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.
The Tallis Scholars Peter Phillips director Recorded in concert July 14, 2017 Basilica di San Marco, Venice Production: Controcampo Produzioni srl, Venezia Director: Pierandrea Gagliardi Cameramen: Paolo Bassi, Claudio Panighel, Beniamino Fenzi, Pierre Girardi Video/Audio recording: Flavio Piva, Antonio Loriga (Waterloo SAS, Milano) Lighting: Antonio Loriga Color grading and video editing: Stefano Codin Audio editing and mastering: Diego Bergamini Project idea and supervision: Minas Lourian, Centro Studi e Documentazione della Cultura Armena Cover photo: Juan Hitters An ECM Production Release date: October 9, 2026
My soul doth magnify the Lord, And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour. –Luke 1:46-47
Some music carries its architecture within it; other music waits for a building to reveal the full shape of its thought. In the Basilica di San Marco, every note enters a space crowded with memory, where gold mosaics hold the afterimage of vanished liturgies. The Tallis Scholars’ concert there on July 14, 2017, begins with Palestrina’s Magnificat primi toni. His counterpoint discovers chambers that masonry alone could never contain. Each vocal line retains its identity while yielding part of its solitude to the others. Peter Phillips founded the ensemble in 1973, beginning a relationship with Renaissance polyphony that helped reshape modern hearing of this repertoire. Under his direction, precision serves the music’s spiritual purpose. San Marco’s reverberation gathers the voices after the singers release them, and the building appears to continue the Magnificat on its own.
Issued as a CD/Blu-ray set, Live in Venice captures the exchange between human expressivity and consecrated space. The film establishes the basilica’s scale, while the recording follows sound into its temporal depths, and the beautiful photography of Juan Hitters (used here with his permission) zooms in on artful details. Palestrina’s radiance narrows into Arvo Pärt’s Nunc dimittis, composed in 2001 and based on Simeon’s words after he has held the infant Christ: “Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace.” A single interval seems to contain the old man’s relinquishment, with mortal fatigue resting beside fulfilled promise. The Tallis Scholars honor Pärt’s restraint, allowing every note to cross a wide interior distance before the next appears. Simeon cradles eternity in perishable hands; the choir ushers his farewell in breath that must vanish.
The program marked the 450th anniversary of Claudio Monteverdi’s birth in 2017. Phillips describes it as a meeting of “old favourites and some very new ideas,” though the sequence coheres by its tracing of sacred expression across changing musical languages. Monteverdi stands at the threshold between Renaissance counterpoint and Baroque drama. His Messa a quattro voci da cappella, SV 190, arose during his tenure as maestro di cappella at St. Mark’s, although its date and intended occasion remain unknown. Published posthumously in 1650, the Mass uses the stile antico while admitting the expressive flexibility of a newer age. The singers here reveal that tension without turning the work into an exhibition of control. The Gloria pulls praise upward; the Sanctus opens the upper register into lucid fire. Through the Agnus Dei, harmony searches for the Lamb it already names. Monteverdi preserves the language of liturgy by allowing it to change from within.
Gregorio Allegri’s Miserere mei, Deus carries the program into a penitential theater governed by distance. Composed in the 1630s for the papal choir’s Holy Week services in the Sistine Chapel, this setting of Psalm 51 became famous through a performance tradition whose ornaments were guarded more closely than the written page. Repeated formulas based on the tonus peregrinus alternate plainsong with polyphonic groups placed apart from one another. Allegri’s falsobordone keeps the text clear, giving contrition the severity of a wound without disguise. In San Marco, the separated choirs seem divided by the distance between sin and forgiveness, yet the psalm repeatedly crosses that abyss. Soprano Amy Haworth’s high C arrives as a vertical disturbance, a needle of brightness through the building’s shadow. The note belongs to a version shaped by oral transmission and later reconstruction, rather than a precise preservation of Allegri’s score. And while many people’s reference, including my own, has long been the Tallis Scholars’ recording encountered through the 1980 US release on Angel Records, this rendition possesses a startling immediacy.
