. The quintet on Movements in Colour surrounded him with shifting densities, Trio Libero pursued more intense conversation, and his quartet with Eivind Aarset opened electronic passageways through acoustic terrain. Most enduringly, the trio with Carla Bley and Steve Swallow placed his lyricism inside a world where wit could hold hands with pathos.

Salt Catchers begins another chapter, bringing the English saxophonist together with Italian pianist Rita Marcotulli and French bassist Michel Benita for the first time as a unit. Their cohesion suggests that certain ensembles exist before they are convened, awaiting only the studio in which their latent testimony can be documented. The drummerless format retains a trace of Sheppard’s years with Bley, whose “Lawns” is the sole nonoriginal among nine pieces, yet memory is a hidden foundation rather than a governing premise.

Most of the album was written during the pandemic, as Sheppard moved from the guitar-centered environments of earlier projects toward chamber music’s concentrated intimacy. Marcotulli opens fissures within composed material, while Benita touches the folkloric roots of Sheppard’s writing without disturbing the earth around them.

A Portuguese shadow passes through Salt Catchers. Now living near Lisbon, Sheppard draws on the gravity of saudade, allowing longing to organize melodies that function as complete emotional bodies rather than maps for improvisation. Their romanticism carries something of John Martyn, absorbed so thoroughly that its source has become molecular. Recorded in Lugano in March 2025 under Manfred Eicher’s direction, the album gathers geography and recollection into a deceptively calm surface, demanding that every note justify the silence it displaces.

“Elevation” establishes this economy with piano that raises a transparent structure around the listener. Sheppard’s tenor enters above its own shadow, offering a melody whose openness contains the ache of distance, while Benita traces the invisible contours that keep it suspended. An echo of Charles Lloyd inhabits Sheppard’s spacious tone, though time may be the deeper influence: decades of listening move through his sound as sediment, leaving the line clear as the past gathers beneath it.

Where “Elevation” offers a horizon, “Lawns” provides an address. Bley’s composition flowers into a suburban psalm, its chords carrying the holiness of ordinary refuge. Marcotulli’s phrases hold survival and repose within the same circumference, as Sheppard’s breath-softened lower register gives the melody human grain and Benita places each note with tender exactitude. With each iteration, the harmony resembles a childhood house whose rooms change dimensions whenever one tries to enter.

The title track begins beneath the keyboard’s conventional surface. Reaching into dampened piano strings, Marcotulli releases metallic murmurs and half-born harmonics. Sheppard’s soprano evokes salt as residue and preservative, the crystal in which an evaporated sea continues thinking. When the musicians reach the concluding unison, three private trajectories have discovered a single edge.

The Portuguese current nears the surface in “Encantos,” whose buoyancy gives Sheppard’s melody an unforced radiance. Enchantment survives through partial concealment: the tune gives itself freely while keeping a central chamber locked. Later, “Salgado” answers with understated montuno inflections and geometric harmonizations.

“Draw You In Stars” opens with a luminous piano arpeggio, a spiral staircase whose destination recedes as it rises. Sheppard’s tenor exposes a vulnerable grain before he and piano meet, then part for Benita’s restrained, quick-minded solo. Marcotulli moves farther from the harmonic center, seeking a truth faithful to instability.

Marcotulli opens “This Too – Three Hills” like a book at an unknown page, and Sheppard enters carrying the next sentence in his breath. The hills become folds in memory, elevations made by all the mind has buried unevenly. As the playing dissolves into breath and pause, each phrase embraces uncertainty instead of converting it into drama.

Absence takes intimate form in “Those That Left.” Piano and bass communicate across a missing center, exchanging signals whose tenderness derives from what they decline to resolve. Marcotulli’s dream logic brings light to grief’s edges without making loss decorative. “Irene” then gathers bass and soprano into a supple dance before piano widens the emotional field. Elegant without sweetness, it draws darkness inside radiance, knowing beauty does not cancel sorrow but grants it another form of circulation.

Marcotulli is the session’s revelation, turning modest gestures into portals through which whole emotional cartographies appear. She does not decorate the music; she alters its physics. Benita gives every contour a quiet gravitational center, allowing Sheppard’s melodies to travel without losing human proportion.

The title contains the key. Salt preserves by entering what it preserves, becoming inseparable from the body it protects. These musicians practice a related attention: each voice receives the others deeply enough to be changed, yet no identity dissolves. Listening becomes a willingness to let another person’s silence speak for itself. Perhaps civilization begins there, in the discipline required to let another person’s unfinished phrase live.

