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Yelena Eckemoff: Adventures of the Wildflower
by Mark Sullivan
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 ...
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by Dan McClenaghan
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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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