Two works by Komitas Vardapet alter the concert’s spiritual geography. Born Soghomon Soghomonian, Komitas was an Armenian priest whose work as a composer and ethnomusicologist preserved his people’s musical inheritance. His music is included in solidarity with Venice’s Armenian community and heritage. Surp-Surp, his setting of the Sanctus from the Armenian Divine Liturgy, draws on the modal contour of chant and surrounds the inherited melody with lucid choral harmony. A droning foundation supports the upper voices as they lift the word “holy” toward a realm beyond possession. Sirt im sasani, or My Heart Trembles, pivots inward. This 13th-century hymn for Maundy Thursday contemplates Judas’s betrayal of Christ. Komitas surrounds the chant with spare, dark-hued harmonies, preserved here in all their tenderness. Christ kneels before the feet of the man who will sell him, suspending judgment within an unbearable act of humility. Komitas brings Armenian sacred memory into the basilica as a living claim upon Christian attention, asking whether worship can approach a wounded past without making suffering decorative.
Antonio Lotti, another maestro di cappella at St. Mark’s, extends the Venetian tradition into the 18th century. His Crucifixus à 8, drawn from a Credo in F major, sets the account of Christ’s crucifixion and burial for eight independent voices. Overlapping entries and chromatic movement build pressure across the choir. Suspensions tighten, then resolve only far enough to make the next dissonance more intimate. Lotti’s evocation of grief takes on disciplined physical force, while resurrection remains beyond the piece’s visible edge. Monteverdi’s Crucifixus from Selva morale e spirituale follows with a harder surface, its syllables bearing the weight of the body named by the Creed. Adoramus te Christe turns toward redemption, and Cantate Domino releases a more buoyant energy. The sequence folds praise back into the memory of the cross, keeping crucifixion and resurrection adjacent without blending them.
The program closes with Lotti’s Crucifixus à 10 from the Credo in D minor. Ten vocal lines create a denser field of imitative phrases and suspensions, but Phillips keeps its inner motion clear. The performance makes audible the Christian scandal that divine glory can inhabit a tortured body and that salvation enters history through an execution outside the city wall. Lotti’s final sonority remains answerable to a fallen world. Across the concert, Palestrina’s abundance, Pärt’s relinquishment, Monteverdi’s liturgical drama, Allegri’s plea, and Komitas’s bruised devotion prepare the ear for this unresolved radiance. The music crosses centuries without smoothing their fractures, gathering difference into communion. San Marco presses itself like an ear against the sealed tomb, where new life begins as a change in the acoustics of the grave, already turning absence into an organ of hearing.
Memory has its own methods of excavation. What one generation buries, another may uncover without knowing what it has found. In Beginning Middle End, the soil of Sicily holds a family history whose meanings are still being negotiated: the narrator’s grandmother once worked here on an archaeological dig, and now the narrator arrives with her daughter, carrying the aftermath of a failed marriage. Elsewhere, her mother’s memories are slipping away. Between that loss and the accumulating impressions of a child approaching adolescence, she must reckon with how much of their shared past she can claim to understand. Across four generations of women, recollection moves unevenly, gathering in one life as it recedes from another. The search for origins becomes an inquiry into the stories we entrust to our children, and what happens when they begin to tell them back.
The island brings a different scale to this uncertainty. Its ruins and volcanic disturbances place the women’s lives alongside histories that exceed any family’s capacity to remember, while encounters with migrants and shopkeepers keep those histories tethered to the present. Yet the novel’s intimacy rests in smaller exchanges: a meal prepared together or the shifting allegiances of a chess game. Through these daily negotiations, the daughter begins to exert her own narrative authority. Her questions alter the direction of their travels and unsettle the mother’s account of how they came to be here. The narrator is struck by the permeability of beginnings and endings, and the inarticulability of what comes between. Belonging reaches her as “an echo of someone else’s belonging.” Later, she muses that perhaps the middle is all there is. Her answers remain as fragmentary as her current sense of self, drawing from their new yet ancient surroundings as if strands of memory could still be woven into tapestries for their becoming. As Mount Etna erupts in the backdrop, a looming threat and a point of fascination, the mood proceeds in curls and thermals.