La Buissonne Studios (RJAL 397003)

| Tyran Grillo

Released in 2005 as a promotion-only compilation, La Buissonne Studios occupies the elusive third chamber in the catalogue attached to the celebrated recording complex at Pernes-les-Fontaines. Its history was built through improbable labor. Gérard de Haro and two childhood friends first recorded musicians in a modest space at L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue; an encounter with bassist Barre Phillips sharpened their desire for a professional studio. They found a hangar and house in Pernes, worked with acoustician Marc Beaufils, and opened La Buissonne on September 1, 1987.

Since then, its rooms have helped define modern European jazz as a silent collaborator, familiar to ECM devotees yet present across numerous labels. Only one ECM recording appears here. That scarcity clarifies the compilation’s purpose: less a house sampler than a map of circulation, showing how one acoustic language can pass through radically different bodies without imposing a uniform complexion. Many selections arrive as excerpts, fragments of fresco carrying enough pigment to imply the civilization around them.

The Jean-Philippe Viret Trio opens one inward passage with “Par Tous Les Temps,” as heard on Étant donnés (Sketch SKE 333025). Édouard Ferlet sets an arpeggio in motion as Viret’s double bass moves beneath him and Antoine Banville’s cymbals scatter radiance across the pulse. A processional shimmer brushes Steve Reich’s language without surrendering jazz’s appetite for contingency.

The Sketch label reappears through Michel Graillier and Riccardo Del Fra’s “Blue Wind,” via Soft Talk (SKE 333014), where piano and bass achieve rare conversational transparency. The inward gravity deepens in Stéphan Oliva’s “It Should Have Happened a Long Time Ago,” from Fantasm (RCA Victor 74321739252). Bruno Chevillon bows his bass until sorrow acquires grain, bowing to minute percussion marks from Paul Motian at the edge of Oliva’s piano.

That private concentration eventually seeks a public body. Under Bernard Struber’s direction, the Orchestre Régional de Jazz d’Alsace turns “Le Phare,” the title piece of its Enja album (ENJ 93592), into a festival whose gaiety contains structural rigor. Guest Louis Sclavis adds another hinge; brass and reeds exult while the rhythmic center remains lucid.

Claude Barthélemy finds harsher collectivity in “Mama Barth Blues,” recorded with the Orchestre National de Jazz for La fête de l’eau (Le Chant du monde 2741228). His guitar strikes the ONJ’s polished mass and releases gorgeous unrest. Andy Emler’s MegaOctet pushes the principle beyond decorum. The previously unreleased “Bal Tribal,” featuring Marc Ducret’s acoustic guitar, wanders through a hospitable delirium where direction keeps changing its name. On “4/4 Cm3/Horizons,” included on Dreams in Tune (Nocturne NTCD 361), Médéric Collignon’s voice becomes percussion and alarm signal before breaking into ecstatic fracture, as Emler’s ensemble treats meter as tensile sculpture.

Another family of pieces gathers around the exposed voice and its difficult bargain with intimacy. “Down by Love,” from Youn Sun Nah’s So I Am… (In Circum Girum ICG 0204-1), holds self-possession and vulnerability within the same trembling filament. David Neerman’s vibraphone opens suspended space, while Benjamin Moussay, Yoni Zelnik, and David Georgelet alter its depth and footing. Nah sings from the point where command begins to quiver, and that quiver becomes sovereign territory.

John Greaves approaches the art of song from a more autumnal interior on “The Price We Pay,” preserved on The Trouble with Happiness (Le Chant du monde 274 11 99). Sophia Domancich’s piano and Vincent Courtois’s cello enlarge the chamber in which mortality has taken a seat. Lucilla Galeazzi brings fiercer blood to “La Luz de Oro,” heard on Trio Rouge (Intuition INT 33532). Her diction tears a bright incision through the darkness, Courtois answers with pizzicato cello, and Michel Godard’s serpent coils through the lower register.

The geographic imagination then widens. Daniel Mille’s “Entre chiens et loups,” the title track of his Emarcy release (013535-2), lets the accordion carry an entire horizon inside its bellows. Jules Bikoko’s double bass provides the patient floor; Jean-Christophe Maillard moves between piano and guitar, with Minino Garay’s percussion tracing paths through the dust.

Carlos Maza’s “Guanabacoa,” appearing on Fidelidad (Emarcy 016109-2), opens the frame across a broad percussive field. Maza’s piano, voice, and cries of acclamation make awareness sudden and bodily before the excerpt withdraws. Jean-Marie Machado’s “Tua-Badalada,” taken from Leve leve muito leve (Hortus/Didier Maes H 100), gathers singers and wind players into modal pageantry. A trace of Carl Orff passes through the writing, though Machado’s fairytale has stranger laws, its tower built downward into recollection.

