Articles by Tyran Grillo
Sigurd Hole: Elvesang
by Tyran Grillo
Sigurd Hole's Elvesang enacts the crossing of a threshold where music loosens its claim on sound alone and begins to behave like weather, memory, and landscape thinking aloud. Recorded in the small Ytre Rendal church near Lake Lomnessjøen, not far from Hole's childhood home in Rendalen, the album carries the unmistakable feeling of return. Not nostalgia exactly, but a deeper settling, as if the bass itself remembers the grain of the wood around it and the cold air pressing against ...
Continue ReadingSigurd Hole Trio: Encounters
by Tyran Grillo
Encounters unfolds as a single, patiently breathed arc rather than a sequence of events. From the outset, the trio situates itself firmly in the world, not observing it from a distance but moving within it, attentive to texture, ritual, and change. Sigurd Hole's compositional voice is quietly astonishing in this regard and finds life-giving partnership in violinist Hakon Aase (also playing kantele) and drummer Jarle Vespestad. He writes music that feels discovered rather than imposed, as though these forms were ...
Continue ReadingDaniel Bennett Group: We Are the Orchestra
by Tyran Grillo
To step into Daniel Bennett's music is to agree, quietly and without protest, to loosen your grip on the obvious. You enter as you might a half-lit room where conversations are already underway, familiar yet oddly angled, tethered to reality but leaning just far enough away from it to feel enchanted. This album opens that door with “Loose Fitting Spare Tire," a title that feels less like a joke than a thesis statement. From the first moments of this duo ...
Continue ReadingListening: Music, Movement, Mind
by Tyran Grillo
Listening: Music, Movement, Mind Nik Bärtsch 352 Pages ISBN: 9783037786703 Lars Müller Publishers 2021 If Swiss pianist Nik Bärtsch, best known as the mastermind--or perhaps, more fittingly, the beginnermind--behind “Ronin," an ever-evolving interpretive organism for his modular compositions, has long seemed an enigmatic figure, then Listening: Music, Movement, Mind may well serve as the missing link between the man and the mystery. Beneath the disarming subtitle “A Useless Guide for Everything" lies ...
Continue ReadingNik Bärtsch’s Ronin with Sumie Kaneko at MIT
by Tyran Grillo
Nik Bärtsch's Ronin with Sumie Kaneko Thomas Tull Concert HallMassachusetts Institute of TechnologyBoston, MAOctober 4, 2025 At the close of a week-long residency at MIT--where Swiss pianist Nik Bärtsch served as both muse and subject to a group of “freaky scientists," as he affectionately called them--something extraordinary came to fruition. The program had seen Bärtsch immersed in neurological studies, AI-driven musical experiments and a collaborative workshop between his band Ronin and the university's own ...
Continue ReadingLucian Ban and Mat Maneri at the Northampton Center for the Arts
by Tyran Grillo
Lucian Ban & Mat Maneri Northampton Center for the ArtsNorthampton, Massachusetts October 1, 2025 In the early 20th century and throughout his life, composer Béla Bartók endeavored to document the folk songs of Hungary and beyond. Of the approximately 10,000 examples he preserved on wax cylinders and later transcribed, a significant handful reflected the dying traditions of his native land, along with the people and places in which they might have been consigned were it ...
Continue ReadingProducer Sun Chung: Always Listening for a Story
by Tyran Grillo
On April 28, 2021, a quiet masterpiece marked the end of an era--and the beginning of another. Hanamichi was to be the last studio recording of Japanese pianist Masabumi Kikuchi, who died in 2015, two years after its creation. And yet, while its sweeter overtones struck balance in the bitterness of his absence, the album marked the birth of Red Hook Records, an independent label run by producer Sun Chung. Kikuchi's uncanny ability to tell a story was an organic ...
Continue ReadingPhil Freeman Talks Jazz in the 21st Century
by Tyran Grillo
If music journalism had an award for honesty, it would belong firmly on the shelf of Phil Freeman alongside his latest book, Ugly Beauty. And if I had a choice about the design of said award, I might opt for a gold-plated boxing glove to symbolize the gut punches his words deliver. Not because his approach is violent, but because his tough love for the music makes us stronger. Like the music he describes, the book eschews pandering appreciation in ...
Continue ReadingPatricia Barber: Clique
by Tyran Grillo
These time-honored songs, lovingly curated, arranged, and performed by pianist/vocalist Patricia Barber and her band, are at last seeing the light of day when the world needs them more than ever. Pristinely recorded, Clique assembles what began as encores to live performances into an experience all its own. The album comes out of the same sessions that gave us Higher (see review for All About Jazz here), which immersed the fortunate listener in a world shaped by art song and ...
Continue ReadingDaniel Bennett Group: New York Nerve
by Tyran Grillo
"This is not a pandemic record, but it is," says Daniel Bennett about his latest album. What might come across as a paradoxical statement is, from the multi-instrumentalist and composer's lips, a poignant assessment of his creative turn. “I didn't go on pause at all. I did my best as a human, using common sense while taking the blessings I had in my life. I didn't want to be consumed by fear. No disrespect, of course, to everyone who has ...
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