Jazz Articles about Yelena Eckemoff

About Yelena Eckemoff

Album Review

Yelena Eckemoff: Adventures of the Wildflower

Read "Adventures of the Wildflower" reviewed by Tyran Grillo

by Tyran Grillo
September 12, 2026

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 ...

Album Review

Yelena Eckemoff: Rosendals Garden

Read "Rosendals Garden" reviewed by Tyran Grillo

by Tyran Grillo
August 30, 2026

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 ...

Album Review

Yelena Eckemoff: Rosendals Garden

Read "Rosendals Garden" reviewed by Doug Collette

by Doug Collette
March 27, 2026

Rosendals Garden is yet another chapter in Yelena Eckemoff's ongoing historical narrative devoted to people and places both real and imagined. Recorded in 2024 at RMV Studio, Stockholm, Sweden, by engineer Linn Final, with mixing and mastering by Stefano Amerio, the audio is as colorful and detailed as the musicianship and the packaging. Remarkably, there has never been a sense of hurry in the playing of keyboardist Eckemoff and her two bandmates. During the luxuriously slow build-up of ...

Album Review

Yelena Eckemoff: Lions

by Tyran Grillo
January 26, 2026

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 ...

Album Review

Yelena Eckemoff: Scenes From the Dark Ages

Read "Scenes From the Dark Ages" reviewed by Tyran Grillo

by Tyran Grillo
April 29, 2025

Yelena Eckemoff has long composed as though mapping weather rather than terrain, tracing pressure systems of mood and atmosphere while leaving strict pulse to others. Her music often moves with purpose yet refuses the easy certainties of groove, circling rhythm instead of kneeling before it. This has never felt like abstinence or austerity. It feels more like rhetoric. She addresses rhythm, engages with it, but rarely submits for the mere sake of doing so. That is why “Pilgrims," the opening ...

Album Review

Yelena Eckemoff: Romance of the Moon

Read "Romance of the Moon" reviewed by Neri Pollastri

by Neri Pollastri
March 12, 2025

Yelena Eckemoff, prolifica e camaleontica compositrice russa da anni residente negli U.S.A., è usa mutare con frequenza collaboratori, adattando le proprie composizioni al loro stile e alla loro cultura. Questo suo ultimo album, intitolato Romance of the Moon, sebbene sia ispirato alla poesia di Federico Garcia Lorca, è di fatto un lavoro “italiano," essendo realizzato nel nostro Paese (in particolare, registrato a nel giugno del 2023 a Mantova e poi missato a Udine negli studi Artesuono di Stefano Amerio) assieme ...

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Album Review

Yelena Eckemoff: Romance of the Moon

Read "Romance of the Moon" reviewed by Doug Collette

by Doug Collette
June 14, 2024

Comparable to the rare and valuable likes of a first edition book worth treasuring, Yelena Eckemoff's Romance of the Moon is no small achievement. The keyboardist/composer creates music as vivid as the images in her own paintings that adorn the inside and out of the CD package, all of which graphics (as well as those in the enclosed booklet) appear in a glossy finish. And that corresponds to the polish of the production of a baker's dozen compositions ...