ECM February 2025 Releases

Yuval Cohen Quartet

Winter Poems

February 14, 2025

Soprano saxophonist Yuval Cohen’s debut for ECM is a thrilling offering that captures the brother of long-time ECM traveller Avishai Cohen charting innovative paths through eight originals in graceful interplay with his freshly formed quartet. Pianist Tom Oren, bassist Alon Near and Alon Benjamini on drums are longtime acquaintances of Yuval’s who are not only outstanding instrumentalists in their own right, but share a deep, intuitive understanding for the leader’s musical language and improvisational approach. “I’m very fortunate to be able to play with these young guys,” says Yuval. “I’ve known them for a long time – they’re three beautiful souls and talents with whom I had a great time shaping this music together.” Throughout the album, the saxophonist demonstrates his own understanding of chamber jazz dynamics and explores a broad range of influences – from folk idioms to motif development borrowed from classical music – to lyrical and contemplative, but also energetic and uplifting results.

Read full press text here.

Billy Hart Quartet

Just

February 28, 2025

After twenty years of playing together, the Billy Hart Quartet – with Mark Turner, Ethan Iverson and Ben Street – is distinguished by its stylistic openness. “If ever there was an example of contemporary jazz that draws extensively on all the ‘traditions’ while infusing some of the melodic clarity associated with the more challenging end of popular song, then this is it,” wrote critic Kevin Le Gendre of the quartet’s previous ECM album One Is The Other. A drummer of enormous experience, who has played through many of jazz’s idiomatic upheavals, Hart, now 83, advocates a ‘multi-directional’ sound approach, and his younger confrères respond accordingly, each piece subtly opening another door. On Just, Ethan Iverson contributes four compositions, ranging from the sly, floating “Chamber Music” to the eruptively motoric “Aviation.” Mark Turner and Hart himself bring three tunes apiece. Hart’s include updates of two of his well-known tunes, “Layla Joy” and “Naaj,” while among Turner’s pieces is “Billy’s Waltz,” both a graceful dance and a vehicle for blues-conscious expression, and the uptempo vamp “Top of the Middle.” Just was recorded in New York’s Sound On Sound Studios in December 2021, and mixed in Studios La Buissonne in the South of France in September 2023.

Read full press text here.