Articles by Sue Yang
Philippe Crettien: Healthy Trail
by Sue Yang
Philippe Crettien's Healthy Trail is a chordless trio album built around implication. Written for saxophone, bass and drums, it removes piano and guitar from the ensemble and makes that open space the source of the music's tension, clarity and risk. Harmony emerges through motion: Barry Smith's bass establishing temporary ground, Crettien's saxophone placing shifting triadic colors above it, and Mike Connors' drums adjusting the pressure before any single center becomes too settled. The record asks the listener to hear harmony ...
Continue ReadingKevin Kastning: Unreal City
by Sue Yang
Unreal City opens as though the room itself has begun to listen. Before theme, pulse, or recognizable structure settles into place, Kevin Kastning and Phil Grenadier direct attention toward the grain of musical events: the weight of a string attack, the bloom of a brass tone, the residue left by resonance, and the silence that follows, quietly changing the next sound. The album's intensity comes less from volume or density than from the precision with which two musicians make each ...
Continue ReadingSerge Rogalski: This Is Not a Blues
by Sue Yang
A title can sometimes work like a trapdoor. This Is Not a Blues begins by denying a form that never quite disappears. Serge Rogalski's live studio EP does not play blues in any conventional sense, but the blues remains present as residue: in the bent pressure of the guitar, in the blunt force of repeated figures, in the bodily insistence of pulse, and in the refusal to let abstraction become weightless. The title is therefore less a disclaimer than a ...
Continue ReadingMichael William Gilbert: Wheel Within the Wheel
by Sue Yang
A circle is never only a circle in Michael William Gilbert's Wheel Within the Wheel. It is a ritual form, a listening mechanism, a rotating architecture of memory and pulse. Across six compact pieces, Gilbert turns repetition into inquiry: not the mechanical recurrence of an unchanged object, but the gradual revelation of difference within return. The album's title provides more than a visual metaphor. Wheel Within the Wheel is built from nested cycles: loops inside loops, pulses inside ...
Continue ReadingJoe Lovano: Paramount Quartet
by Sue Yang
The risk with a new Joe Lovano recording is that listeners may hear the résumé before the band. The Blue Note Records years, the long triangular history with Paul Motian and Bill Frisell, and the more austere ECM Records terrain of Trio Tapestry (2019) all sit close to the surface of Lovano's sound. Paramount Quartet quickly makes that kind of listening insufficient. This is not Lovano arranging familiar authority around new personnel; it is a band record in which his ...
Continue ReadingMark Turner: Patternmaster
by Sue Yang
Mark Turner has never been a saxophonist of easy declarations. His tenor rarely shouts for attention; instead, it moves through the music like a thought searching for its most exact shape. On Patternmaster, the follow-up to Return From The Stars (ECM Records, 2022), that familiar restraint remains, but the quartet sounds more road-tested, more physically alert. This is still Turner's cool, high-wire music, but the wire now trembles with a little more heat. The album title helps frame ...
Continue ReadingBill Evans: Nardis
by Sue Yang
Bill Evans turns “Nardis" into something far more tense and combustible on At The Montreux Jazz Festival (Verve Records, 1968). Anyone coming to this performance looking only for the lyrical, introspective Evans will hear a trio working closer to the edge. Jack DeJohnette keeps the music in restless motion, Eddie Gomez pushes the bass into a fully melodic role, and Evans shapes the piece with dark modal suspense, sudden flares and beautifully judged pauses. What makes this version so memorable ...
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