Yelena Eckemoff

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 memories, and recruited a Finnish band to realize her vision.

I am a melodist, but the melodies that come from the words I hear in the Psalms, I think they are the best melodies I create. And I think it's because there's a power in those words. . . . You can feel the power that God channels through that music. - Yelena EckemoffPianist-composer Yelena Eckemoff adds to her already impressive corpus of settings for the Psalms. The album is a new installment in a long-term musical project that began with 2018s Better Than Gold and Silver, and once again teams Eckemoff with that albums trumpeter Ralph Alessi and bassist Drew Gress, along with guitarist Adam Rogers and drummer Nasheet Waits.

Colors reflect not only the Russian-born pianist and composer's creative drive, but also her seemingly limitless imagination. Each of the 14 colors she interprets represents a different stage in life, with the songs presented chronologically.

Pianist-composer Yelena Eckemoff’s body of elaborate, ambitious jazz concept albums reaches a new virtuosic summit with "Lonely Man and His Fish," to be released April 28. A double-album set, the album is also a long-form parable, a story of deep affection between a human and his beloved pet. An all-star lineup—cornetist Kirk Knuffke, flutist Masaru Koga, bassist Ben Street, and drummer Eric Harland—helps Eckemoff breathe life into the tale.

Composer and pianist Yelena Eckemoff's Colors (L&H Production, 2019) was a duet with drummer Manu Katche, a unique instrumentation in her ever-growing list of works.

Die Pianistin, Komponistin und Konzeptkünstlerin Yelena Eckemoff versucht sich mit »Romance of the Moon« an einer etwas anderen, aber nicht minder geistreichen und kühnen Lösung. Als multimedialer Denker hat Eckemoff schon früher Alben gemacht, die sowohl ihre visuelle Kunst als auch Geschichten, Gedichte und Konzepte aus ihrer eigenen Vorstellungskraft einbeziehen. Diesmal präsentiert sie eine Suite von Kompositionen, die von dem großen spanischen Dichter Federico García Lorca inspiriert sind und von einem formidablen italienischen Ensemble interpretiert werden, zu dem der Bassist Luca Bulgarelli, der Schlagzeuger Stefano Bagnoli, der Gitarrist Riccardo Bertuzzi und die weltberühmte Trompetenikone Paolo Fresu gehören.

It takes a discerning eye, or in this case ear, to envision the desert as more than a vast, arid wasteland. Pianist/composer Yelena Eckemoff succeeds in musically portraying many of this daunting environment’s mysteries and its boundless allure on her new recording, "Desert", to be released May 4 on her imprint L&H Production. The quartet outing, the latest in the impressive series of concept albums at the core of the prolific Russian-born, North Carolina-based keyboard virtuoso’s catalog, reunites her with Norwegian bassist Arild Andersen and internationally acclaimed drummer Peter Erskine and features Oregon co-founder Paul McCandless on oboe, English horn, soprano saxophone, and bass clarinet.

Pianist/composer Yelena Eckemoff defines radiance as a state of happiness or confidence when everything around you is shining. On her latest CD, A Touch of Radiance, she explores that idea from ten different perspectives, drawing rich inspiration from memories, emotions, and dreams, and the inner world where all three intersect.

Pianist Yelena Eckemoff's backstory doesn't suggest the potential for a rise to the category of top level jazz pianist. But here she is, after emigrating to the U.S. from Russia with her husband—leaving her children (temporarily) and everything else (permanently) behind in 1991 to escape repression and to start a new life. Classically trained in her homeland, Eckemoff came to jazz relatively late. With persistence, talent, ambition, audacity and a seemingly unshakable optimism, she has navigated her way to the top echelon of the jazz world and created a substantial discography of very good to excellent recordings, collaborating with the cream of rhythm section cohorts–-bassists Arild Andersen and Jon Christensen, drummers Peter Erskine and Billy Hart.

The only real surprise at this stage in Yelena Eckemoff's unique, super-prolific career would be if the Russian-born pianist-composer made new music that didn't surprise. But even by that standard, Yelena Eckemoff's double album, Better Than Gold and Silver, on which she sets biblical psalms to music, is an amazement: Each disc of Better Than Gold and Silver consists of ten selections, presented in identical order. The first disc features Eckemoff with vocalists, the second disc consists of instrumental versions by the same ensemble, different takes with longer solos in which the vocal lines are given to the various instruments.