Yelena Eckemoff Quintet - Blooming Tall Phlox

Yelena Eckemoff Quintet - Blooming Tall Phlox
(L&H Production L&Hcd806151-24. Review by Peter Bacon)
On Thursday, June 22, 2017

The Russian classical pianist, Yelena Eckemoff, now living in the U.S. and dedicating herself to jazz continues to forge a singular musical path - and a generous one, too, this being her 10th jazz release since 2010.

I have always found her approach intriguing because although she surrounds herself with jazz musicians and improvises herself, her way of structuring her music and indeed her own playing sounds much more aligned - at least to my under-educated ears - with classical composition than the Afro-American jazz conventions.

There has been increasing assuredness in this approach over those ten releases but its development is not quite so easy to articulate or illustrate because none has shared exactly the same personnel. The earlier albums were trio affairs, latterly the groups have expanded and diversified in instrumentation. Eckemoff’s choice in musicians is impeccable: Mats Vinding and Peter Erskine on her first jazz disc, Cold Sun, for example, with subsequent line-ups including, from this side of the pond, Morten Lund, Mats Eilertsen, Arild Andersen, Tore Brunborg and Jon Christensen; from the U.S. Billy Hart, Mark Turner and Joe Locke.

Last year’s Leaving Everything Behind was a deeply moving collection of pieces many of which were linked by loss - of childhood, of family, of homeland - all eloquently explored by Eckemoff with an all-American band of Mark Feldman on violin, Ben Street on double bass and Billy Hart on drums.

read more at: http://www.londonjazznews.com/2017/06/cd-review-yelena-eckemoff-quintet.html