In many ways, the novel is as much about the machinations behind its own creation as the story it seeks to create. “Why is the language of fiction writing so full of real estate?” the narrator asks early on, bringing a valid concern to our penchant for thick description. The question also exposes the possessive grammar of storytelling: to establish a setting can become a way of claiming it; to explain a daughter can become a way of occupying her future. Her resistance to journalists and critics who draw a straight, unbreakable line between her life and her words belongs to this same inquiry. “I have, of course, used slivers of my own life,” she admits, because “I wouldn’t know what else to write with.” Lived experience becomes the building material of fiction, retaining edges that can cut the hand arranging it. As she contemplates how her daughter, now ripped from the master narrative of family life, must learn to navigate the world anew, her own position as a daughter passes beneath the distorted magnifying glass of retrospection.
The novel, accordingly, unfolds in a strangely beautiful vignette style, each passage carrying its own title while flowing into the larger story taking shape in real time. Their separateness gives uncertainty room to breathe. An image can arrive before its significance becomes apparent; a thought may find its consequence several pages later. Many of these images suggest the universe and its natural phenomena, sometimes surreal and distant, because a solar system in need of a new name is forming between mother and daughter. They are trying to reinvent their lives in a home away from home, learning the pull of a changed relation without knowing where its orbit will lead. The daughter’s questions exert a force the mother can neither calculate nor keep outside the story. What appears to be fragmentation gradually reveals the gravitational field of another consciousness entering the composition.
The narrator quickly realizes that there are things she would rather withhold from her daughter, or reveal only through the lens of obfuscation, where the author’s art takes over in service of life. Invoking Greek theater, she observes that “the violence happens backstage.” Concealment becomes a problem of form, asking us to consider what an omission protects and what it allows to continue unchallenged. The daughter’s desire for a Polaroid camera, whose images eventually make themselves metaphysically known at the back of the book, establishes a nuanced reciprocity between what one observes and what one makes of the observation. Her photographs give another gaze a place within the broader account, preserving evidence she cannot entirely explain. All the while, they are caught up in moments of inconspicuous portent: a mosquito crushed on a pillow; a ladybug occupying a wall. A plume hangs in the sky in the wake of Etna’s wrath, the residue of a thought too large for the earth to contain.
Staying in the apartment of the mother’s lover, a pianist and collector of Greek and Roman classics, they begin reading through the works from which the novel’s section titles are taken. The warrior mythos of the Odyssey brings its troubled promise of return, while the destruction of the Aeneid presses loss into the service of a future homeland. Between these monumental arrangements, the unrest of Trojan Women exposes the lives left beneath heroic accomplishment. The myths hover as a constant pool beneath the action, into which the characters may dip a hand or a foot and emerge with something substantial to hold in the present moment. Reading becomes one of their daily negotiations, with the daughter’s presence changing what can be asked of an ancient text. An epic opens differently when a child is there to question the account it gives of survival.
One day, mother and daughter attend a performance of Trojan Women, with incidental music by Greek composer Eleni Karaindrou. Brief as it is, the sequence feels strangely intimate and private, reducing the novel to a single kernel of curiosity from which it seems to sprout all over again. Euripides’ tragedy, first performed in 415 BCE, attends to the captive women after Troy’s destruction, granting the aftermath of conquest its devastating duration. The scene in Luiselli’s novel is also the scene of an earthquake, shaking experience to its foundations and drawing the act of witnessing into the instability of the ground beneath it. What the spectators encounter onstage passes into their bodies.
In my earlier review of Karaindrou’s Trojan Women, I heard its choral odes as vertebrae of story and music and traced the way its related themes changed their instrumental clothing from one visage to another. Returning to those impressions through Luiselli, I find a new resonance in that fluidity. The family’s stories also acquire different bodies as they pass between women, each voice altering the weight of what it carries. Karaindrou’s chorus gathers suffering into a shared utterance, opening a space beyond the solitary narrator’s reach. Within the novel, that possibility matters acutely: the mother must find a form that can hold her anguish without requiring her daughter to become its instrument. Music lends this difficulty a tangible melodic beauty, allowing what cannot yet be articulated to enter the room.
