Articles by Tyran Grillo
Alicia Hall Moran: Coldblooded
by Tyran Grillo
Take a heart and cast it into water. Lower the temperature. Watch the surface tighten until motion turns into sculpture. What remains are rings expanding outward, movements frozen into memories. These are the contours listeners encounter on Coldblooded, the third meta-statement from singer and composer Alicia Hall Moran. Sound travels across its surface as a skate blade tests structural integrity. History breathes beneath that ice, even as traumas wait behind winter's glaze. And so, the music begins its slow migration ...
Continue ReadingIngi Bjarni Skúlason: Hope
by Tyran Grillo
On Hope, Icelandic pianist and composer Ingi Bjarni Skulason opens a quiet interior, one shaped by listening as much as by sound. Joined by bassist Anders Jormin, guitarist Hilmar Jensson, and drummer Magnus Trygvason Eliassen, he presents a quartet steeped in introspection, where each note seems to arrive after careful consideration, as if feeling its way forward. The album gathers itself around loss, tracing the many chambers of grief that followed the death of his mother, yet it never settles ...
Continue ReadingBram De Looze, Felix Henkelhausen, Eric McPherson: Vice Versa II - Rebounce
by Tyran Grillo
Belgian pianist Bram De Looze's Vice Versa project is one that gradually becomes visible, the way a constellation appears only after your eyes adjust to the night. The music feels as if it had always been orbiting somewhere just beyond earshot, waiting for the right trio of creatives to call it into being. At the center of it all, De Looze's playing carries a sensitivity to hidden paths. Reaching outward across cities and oceans, he did not recruit ...
Continue ReadingYelena Eckemoff: Lions
by Tyran Grillo
Pianist Yelena Eckemoff, a melodic marvel whose gift for atmosphere has been apparent from the beginning, has never felt comfortable settling into a single definition. Rooted in classicalism yet never bound by its strictures, she has carved a singular path through the world of jazz, guided by a restless imagination that treats genre as porous terrain rather than fenced land. Her music arises from a place where labels dissolve and instinct takes over, a place recognized immediately by tender-minded musicians ...
Continue ReadingSigurd Hole: Elvesang
by Tyran Grillo
Sigurd Hole's Elvesang enacts the crossing of a threshold where music loosens its claim on sound alone and begins to behave like weather, memory, and landscape thinking aloud. Recorded in the small Ytre Rendal church near Lake Lomnessjøen, not far from Hole's childhood home in Rendalen, the album carries the unmistakable feeling of return. Not nostalgia exactly, but a deeper settling, as if the bass itself remembers the grain of the wood around it and the cold air pressing against ...
Continue ReadingSigurd Hole Trio: Encounters
by Tyran Grillo
Encounters unfolds as a single, patiently breathed arc rather than a sequence of events. From the outset, the trio situates itself firmly in the world, not observing it from a distance but moving within it, attentive to texture, ritual, and change. Sigurd Hole's compositional voice is quietly astonishing in this regard and finds life-giving partnership in violinist Hakon Aase (also playing kantele) and drummer Jarle Vespestad. He writes music that feels discovered rather than imposed, as though these forms were ...
Continue ReadingDaniel Bennett Group: We Are the Orchestra
by Tyran Grillo
To step into Daniel Bennett's music is to agree, quietly and without protest, to loosen your grip on the obvious. You enter as you might a half-lit room where conversations are already underway, familiar yet oddly angled, tethered to reality but leaning just far enough away from it to feel enchanted. This album opens that door with “Loose Fitting Spare Tire," a title that feels less like a joke than a thesis statement. From the first moments of this duo ...
Continue ReadingListening: Music, Movement, Mind
by Tyran Grillo
Listening: Music, Movement, Mind Nik Bärtsch 352 Pages ISBN: 9783037786703 Lars Müller Publishers 2021 If Swiss pianist Nik Bärtsch, best known as the mastermind--or perhaps, more fittingly, the beginnermind--behind “Ronin," an ever-evolving interpretive organism for his modular compositions, has long seemed an enigmatic figure, then Listening: Music, Movement, Mind may well serve as the missing link between the man and the mystery. Beneath the disarming subtitle “A Useless Guide for Everything" lies ...
Continue ReadingNik Bärtsch’s Ronin with Sumie Kaneko at MIT
by Tyran Grillo
Nik Bärtsch's Ronin with Sumie Kaneko Thomas Tull Concert HallMassachusetts Institute of TechnologyBoston, MAOctober 4, 2025 At the close of a week-long residency at MIT--where Swiss pianist Nik Bärtsch served as both muse and subject to a group of “freaky scientists," as he affectionately called them--something extraordinary came to fruition. The program had seen Bärtsch immersed in neurological studies, AI-driven musical experiments and a collaborative workshop between his band Ronin and the university's own ...
Continue ReadingLucian Ban and Mat Maneri at the Northampton Center for the Arts
by Tyran Grillo
Lucian Ban & Mat Maneri Northampton Center for the ArtsNorthampton, Massachusetts October 1, 2025 In the early 20th century and throughout his life, composer Béla Bartók endeavored to document the folk songs of Hungary and beyond. Of the approximately 10,000 examples he preserved on wax cylinders and later transcribed, a significant handful reflected the dying traditions of his native land, along with the people and places in which they might have been consigned were it ...
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