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Yelena Eckemoff Quartet: Leaving Everything Behind
by Neri Pollastri
Continua a mostrare gusto, classe e capacità di scegliersi i compagni di avventura l'eclettica pianista russo-americana Yelena Eckemoff, la quale dopo album con partner nordeuropei -Glass Songs, in trio, e Everblue, in quartetto -realizza adesso questo lavoro con musicisti statunitensi. Rispetto al precedente CD cambia drasticamente anche il primo strumento solista -là il sassofono di Tore Brunborg -qua il violino di Mark Feldman. Alla ritmica, per non far rimpiangere Arild Andersen e Jon Christensen, troviamo uno storico protagonista ...
Continue ReadingYelena Eckemoff: Blooming Tall Phlox
by Tyran Grillo
For this quintet outing, pianist and composer Yelena Eckemoff is joined by Verneri Pohjola on trumpet and flugelhorn, Panu Savolainen on vibraphone, Antti Lotjonen on double bass, and Olavi Louhivuori on drums and percussion. Together they move through a sequence of 15 originals that feel less composed than remembered, as though the music were lifted from the air itself and gently given form. What emerges is a cabinet of scents, each one opened with care, each one releasing its own ...
Continue ReadingYelena Eckemoff: Blooming Tall Phlox
by Mark Sullivan
You can look up the phlox flower online: there are 67 species, many of them fragrant. But none of the photographs or botanical classifications will tell you how it smells. For that we have pianist/composer Yelena Eckemoff's musical impressions here, along with a range of other smells recalled from her Russian childhood. When Eckemoff visited Finland and saw how much it reminded her of Russia she decided it was the best place to record an album about her Russian aroma ...
Continue ReadingYelena Eckemoff: Blooming Tall Phlox
by Dan Bilawsky
While the art of playing jazz qualifies as a multisensory experience, involving listening, touching, and seeing, it usually doesn't extend so far as to include the sense of smell. But that's not to say that a nose for scents has no place in musical and artistic spheres. If you need convincing, just look at Blooming Tall Phlox. For her tenth album in six years, pianist Yelena Eckemoff uses life and nature's bouquets as her muse. Her memory ...
Continue ReadingYelena Eckemoff Quartet: Leaving Everything Behind
by Mark Sullivan
Pianist/composer Yelena Eckemoff has restlessly explored a new theme with each new album, with a shifting group of musicians. The central event behind the album title Leaving Everything Behind was her departure from the Soviet Union in 1991. She and her husband came to the United States to start a new life, having literally left everything behind--even their children, left indefinitely with Eckemoff's parents until the couple could get established. To explore this theme she returned to older original material, ...
Continue ReadingYelena Eckemoff Quartet: Leaving Everything Behind
by Dave Wayne
With all of the worldwide hue and cry concerning immigration, precious little is said about the lives of immigrants themselves, the sacrifices they've made and the risks they've taken in order to start their lives anew; free of whatever hardships and oppression they endured in their native country. In the news, entire lives are boiled down to reports of another capsized boat in the Mediterranean, or another truckload of hopeful souls stopped at the border. Even those who immigrate legally ...
Continue ReadingYelena Eckemoff Quartet: Everblue
by Neri Pollastri
A due anni di distanza dall'ottimo Glass Song, realizzato in trio, la pianista Yelena Eckemoff, moscovita da oltre vent'anni stabilitasi negli Stati Uniti, allarga la formazione mantenendone l'impianto culturale: ai due monumenti della musica scandinava Arild Andersen e jon Christensen aggiunge infatti il sassofonista Tore Brunborg, per formare un quartetto dalla cifra meditativa e dal lirismo evocatico tipicamente nordici. Le composizioni di questo Everblue sono quasi tutte della pianista (fanno eccezione solo “Prism" e “Man," di Andersen), la ...
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