When the pianist returns to his apartment and works his way into their lives, he creates another ripple in that water. His words also cut theirs short, however, introducing a disruption that cannot hold its own in their orbit. The room’s borrowed hospitality begins to reveal its conditions. Read alongside the narrator’s question about fiction and real estate, this disturbance makes possession painfully immediate, entangling the right to speak with the right to inhabit. As mother and daughter plan their escape, things turn inward and outward simultaneously. Their departure gives their relation room to continue, even as it requires them to leave the shelter where it has been taking shape. The road carries them toward family history while allowing the daughter’s questions to travel beyond the acoustics of someone else’s home.
The narrator wants to “write a reverse catastrophe: from the end of the world to the beginning of it; from the loss of memory to the first image of the world imprinted on a big brown eye.” As details of her lineage emerge, whether through an archaeological discovery or a shipwreck, we find places in which to fit our own. Their road trip begins returning a piece of genetic history to its origins, and the geography without becomes less important than the border crossings within. Yet the first image belongs to an eye the mother cannot see through. When the daughter picks up the proverbial pen and finishes the story, the direction of inheritance changes. Beginnings and endings take another shape through the people to whom we pass slivers of ourselves, our identities blurring in the watering eyes of humanity writ large. The mother’s longing for an origin must make room for someone else’s beginning.
The book ends with postcards and photographs, its archival images standing beside the daughter’s Polaroids. These materials extend the transfer of narrative authority into physical margins. The older photograph carries the burden of having outlived its occasion; the instant image is already separating from the moment that produced it. Neither supplies the whole life we might ask it to recover. Their incompleteness asks us to attend to the distance between evidence and invention, looking closely without converting every surface into an explanation. The daughter’s images preserve the freedom of an attention that has wandered beyond the mother’s prose. At the edge of the frame, something remains in motion, declining the stillness we have mistaken for understanding.
There is also a sonic parallel to the novel in the form of recordings made on site in Sicily and the Aeolian Islands by Charles de Montebello and Ricardo Giraldo. Alongside raw field recordings, 12 sound mixes form “constellations” between locations. A timeline follows the novel’s structure, while a separate soundscape offers its sonic environment without narration. The daughter’s postcards can be read and heard; photographs accompany videos. Whether immersing oneself underwater at Basiluzzo or in the evening ambience of Caltagirone, there is much to be felt and heard. The more one explores these places, the more they reveal the people who live and work there, whose lives intersect ephemerally to become part of the landscapes they inhabit. This is palpable in Catania’s fish market, but even in the absence of flesh, humanity can be felt in the winds of Scopello and the eruptions of Mount Etna. The assembled portrait lets the setting exceed its description, occupying the ear with pressures that have no obligation to become a plot.
That possibility returns us to the narrator’s reverse catastrophe, now turned toward a future she cannot arrange. Perhaps the daughter will one day listen to these waters and think of no one in her family. A sound her mother associated with loss may enter her life under an entirely different sign. The thought hurts precisely where love has mistaken remembrance for its only means of moving on. Beneath the sea, an unheard movement passes through stone; above it, a child is growing into the right to forget. The strands woven into the tapestry of her becoming may loosen without destroying it. An inheritance might endure most fully at the moment it ceases to point toward the person who gave it. The hand opens, allowing something loved to escape the duty of returning.
In Steve Reich’s music, repetition is a method of survival. A phrase returns carrying the microscopic damage of having been heard, while attention acquires an unfamiliar capacity for desire. Recordings on ECM brings that reciprocal transformation back to vinyl, gathering the three albums ECM released between 1978 and 1982. Revisiting the collection issued on CD in 2016, this three-LP edition arrives on October 2, 2026, one day shy of the composer’s 90th birthday. Sourced from the original analogue master tapes, the records reproduce their original sleeves; archival photographs accompany Paul Griffiths’s liner notes. Inside the music, strict procedures open improbable apertures, and counting becomes a form of surrender.
The history behind these recordings retains its own dissonance. Reich had developed an unmistakable musical language before the recording industry found a durable place for it. Manfred Eicher brought Music for 18 Musicians, recorded for Deutsche Grammophon but left unreleased, into circulation through ECM in 1978. His intervention gave a public address to an imagination exceeding the available categories. Across the collection, gestures migrate between works, acquiring unfamiliar consequences in changed surroundings. What initially registers as an insistent surface gradually admits depth, until the ear discovers a staircase folded into a single step.
