Jazz Articles about Yelena Eckemoff

About Yelena Eckemoff

Album Review

Yelena Eckemoff: Colors live at KITO Bremen

Read "Colors live at KITO Bremen" reviewed by Mark Sullivan

by Mark Sullivan
September 24, 2022

Composer and pianist Yelena Eckemoff's Colors (L&H Production, 2019) was a duet with drummer Manu Katché, a unique instrumentation in her ever-growing list of works. His contributions were so singular that when she had an opportunity to celebrate the album release by playing the music live at KITO in Bremen, Germany in 2019, and he could not make the gig, she opted to play solo rather than hire another drummer. It was the first time in about 15 years that ...

Album Review

Yelena Eckemoff: I Am a Stranger in This World

Read "I Am a Stranger in This World" reviewed by Tyran Grillo

by Tyran Grillo
August 3, 2022

To feel estranged from one's own mind is among the quiet terrors of modern life. It is this condition, ancient yet urgently contemporary, that Yelena Eckemoff confronts on I Am a Stranger in This World, a double album that treats the Psalms of David not as scripture to be recited but as psychic terrain to be crossed. Following 2018's Better Than Gold and Silver (L&H Productions), Eckemoff returns to these texts with renewed gravity. Where the earlier album relied on ...

Album Review

Yelena Eckemoff: Adventures of the Wildflower

Read "Adventures of the Wildflower" reviewed by Mark Sullivan

by Mark Sullivan
July 15, 2021

The last time composer/pianist Yelena Eckemoff recorded in Finland she led a quintet on Blooming Tall Phlox (L&H Production, 2017). The program was devoted to smells, particularly the phlox flower and other scents remembered from childhood. Here she returns to Finland with a sextet (including several returning players, basically the entire rhythm section) and a related concept: the life cycle of a wildflower. The mood of the music is well captured in the smiling band photo on the back of ...

Album Review

Yelena Eckemoff: Adventures of the Wildflower

Read "Adventures of the Wildflower" reviewed by Dan McClenaghan

by Dan McClenaghan
March 10, 2021

The seeds of pianist-composer Yelena Eckemoff's Adventures Of The Wildflower were planted in 2013, when she traveled to Hollola, Finland, to record Blooming Tall Phlox (L&H Productions, 2017) with a group of young Finnish musicians. Several Eckemoff albums came about after that recording, but the experience with her Finnish friends must have exerted a sort of gravitational pull, and in 2019 she made a return trip to the country to team with vibraphonist Panu Savolainen, bassist Antti Lotjonen and drummer ...

Album Review

Yelena Eckemoff: Nocturnal Animals

Read "Nocturnal Animals" reviewed by Tyran Grillo

by Tyran Grillo
February 9, 2020

There is something quietly revelatory about music that chooses the night not as a backdrop but as a mode of thought. With Nocturnal Animals, pianist and composer Yelena Eckemoff enters this liminal terrain with rare attentiveness, offering an album that does not describe animals so much as think alongside them. This is music that crouches, listens, waits, and then moves with purpose. For this journey, Eckemoff has assembled a dream team within a discography already rich with inspired ...

Album Review

Yelena Eckemoff: Nocturnal Animals

Read "Nocturnal Animals" reviewed by Mark Sullivan

by Mark Sullivan
February 2, 2020

Pianist-composer Yelena Eckemoff is predictably unpredictable. After an early series of piano trio albums she worked with larger ensembles, culminating in the sextet (plus vocalists) of Better Than Gold And Silver (L&H, 2018). After cutting back to a duet with drummer Manu Katché on Colors (L&H, 2019) she returns with a larger band, but with a difference; this is a quartet with double bassist Arild Andersen (her longest collaborator), and drummer/percussionists Jon Christensen and Thomas Strønen. It may ...

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Album Review

Yelena Eckemoff: Nocturnal Animals

Read "Nocturnal Animals" reviewed by Dan McClenaghan

by Dan McClenaghan
January 1, 2020

"You're busy appearing or you're busy disappearing." Drummer-bandleader Art Blakey may have said that; if he didn't, he should have. Somebody had to express the importance of presenting your work, for getting it out there to an audience. This goes for virtually any artist in any medium. Double down on that for people who create jazz. Pianist Yelena Eckemoff rolls with the “busy appearing" concept. She is prolific; since her debut recording , Cold Sun (L & H, ...