Yelena Eckemoff: Better Than Gold and Silver
L&H Production

Yelena Eckemoff Quartet: Desert
L&H Production

Yelena Eckemoff approaches her musical productions much like a congenial film director. To bring out the best performances, she first selects exceptionally talented ‘actors' who, having been provided with clear instruction (read: charts), require a modicum of instruction. Eckemoff directs with a nurturing hand, intent on ensuring that everyone involved is comfortable, and she ‘acts,' too, though always in such a way that she's never less or more dominant than the others. Yet while their contributions are critical to the project's outcome, Eckemoff, as composer, producer, arranger, and pianist, is clearly the one in charge. And her involvement extends into other areas, too: she composes texts that serve as guideposts for the compositions and displays her professional-calibre paintings in the release packages.

Her recent Desert is representative of the approach. For this date, she convened Oregon's Paul McCandless (oboe, English horn, soprano sax, bass clarinet), Norwegian bassist Arild Andersen, and drummer Peter Erskine (Weather Report, Steps Ahead), three players with decades of recordings and gigs behind them (Andersen and Erskine teamed up for the first time, incidentally, on Eckemoff's 2013 release Glass Song). They're seasoned pros who, presented with charts, can deliver a credible performance the first time through, and consistent with that each of the recording's eleven tracks plays like a live take the four laid down soon after familiarizing themselves with it; as a result, the music's characterized by freshness and spontaneity. Erskine's comment after the two-day recording session ended is telling: “Yelena brings out the best in all of us.”

The leader herself is a distinctive player, a pianist who brings a very personalized style to the jazz piano tradition. Whereas another's is heavily informed by the blues or R&B, her playing is strongly influenced by years of classical training, which makes for a generally elegant and lyrical result. Perhaps the best way of stating it is to say that she embroiders the material (see “Garden of Eden” as an especially good illustration) while also providing a secure foundation for her partners; rarely sitting out, she's instead omnipresent, though never overbearingly. Her solos are typically arresting for the way they weave intricate patterns without losing a fundamental sense of swing.

It's a concept album of sorts that sees Eckemoff and company relocating to the Arabian desert and evoking in musical form the sights, sounds, and rhythms of the setting. True to form, she composed texts for the compositions, in this case a short story for the opening “Bedouins” and poems for the ones following. In the story, a Westerner, having lost his wife and daughter, decamps to Arabia where he stays with a Bedouin family, hoping to join it. Having determined that his guest's a better writer than desert worker, the family patriarch invites the visitor to stay but in a writing capacity, the poems displayed after the story presumably samples of his creative output. Eckemoff's never visited the Arabian Desert (she was born and raised in Moscow and emigrated to the United States in 1991) and the album was recorded in Hollywood, California, but that hardly deterred her from imagining what it would be like to gaze upon sand dunes and the slow treks of caravans.

All four musicians are integral to Desert's tapestries. Erskine is a wellspring of percussive imagination, Andersen unfailing, McCandless indispensable, and Eckemoff her usual attentive, supportive self. Though McCandless is the one most responsible for articulating the melodic character of a given piece, each player's contributions are critical; in augmenting his drumming with percussion, for example, Erskine does much to help evoke the mystery of the Arabian locale (see “Oasis,” for example). Interplay is at a consistently high level, and solo episodes emerge naturally from the ensemble; Eckemoff favours slow to medium tempos, which also allows for a relaxed, loose feel that encourages improvisation and strengthens the impression of live interaction. In a typical piece, the musicians follow a road map of sorts that provides direction but that's also not constricting creatively, and free episodes even in a few cases arise. While Desert is by default jazz, it also could be labeled World music for its aromatic fusion of Arabic music, jazz, and classical.

The more recent Eckemoff release of the two symbolizes a dramatic departure from her customary all-instrumental approach, though not completely: Better Than Gold and Silver is a two-disc affair, with the first featuring ten vocal-based settings and the second instrumental versions of same. As noteworthy is the subject matter: the project is the first in a planned series of releases featuring settings of Biblical psalms, with the lyrics word-for-word texts taken from the King James Bible and voiced, in this installment, by tenor Tomás Cruz, a graduate of the New England Conservatory of Music, and mezzo-soprano Kim Mayo, a colleague of Cruz's from the Conservatory. Yet as foundational as the religious dimension is, Better Than Gold and Silver still qualifies as a jazz project, albeit one of a slightly formal kind, as opposed to Christian vocal music; one might think of it as a hybrid recording that combines the sensibilities of jazz musicianship with the stately presentation of sacred vocal texts. Jazz stalwarts were called upon to join the pianist and vocalists, in this case trumpeter Ralph Alessi, guitarist Ben Monder, violinist Christian Howes, double bassist Drew Gress, and drummer Joey Baron. Think of Better Than Gold and Silver as a new addition to religion-inspired jazz works that include Coltrane's A Love Supreme and Ellington's Sacred Concerts.

Whether delivered by vocalist or instrumentalist, Eckemoff's melodies are strong throughout, so much so you might find yourself hearing echoes of them once the recording's over. The vocal half begins strongly with Cruz's pure voice and clear enunciation helping to distinguish “Psalm 131,” which also impresses for the sympathetic accompaniment the others provide when concise turns by Monder, Howes, and Alessi extend the plaintive character of the vocal. Appealing contrast declares itself immediately thereafter when Mayo invests the lively “Psalm 119 Teth” with a soulful performance, her vocal also complemented by solos, this time by Alessi and Gress. Typically the vocalists appear in separate songs, but they're both featured during the slow, blues-inflected “Psalm 119 Lamed” where their strongly contrasting voices blend nicely (jazz singer Jackie Gage also contributes to the cut). Particularly memorable is “Psalm 147” for the ponderous, piano-sprinkled intro and the stately melodic lines voiced in unison by Cruz and Howes.

Eckemoff clearly gave considerable thought to precisely where the vocal and instrumental elements would appear in a given arrangement; the two often occur in sequence, but they sometimes double up (hear, for example, in “Psalm 110” the trumpeter play the vocal melody in unison with Mayo before stepping forth for a punchy solo) and often interweave. The songs are, as a result, richly layered and intricately structured yet never feel excessively complex, and the integration of the different resources and the balance achieved between them is realized with immense skill by the leader. The pianist takes a number of elegant, artfully constructed solos but also cedes generous solo space to her partners.

It might be tempting to think of the instrumental disc as a bonus add-on of secondary importance. In fact, it proves as rewarding as the first for the simple fact that the melodies sung by the vocalists in the first half are handled in the second by instrumentalists, and as a result the listener is treated to extended episodes featuring the players operating in front-line soloist modes. If anything, the slightly longer second half allows one to appreciate all the more how much in tune the musicians are with one another, as well as their advanced artistry as individuals. Judging from the inspired playing on “Psalm 119 Teth,” “Psalm 110,” and the muscularly swinging “Psalm 58,” to cite three examples, it certainly sounds as if Alessi, Howes, Monder, and Eckemoff enjoyed digging into the vocal melodies and maximizing the tunes' harmonic potential. Similar to disc one, a highlight in the second part is the thirteen-minute rendering of “Psalm 147,” with Howes and Monder voicing the themes and Eckemoff decorating the performance with trills and descending runs.

November 2018