Music for 18 Musicians establishes this permeability with extraordinary clarity. Its opening cycle of eleven chords provides the harmonic material that subsequent sections expand, and the eventual return closes an immense parenthesis. Pianos and mallet instruments sustain a continuous pulse while voices and winds measure phrases through the limits of breath. The mechanical subdivision of time meets the lung’s finite generosity, allowing rigor to develop a vulnerable interior. Wordless singing moves through the instrumental fabric with translucent tenderness; clarinets continue its contours until the boundary between body and instrument becomes difficult to locate. The ensemble’s collective alertness supplies much of the recording’s emotional force. A shifting accent redirects a passage without disturbing its pulse, while the vibraphone’s cues turn communication into audible structure. Individual timbres retain their grain within a beautifully concentrated field. During the work’s nearly hour-long span, our sense of succession loosens. The clock has entered its own reflection and found soil there to grow roots.
The next album changes the proportions of this experience. Music for a Large Ensemble distributes its activity across a broader instrumental field, maintaining remarkable buoyancy amid the layered motion. Strings contribute a vibrating tension; trumpet chords open luminous pockets above the pulse. The vibraphone’s resonance gives the surrounding activity a polished edge without draining its tactile life. Apparent abundance rests on meticulous relationships, allowing the smallest adjustment to alter the lung capacity of the whole. Every entrance renews the agreement holding this intricate structure together, making consistency an active expression of shared musical purpose.
Violin Phase concentrates the inquiry into a more abrasive intimacy. Its repeated figure slips out of alignment with its doubles, generating patterns through the resulting weave. Shem Guibbory’s bow retains a palpable friction, giving the process an embodied urgency. Reiteration rubs the phrase against itself until hidden contours become audible; an interval opens its mouth, and another melody steps through. Where attention lands determines the shape of the encounter. Octet introduces a delicacy of articulation that feels newly spacious. The flute illuminates the texture from within, while clarinet lines give its motion a supple underside. Its abrupt ending leaves the ear suspended, still furnishing a room from which the walls have vanished.
With Tehillim, the voice assumes the authority of language. Reich’s engagement with his Jewish heritage places Hebrew psalm texts at the composition’s center, allowing their rhythms to determine melodic movement. Meaning inhabits the pulse as an ancestral presence. The opening interplay of singing and percussion has a searching energy, and the unfolding canons give that energy increasingly intricate dimensions. Through the work’s four parts, exhilaration gathers a contemplative gravity; the slower third part suspends the forward impulse without extinguishing its inner motion. The performance gives each carefully shaped phrase an edge of discovery. In the closing hallelujahs, praise becomes bodily expenditure, a word passing through the throat until its syllables seem capable of bearing the singer aloft.
Returning to these performances, I continue to hear excess within the supposedly minimal. Reich makes limited materials sustain an astonishing density of experience, and his musicians give that density a human scale. This vinyl edition offers a renewed occasion to inhabit their concentration. Even the necessary interruptions sharpen awareness of what persists after the sound stops. The mind follows a process until following becomes participation; the body answers before interpretation has finished assembling its credentials. Eventually, a pulse reaches some unlit interior of the listener and finds that it has been expected. Within the groove, the future rehearses its first breath.
Anthony Baldino’s music seems to emerge from two adjoining rooms whose shared wall has become susceptible to the mold of determination. In one, he designs sound and programs synthesizers for Ludwig Göransson on projects including Venom, Tenet, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, and Transformers: Rise of the Beasts. In the other, he sits alone among modular systems and vintage machines, teaching private grief to speak through oscillators. Each practice contaminates the other productively. Blockbuster precision enters his independent work, while the freedoms of Los Angeles’ electronic underground haunt his commercial craft. Across his second solo album, CONVEYOR, sound becomes a substance caught between sculpture and combustion, carrying dread before language can domesticate it.