Scale contracts as smaller ensembles excavate dream matter. François Raulin’s “Légère Houle,” on Trois plans sur la comète (HatOLOGY 582), places his piano beside Bruno Chevillon’s bass and lets François Corneloup’s baritone saxophone roam through the clearing they create. Voice doubling introduces a child’s candor, turning wonder into a form of exact knowledge.

Claude Tchamitchian’s “Rêve. Hommage à Sayat Nova,” drawn from Le monde est une fenêtre (Émouvance EMV 1018), brings his double bass into dialogue with Gaguik Mouradian’s kamancheh across a narrow abyss. Earth and ether exchange substances; wood dreams in mineral. Louis Sclavis and Vincent Courtois achieve related concentration in “Grand Comme le Monde,” a clarinet-and-cello theme drawn from Denis Gheerbrant’s film Grands comme le monde rather than a conventionally catalogued album. Its brevity gives it the density of an inscription.

Rhythm itself becomes philosophy in Daniel Humair’s unreleased “Drum Solo,” drawn from the Work sessions for Sketch. Humair sends thought through skins and metal, asking how consciousness might proceed if it had no nouns, only impact and decay. Sparkle carries shadow, even as momentum becomes a life force whose destination recedes.

Eric Watson’s “Tryst,” documented on Full Metal Quartet (Owl Records 159 572-2), answers with the perilous discipline of the ballad. Mark Dresser’s bass and Ed Thigpen’s drums create a foundation supple enough to disappear. Watson’s piano offers tenderness without sentimentality, leaving Bennie Wallace’s tenor free to roughen the lyric surface. His sound bears the abrasion of a truth dragged across distance, and the quartet’s restraint makes every fracture audible.

Two larger visions convert audibility into conscience. Jon Balke’s North Magnetic Orchestra supplies the compilation’s lone ECM emissary with “Falling,” included on Diverted Travels (ECM 1886). Strings gather around Per Jørgensen’s wordless voice, creating a lullaby whose destination has been erased from the map. The piece suspends arrival, asking listening to survive without possession.

Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra carries that suspension into historical responsibility on Bill Frisell’s “Throughout,” heard on Not in Our Name (Verve B0004949-02). Although the album was recorded in Rome, Gérard de Haro mixed it and La Buissonne later hosted its mastering, proof that the studio’s authorship sometimes begins after the musicians leave the recording floor. Carla Bley shapes the opening with Haden, Chris Cheek and the horns unfold in varying densities of duration, and Steve Cardenas threads guitar through the restrained ache. The performance never confuses beauty with innocence. Its tenderness has political weight because every lucid tone carries the pressure of what lucidity obliges us to see.

François Couturier, Jean-Marc Larché, and Jean-Louis Matinier gather those obligations into “Epilogue Requiem,” part of Music for a While (Émouvance EMV 1017). After Couturier’s piano opens in dark concentration, Matinier’s accordion and Larché’s soprano saxophone gradually lift the music into another register, though hope arrives with scars still legible in its grammar. The title promises an ending, while the performance quietly disputes the jurisdiction of such a concept.

Across this rare disc, La Buissonne’s crystal clarity makes room for separateness, preserving the pressure around a cymbal stroke, the darkness under a bowed note, and the breath before a singer risks becoming audible. The microphone receives vibration, but also ancestry and unborn meanings gathering around a phrase. What the studio preserves is that instant when something personal becomes an aperture. Through it, one can almost glimpse a future archaeology in which our civilization is known neither by its monuments nor by the catastrophes it mistook for destiny, but by the care with which a room once held a vanishing note and refused to let its fragility count as disappearance.

Ralph Alessi: A Sun That Never Sets (ECM 2864)

| Tyran Grillo

Ralph Alessi
A Sun That Never Sets

Ralph Alessi trumpet
Joseph Alessi trombone
Matt Mitchell piano
John Hébert double bass
Ches Smith drums, vibraphone
Recorded February 2025
Oktaven Audio Studio, Mount Vernon, NY
Engineer: Ryan Streber
Mixed by Manfred Eicher, Ralph Alessi, and Michael Hinreiner (engineer)
Bavaria Musikstudios, München
Cover design: Sascha Kleis
Produced by Ralph Alessi and Manfred Eicher
Release date: July 3, 2026

On A Sun That Never Sets, Ralph Alessi expands the architecture of his quartet by adding a second horn: his brother Joseph, a trombonist best known for his work with the New York Philharmonic. Their shared history gives the music an immediate intimacy, but the album draws its energy from the differences between their voices. Joseph is more than a featured guest. His burnished tone changes the ensemble’s center of gravity and reveals new colors in Ralph’s compositions. The result is an album concerned with kinship, not only between brothers but also between freedom and form.

