Articles by Tyran Grillo
Yelena Eckemoff: Adventures of the Wildflower
by Tyran Grillo
Yelena Eckemoff's Adventures of the Wildflower begins beneath the thinnest layer of perception. Its governing question concerns who receives recognition and what can survive being misread. A columbine enters the world as possibility. Decreed a weed, she later flowers beyond that verdict. Eckemoff turns this botanical fable into a meditation on exclusion and hidden continuity. Her piano supplies the narrative intelligence, lucid but never omniscient. Jarmo Saari colors the margins with guitars and theremin, then makes the glass harp speak in ...
Continue ReadingYelena Eckemoff: Rosendals Garden
by Tyran Grillo
A garden is one of civilization's gentlest fictions, a piece of earth coaxed into pattern while still permitted to breathe beyond the gardener's intentions. That tension between cultivation and freedom animates Rosendals Garden, pianist and composer Yelena Eckemoff's 23rd album since 2010. The project, animated as always by a vivid personal concept, distills her travels through Sweden into something more elusive than an itinerary. Each destination enters as a physical place and emerges as a chamber of consciousness, steeped in ...
Continue ReadingSun Chung of Red Hook Records: Listening at the Threshold
by Tyran Grillo
Sun Chung's Red Hook Records has, in just five years, become one of the most quietly consequential imprints in contemporary creative music. Its significance lies not in volume, market saturation, or stylistic branding, but in something rarer: a producer's ear turned into an aesthetic world. At a time when recorded music is often treated as content, detached from process and material presence, Chung has built a label around the opposite premise. A Red Hook album asks to be heard as ...
Continue ReadingWolfgang Muthspiel: ATLAS
by Tyran Grillo
There is a special kind of intimacy that can arise when a trio dispenses with the obvious rhythmic anchor of drums. In the right hands, that absence makes every gesture structurally important. On Atlas, guitarist Wolfgang Muthspiel, trumpeter Mario Rom, and pianist Colin Vallon make precisely that kind of space. Their music is chamber-like in its balance and jazz-rooted in its freedom, with several traditions moving easily through the frame. The album's title is apt not because these pieces try to ...
Continue ReadingAlicia Hall Moran: Coldblooded
by Tyran Grillo
Take a heart and cast it into water. Lower the temperature. Watch the surface tighten until motion turns into sculpture. What remains are rings expanding outward, movements frozen into memories. These are the contours listeners encounter on Coldblooded, the third meta-statement from singer and composer Alicia Hall Moran. Sound travels across its surface as a skate blade tests structural integrity. History breathes beneath that ice, even as traumas wait behind winter's glaze. And so, the music begins its slow migration ...
Continue ReadingIngi Bjarni Skúlason: Hope
by Tyran Grillo
On Hope, Icelandic pianist and composer Ingi Bjarni Skulason opens a quiet interior, one shaped by listening as much as by sound. Joined by bassist Anders Jormin, guitarist Hilmar Jensson, and drummer Magnus Trygvason Eliassen, he presents a quartet steeped in introspection, where each note seems to arrive after careful consideration, as if feeling its way forward. The album gathers itself around loss, tracing the many chambers of grief that followed the death of his mother, yet it never settles ...
Continue ReadingBram De Looze, Felix Henkelhausen, Eric McPherson: Vice Versa II - Rebounce
by Tyran Grillo
Belgian pianist Bram De Looze's Vice Versa project is one that gradually becomes visible, the way a constellation appears only after your eyes adjust to the night. The music feels as if it had always been orbiting somewhere just beyond earshot, waiting for the right trio of creatives to call it into being. At the center of it all, De Looze's playing carries a sensitivity to hidden paths. Reaching outward across cities and oceans, he did not recruit ...
Continue ReadingYelena Eckemoff: Lions
by Tyran Grillo
Pianist Yelena Eckemoff, a melodic marvel whose gift for atmosphere has been apparent from the beginning, has never felt comfortable settling into a single definition. Rooted in classicalism yet never bound by its strictures, she has carved a singular path through the world of jazz, guided by a restless imagination that treats genre as porous terrain rather than fenced land. Her music arises from a place where labels dissolve and instinct takes over, a place recognized immediately by tender-minded musicians ...
Continue ReadingSigurd 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 ...
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