The album began with an image made unbearable by its clarity: Baldino’s mother standing on a conveyor belt traveling toward death while he remains powerless to stop it. The vision gathered force amid his grandfather’s passing, his dog’s death, anxiety surrounding his parents’ mortality, and the suspicion that the world had entered a terminal corridor. Anguish becomes the imperceptible mechanism beneath the day, moving everyone we love toward an absence the mind cannot inhabit. Baldino built these pieces around his Eurorack system and Deckard’s Dream, adding outmoded synthesizers while threading recordings of his grandfather and dog through music informed by IDM, industrial music, metal, and film scores. Released into the circuitry, their voices become unstable presences, fragments of affection wandering between frequencies, close enough to disturb the current yet too distant to hold.
Within the record’s implied world, a nameless protagonist wakes beneath the failing lights of a city abandoned by chronology. Streets advertise pleasures whose consumers have vanished. Towers burn with corporate insignia while elevators ascend without passengers. Screens sell eternity to the dead. “For Death To Come” opens the blinds on this exhausted metropolis, its rolling bass carrying the patience of a verdict already delivered. Fractured transmissions cross the horizon while raw tones scrape silence into finer forms of silence. Outside, a crimson glow divides the skyline. Time has frozen without becoming merciful: debris hangs above an avenue while an explosion waits inside its unfinished flower. Movement belongs only to the solitary figure walking through the galactic pause before some unseen hand restarts the catastrophe. Baldino’s synths turn escape into a spiritual problem. Survival promises only another conscious mile.
“Leave The Reminder” appears farther on as a district of radiant keys and nervous percussion, where memory stutters under the weight of being carried forward. The central figure enters a club beneath a ruined transit station. No bodies occupy the floor, although automated light and bass keep the room dancing. Chord swells preserve an era when listening required no public evidence and a song could live entirely within its recipient. Disembodied impulses gather into a hymn for the unborn, moving without witnesses or the tribunal of visibility. Inside the rhythm, a tender, damaged recording surfaces, then dissolves before identity fastens around it. Remembrance cannot retrieve the lost, the traveler realizes. It gives absence a nervous system, which Baldino crafts from gleaming abrasion.
Beyond the station lies the technological undertow of “Dark As Sleep,” a void generated by machines seeking release from matter. The city thins into scorched plains threaded with fiber-optic roots. Satellites drag broken halos through orbit; buried servers dream on behalf of a species that misplaced its future. As the traveler crosses, inner and outer life collapse. Angels rise with ash in their mouths, demons descend carrying instruments of impossible mercy, and their encounter opens a passage between rival eternities. To dream here is to live on one’s own terms, yet freedom exacts a toll. Each step requires surrendering a former self, leaving translucent skins behind. Metallic convulsions suggest that perseverance becomes another machine when pain is merely outrun. Baldino refuses easy deliverance. His traveler presses onward while facing every discarded version of the person they once believed they had to be.
That reckoning leads to “A Sudden Crumbling Into Ruin,” where gunfire and corroded broadcasts collapse history into simultaneous debris. The wanderer enters a battlefield whose causes have been erased. Symbol-less flags remain; orders crackle from speakers whose armies became dust generations earlier. Fragmentary memories mingle with interrupted signals until private regret and public failure share a frequency. Unlaid plans accumulate as phantom roads promising destinations that disappeared before departure. Every route converges upon “Holding, Waiting,” an immense terminal built for an answer that may never arrive. Departure boards cycle through extinct alphabets, and benches hold the impressions of bodies absent for centuries. Beneath an artificial moon, broken politics washes into white noise, letting the heart redraw its coordinates with each beat. At the edge of perception, a wing flutters behind a sealed gate, carrying the final tremor of a love that never entered history.
Baldino makes this middle passage especially potent by resisting narrative comfort. The record’s machinery convulses with pangs of sorrow, yet never impersonates a human mourner. Its compassion emerges through other means. Dissonance excavates chambers beneath feeling, revealing that dread can contain awe without ceasing to be dread. CONVEYOR understands cinematic scale as an instrument of intimacy: the horizon expands until one remembered voice becomes its gravitational center. What initially resembles apocalypse gradually reveals itself as consciousness stripped of distraction, a psychic wasteland where mortality cannot be outsourced to abstraction. The protagonist’s journey therefore bends inward even as it continues across physical terrain. Every ruined structure is also a failed defense against impermanence. Every transmission asks whether love survives as memory or whether memory is simply the shape love takes after losing its object.