Pianist Matt Mitchell and bassist John Hébert return alongside Ches Smith, who moves between drums and vibraphone. The musicians navigate Alessi’s writing with confidence, allowing angular ideas to open into clearings where lyricism can emerge without becoming sentimental. The influences of Ornette Coleman and Igor Stravinsky remain present without sounding imitative. Coleman’s example encourages melodic liberty, while Stravinsky’s is evident in the music’s rhythmic disruptions and structural precision. These forces help the album sound cerebral but never clinical. Each musician receives ample space, yet every contribution remains connected to the group’s larger movement.

The title track establishes this language through a precise theme that gradually loosens into exploratory improvisation. Smith’s vibraphone and Hébert’s bass approach the music from different angles, creating productive uncertainty over where its rhythmic and harmonic direction originates. Mitchell supports Alessi’s trumpet without restricting it, enabling the bandleader to move beyond the tune’s apparent boundaries while retaining a thread back to its central idea. The performance captures the strength of a quintet that can surrender a fixed destination without losing its sense of direction. Unity comes through the negotiation of contrasting approaches rather than strict agreement.

Several pieces turn that tension inward. “Nothing Is Dead” suspends piano and vibraphone within an elusive harmonic atmosphere, allowing its meaning to emerge gradually. Alessi’s trumpet is assured but guarded, conveying emotional weight without forcing a single interpretation. In “Ether,” Smith’s brushed drumming opens space beneath Mitchell’s wide range of touch, attracting fragments of memory into the present.

The closing “Behind Clouds” extends this fascination with concealed presence. Over Hébert’s steady, intoning bass, the ensemble proceeds with melodic care. Placed beside “Nothing Is Dead,” it creates correspondence across the record, as both compositions examine how absence can remain active.

The brothers’ most prominent duets, “Relaxed Misery” and “Of Trees (Variations on a Theme by TB),” bring the album’s interest in inherited language into sharper focus. Trumpet and trombone circle one another through muted exchanges, sometimes converging and sometimes letting the space between them carry the conversation. “Relaxed Misery” earns the sardonic tension of its title, turning discomfort into buoyancy and giving Ralph room for some of his most animated soloing. “Of Trees” is more oblique, developing its theme through disparities that keep the source partly hidden. The pieces share a jaunty, alert quality, but their emotional charge comes from the brothers’ ability to recognize and challenge one another in real time.

A familial current also runs through “Twichild,” “Slow Dancing Bear” and “Duck Face,” whose titles suggest private humor and childhood memory. Each uses wonder as a disciplined way of reconsidering familiar materials. “Twichild” follows delicate, winding lines toward a more inward mood, with Ralph’s precision made unusually vulnerable. “Slow Dancing Bear” finds tenderness in an awkward rhythmic gait, allowing weight and grace to coexist. On “Duck Face,” Hébert provides a perceptive countervoice before Smith’s solo releases the tune from its established footing. Together, the tracks treat play as a vital form of communication.

“Sweet Spot” occupies a warmer region. Its spacious, glowing color recalls Enrico Rava, while Mitchell’s piano creates a suspended foundation beneath the horns. Joseph’s trombone contributes a dusky depth that approaches a lullaby without becoming overly sweet. Small harmonic disturbances keep the tune’s balance alive. “Transitional Imagery,” by contrast, converts instability into propulsion. Mitchell and the rhythm section move with fierce clarity, shapeshifting as they proceed. The title could describe Alessi’s broader method: his music is most alive when one shape gives way to another.

Across these 11 originals, Alessi’s fluency as a player and composer gains a more varied context. The expanded ensemble shows how strongly his music depends on the willingness to offer an unfinished thought and let another musician transform it. His writing gives each player a distinct orbit while maintaining a field of mutual consequence. Freedom, therefore, carries responsibility, since every spontaneous gesture changes what is available to the others.

