Jazz Articles about Yelena Eckemoff

About Yelena Eckemoff

Album Review

Yelena Eckemoff: Romance of the Moon

Read "Romance of the Moon" reviewed by Tyran Grillo

by Tyran Grillo
May 10, 2024

With Romance of the Moon, Yelena Eckemoff descends further into the symbolic night, carrying Federico García Lorca's poetry as a living grammar in her heart. This suite of 13 compositions does not illustrate the poems so much as converse with them, answering their obsessions with music that listens as intently as it speaks. Lorca's moons, bells, animals, and silences find a second life here, translated into pulse and pause. Eckemoff assembles a band whose collective intelligence feels instinctive ...

Multiple Reviews

Yelena Eckemoff And Cory Smythe: Imagination Unbound

by Doug Collette
September 4, 2023

Yelena Eckemoff and Cory Smythe have configured mirror images in music that reflect global mindsets of race, gender and class in the wake of COVID lockdowns and in the midst of climate change (among other controversies). The former postulates an insular existence populated only by a single individual and a sole figure with whom he finds empathy, while the latter formulates a world vision from a single point of view scanning the boundaries of culture(s). In keeping with the various ...

Album Review

Yelena Eckemoff: Lonely Man and His Fish

Read "Lonely Man and His Fish" reviewed by Tyran Grillo

by Tyran Grillo
May 3, 2023

After a run of emotionally expansive albums, pianist and composer Yelena Eckemoff once again pivots without losing her center. Reinvention has become part of her artistic language, and here it arrives with a new cast and a story told in patient detail. Kirk Knuffke appears on cornet, Masaru Koga on a flute modified with a shakuhachi mouthpiece, Ben Street on double and electric bass, and Eric Harland on drums and percussion. Together they inhabit a two-disc narrative that follows the ...

Radio & Podcasts

New Music From Yelena Eckemoff, Arturo O'Farrill, Lauren Henderson, Melissa Pipe, Cecilia Smith & More

by Mary Foster Conklin
May 1, 2023

This broadcast includes new releases from pianists Yelena Eckemoff, Arturo O'Farrill, vibraphonist Cecilia Smith, vocalist Lauren Henderson, saxophonist Melissa Pipe and a special song cycle by lyricist David Hajdu featuring Theo Bleckmann, Alicia Olatuja and Dan Tepfer, plus birthday shoutouts to Roxy Coss, Wendy Kirkland, Judy Wexler, Rosa Passos, Kendra Shank and Lara Downes, among others. Thanks for listening and please support the artists you hear by seeing them live and online. Purchase their music so they can continue to ...

Album Review

Yelena Eckemoff: Lonely Man and His Fish

Read "Lonely Man and His Fish" reviewed by Dan McClenaghan

by Dan McClenaghan
April 18, 2023

A Moscow-raised, classically-trained pianist, Yelena Eckemoff made the move to the United States in 1991, after being bitten by the jazz bug via a Dave Brubeck concert she attended in Moscow in 1987. In 2010, after settling with her family in rural North Carolina, she released Cold Sun (L & H Records), a trio outing featuring bassist Mads Vinding and drummer Peter Erskine. She followed up this fine debut with several more albums, all on her L & H Label, ...

Liner Notes

Yelena Eckemoff: I Am a Stranger in This World

by Mark Sullivan
January 22, 2023

Russian-born pianist/composer Yelena Eckemoff began setting verses from the Bible's Book of Psalms shortly after her conversion to Christianity, even before her emigration to the United States. But she waited until she had considerable experience working with jazz musicians before producing her jazz arrangements. They were first recorded on her album Better Than Gold and Silver [L&H Production, 2018], which presented ten Psalm settings in both vocal and instrumental versions. The detailed story of how Yelena Eckemoff came to set ...

Album Review

Yelena Eckemoff: Colors live at KITO Bremen

Read "Colors live at KITO Bremen" reviewed by Tyran Grillo

by Tyran Grillo
October 3, 2022

Colors is less a suite than a life in motion, and in this solo performance at KITO Bremen, Yelena Eckemoff allows that life to unfold with an unguarded clarity that feels both intimate and elemental. What began as a duo project with drummer Manu Katché becomes, through circumstance and choice, a meditation stripped of all counterweights. When Katché was unable to appear, Eckemoff declined substitution, understanding that absence itself could become a generative force. Nearly 15 years since her last ...