Then “Lifted From Lifetimes Away” alters the album’s gravity. The terminal ceiling opens onto a realm outside inherited time, and the traveler rises through it without triumph. Death recedes to a whisper on the lips of figures stranded beyond distant access points, but immortality has not arrived. What changes is the central figure’s relation to motion. Until this point, the conveyor has represented helpless passage, the mechanism carrying beloved bodies toward disappearance. From above, its belts form a vast script written across the wasteland, each line composed of lives migrating beside one another for brief intervals. No single rider can halt the system, though every touch changes what the next person carries. The traveler has searched for a refuge beyond loss and instead discovers continuity within contact: a hand steadied and an animal’s devotion translated into current. Mercy becomes less a pardon than a method of transmission.
“Live Forever” rises from a cloud of dissonance as the traveler returns to the surface. Synthesizers push through the haze until accumulated pain breaks into an electrified physical release. The title sheds its boastful armor. Living forever no longer means securing a permanent place on the leaderboard of recall. It names the instant when a finite life passes something tender into another finite life, accepting alteration as the cost of endurance. The traveler walks back through the city while time resumes around them. Debris completes its fall. The waiting explosion spends its force against the horizon. Screens dim while elevators stop; the underground club releases its final pulse into empty streets. None of this resembles restoration. The wasteland remains wounded, yet its wounds cease demanding an impossible cure. They become openings through which the dead continue to modify the living.
This is where Baldino’s technical discipline and private mourning align most closely. His machines do not conquer mortality. They translate its terrible rhythm into a helpless luminosity that never pretends to save us. The protagonist finally reaches the conveyor seen at the journey’s beginning and steps onto it willingly. Ahead stands the mother figure, still traveling beyond reach. Behind gather the grandfather and the dog beside innumerable strangers whose losses fed the city’s electrical veins. The traveler cannot move closer to any of them because the distances remain fixed. Yet beneath everyone’s feet, the belt carries more than bodies toward an ending. It carries gestures forward, including those too small to recognize themselves as inheritance.
The unexpected refuge of CONVEYOR lies in this reversal. Mortality, the thief stalking love, also provides the limit that permits love to be given, because a gift without an ending would never have to leave its giver. The lone figure opens an empty hand and discovers that emptiness is not proof of failure. It is evidence that something has been passed on. In the final illumination, solace becomes neither destination nor escape but the courage to serve as a temporary passage for what no one can own. The conveyor continues beneath the stars, bearing each life into darkness, while through the traveler moves a warmth shared by the dead but owned by no one.
András Schiff Blüthner piano Recorded March 2021 Kammermusiksaal Hermann J. Abs des Beethoven-Haus, Bonn Engineer: Stephan Schellmann Production coordination: Guido Gorna Cover photo: Péter Nádas Produced by Manfred Eicher Release date: September 18, 2026
The distance between Johannes Brahms’s early and late piano music supplies the organizing principle for András Schiff’s latest addition to his ECM New Series traversal of the 19th-century German composer. Schiff begins with the long-lost Albumblatt, written when Brahms was 20 for the friendship album of Göttingen music director Arnold Wehner and later adapted for the Horn Trio, Op. 40. Youthful possibility enters a silent argument with late style, and four intervening decades press upon every note.
Schiff plays a beautifully preserved 1859 Blüthner whose warmth never becomes cosmetic and whose bass register retains an almost archaeological presence. His booklet notes unite personal reflection with close attention to Brahms’s striations, clarifying the interpretive dialogue at play throughout. The instrument extends Schiff’s intimate correspondence with Brahms across earlier ECM recordings, including the Clarinet Sonatas with Jörg Widmann and the Piano Concertos with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. His Violin Sonatas with Yuuko Shiokawa occupy another chapter. Here, the Albumblatt, marked Allegro con espressione, rocks gently beneath phrases of fluid grace. Melancholy passes through sunlit warmth, leaving consolation truer for the pain dissolved within it. Schiff shapes each phrase with the curvature of handwriting, as though the young composer’s hand still pressed against the page.