Steve Swallow: Winter Songs (ECM 2879)

| Tyran Grillo

Steve Swallow
Winter Songs

Mike Rodriguez trumpet
Chris Cheek tenor saxophone
Steve Cardenas guitar
Gil Goldstein piano
Steve Swallow bass
Adam Nussbaum drums
Recorded September 2024 at Sear Sound, New York
Engineer: Tyler McDiarmid
Cover photo: Luciano Rossetti
An ECM Production
Release date: June 26, 2026

“I was there when this music was written. In fact, my hand held the pencil. I began with the need to do something to fill each long day, and music rushed forward to sustain me. Before Winter Songs I had given music whatever I could, but as I made this album the tables turned: it gave me what I needed. Music is elemental, like the air we breathe.”
–Steve Swallow

Winter Songs is one of those albums that arrives quietly, carrying the circumstances that shaped it. Steve Swallow’s first true leader date since 2013’s Into The Woodwork, and his first appearance on the label since contributing to John Scofield’s Swallow Tales and Carla Bley’s Life Goes On in 2020, does not present itself as a comeback. Instead, it sounds like music assembled among close friends, with each idea given time to settle into its clearest form. Its restraint, therefore, evokes the confidence of an artist with nothing left to prove.

Swallow is joined by saxophonist Chris Cheek, trumpeter Mike Rodriguez, drummer Adam Nussbaum, guitarist Steve Cardenas, and pianist Gil Goldstein. These longtime collaborators approach the material with patience and mutual trust. The horns add color without crowding the arrangements, Cardenas and Goldstein outline the harmony, and Nussbaum keeps the time flexible. Swallow’s distinctive electric bass moves through the ensemble with unforced grace. He rarely demands the foreground, but the group continually turns around the quiet authority of his phrasing. No one treats space as something that must be filled, and that shared worldview gives the performances much of their character.

Recorded at Sear Sound in New York in September 2024, Winter Songs suggests a warm room in a cold climate. Fluid swing, reflective balladry, and chamber-like precision coexist throughout. The improvisations never mistake intensity for discovery. Instead, the music finds momentum in subtle shifts of weight, tone, and emphasis, with ideas passing naturally between the players. Its calm is active rather than static, sustained by close attention to every change in direction.

The titles, taking simple form as spelled-out numbers, leave the music open to association. “One” and “Nine,” positioned at opposite ends of the sequence, share a luminous tenderness. “One” moves with understated assurance. Rodriguez delivers a sensitive solo, and Cheek follows with what feels like a thoughtful reply. Their exchange shows how two melodic voices can meet without competing. “Nine” carries that generosity into a more spacious setting. Piano and guitar establish a delicate atmosphere before Rodriguez’s trumpet gives the piece direction and weight. Its grace comes from the ensemble’s trust: each musician holds a part of the tangram, but the complete shape emerges from their cumulative outcome.

The more rhythmically driven pieces are equally controlled. “Two” is a midtempo performance whose strengths become clearer with repeated listening. Swallow navigates its shifting harmonies so easily that their complexity feels instinctive. Goldstein finds fresh routes through the composition, while Nussbaum’s cymbals add brightness and motion. Cheek’s concise solo is especially compelling; his pauses give the phrases room to register. “Four” builds on a rounded backbeat and restrained, slow-moving funk. The horns braid their lines naturally before Goldstein explores the harmonic implications of their exchange. The groove is steady but never forceful. “Six” releases more of the energy held in reserve elsewhere, allowing Cheek to stretch across a broader emotional range. Rodriguez takes up that momentum in his own ascending solo. Even at its most animated, however, the ensemble remains disciplined.

Cardenas takes the foreground on “Five,” using light, pastel-toned voicings that add color without unnecessary density. Cheek enters with a solo that builds gradually while preserving the performance’s even keel. On “Eight,” Goldstein creates small openings in the piano texture, and Cheek responds with measured emotion. In both tracks, timbre shapes how the compositions develop.

“Three” and “Seven” lead into the album’s deepest interior. “Three” unfolds at an unhurried pace under Goldstein’s guidance, with Cardenas adding brief, pointillistic guitar figures near the end. The melody feels patient, lucid, and seasoned without calling attention to its maturity. Its force comes from clarity rather than drama, and the arrangement trusts the listener to meet it at that level. “Seven” brings Swallow most clearly into focus. He states the melody against Goldstein’s soft-pedaled chords and Cardenas’s fluid picking, creating the album’s quiet fulcrum. Swallow makes the tune sound discovered rather than declared, while Goldstein and Cardenas surround it with carefully placed details.

The numerical titles might suggest order, but Swallow uses them to emphasize relationship rather than measurement. Each piece gains meaning through the musicians’ responses to one another. The end effect is an album that is modest in presentation but substantial in feeling, a late-career statement whose assurance lies in how little it needs to insist on itself.