The Eight Piano Pieces, Op. 76, composed largely in 1878 after Brahms had neglected solo piano music for more than a decade, contract the dimensions of his earlier sonatas while enlarging their interiors. The opening F-sharp-minor Capriccio surges forward, tightened by a fleeting allusion to the finale of Mozart’s “Jupiter” Symphony that Schiff allows to flicker at the edge of recognition. The jocular B-minor Capriccio rearranges the floor with volatile accents; the C-sharp-minor Capriccio drives every gesture deeper into the keyboard. In the A-minor Intermezzo, an ashen chorale shelters unexpected tenderness. By the ecstatic C-major finale, exuberance carries knowledge of entropy, its brightness sharpened by everything it has survived.
The Fantasies, Op. 116, written in 1892, leave D minor and ultimately return there, each departure altering the point of origin. Schiff lends the opening Capriccio muscular clarity, preserving its contrapuntal grain, while the A-minor Intermezzo finds knowing innocence in folk inflection. The G-minor Capriccio tears open this fragile space with chopped rhythms and distant calls, its ferocity generated through fracture rather than brute force. Brahms originally conceived the central E-major Intermezzo as a nocturne, and its suspended consciousness seems to contemplate contemplation itself. The concluding D-minor Capriccio encloses a vulnerable middle within confrontational outer material.
The Intermezzi, Op. 117, inhabit an even more concentrated emotional world. Brahms associated the opening piece with a Scottish ballad in which a mother laments her absent child, and Schiff lets its rocking motion retain the gravity of that imagined voice. Comfort and grief share one pulse; the lower register answers from beneath ordinary thought. In the B-flat-minor Intermezzo, harmony erodes certainty from within as the phrases darken by degrees. Schiff allows the music freedom to breathe without turning sorrow into theater. Tragedy has been compressed beyond narrative, an ancient text reduced to scorched fragments whose missing sentences outweigh the surviving words.
With the Six Piano Pieces, Op. 118, beauty and desolation become inseparable. The celebrated A-major Intermezzo seems almost too delicate to hold, yet its slow undulation possesses immense structural strength. Schiff sustains its melodic line patiently, allowing inner voices to rise and vanish at their own pace. The vigorous G-minor Ballade, alone among Brahms’s late piano works in bearing that title, expands the dramatic perimeter without breaking the cycle’s inward concentration. By the E-flat-minor Intermezzo, descending figures burrow beneath pitch into a mineral stratum where lament existed before any creature possessed a voice.
Schiff never imposes a single idea of lateness upon this music. His Brahms can be severe or playful, with both qualities transformed by proximity to silence. The Blüthner’s colors disclose the sensual complexity within decay, with the treble carrying an especially pale radiance. Pedaling becomes controlled haunting, one sonority remaining faintly present inside the next. Musical time accumulates rather than passes. Beneath Schiff’s fingers, every chord contains a small excavation of those that preceded it.
The Four Piano Pieces, Op. 119, draw that sentiment toward its most enigmatic conclusion. The opening B-minor Intermezzo begins with descending thirds that Schoenberg praised as evidence of Brahms’s radical structural imagination. The succeeding Intermezzi expose the machinery by which memory converts loss into form, reducing expression to the weight of time bearing down upon intervals.
The concluding Rhapsody in E-flat major initially promises public confidence and heroic breadth, then gradually reveals another intention. Schiff notes the rarity of a work that begins in major and ends in minor. Such a turn overturns the old promise that struggle earns radiance, replacing triumph with a truth too lucid to require consolation. Schiff gives the closing pages a thrilling inevitability, letting five and a half minutes contain the contour of a lifetime without forcing that life into a paltry moral framework.
What begins with a young man writing in a friend’s guestbook arrives at an older man dismantling the mechanisms of arrival. Between them, the piano becomes a theory of consciousness: themes remember futures they have yet to enter, while harmonies age within seconds. Schiff makes this impossible chronology audible, joining pages separated by 40 years through one unfinished act of attention. Time becomes a manuscript written on both sides, its ink bleeding through until every beginning bears the watermark of its conclusion. Somewhere within that translucent page, the 20-year-old Brahms writes a melody for Arnold Wehner, unaware that an old man is listening from the reverse. The older Brahms answers in a minor key whose cadence seals no tomb. He addresses the past as a living stranger, entrusting us with the possibility that memory belongs less to those who have lived than to whatever, across centuries, keeps them alive.
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.
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 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.
