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Yelena Eckemoff

About Me

Over the past 15 years, Yelena Eckemoff has recorded an extraordinary series of albums featuring a cross section of jazz masters, including drummers Billy Hart, Nasheet Waits, and Gerald Cleaver, saxophonists Chris Potter and Mark Turner, vibraphonist Joe Locke and cornetist Kirk Knuffke. Part of what makes Eckemoff’s emergence as a major voice in jazz is that she’s gained international renown without performing. Years ago she decided to focus all of her attention on writing—and finding the right players to interpret and record her music. Working from her home in rural North Carolina, the astonishingly prolific composer has connected with a diverse pool of master improvisers, supplying them with music requiring rarified storytelling skills. Since early childhood she was a musical prodigy who began playing piano and composing at the age of four tutored by her mother, a noted piano teacher. By seven she was studying at the prestigious Gnessins Academy with Anna Pavlovna Kantor, whose former students include Evgeny Kissin. Eckemoff went on to the elite Moscow Conservatory as a young teen, but her musical curiosity eventually propelled her off the classical path. Enamored by Pink Floyd, she started dissecting prog rock, and became smitten with jazz when she attended Dave Brubeck’s famous 1987 Moscow concert. “And then I was studying jazz in the experimental Moscow Jazz studio,” she says. “So that’s how I was educating myself.”

Teaching and composing, she and her husband carved out a comfortable niche, but seeking more opportunities they decided to emigrate to the U.S. with their three children in 1991 as the Soviet Union started to disintegrate. A long, arduous process eventually found the family reunited in Greensboro, North Carolina, where she started to build a new life playing occasional concerts, teaching music, and working as a church musician. Frustrated by the uninspired level of local jazz talent, she eventually connected with veteran Danish bassist Mads Vinding via her MySpace page when he messaged her to offer his services. Thrilled with the results, she sent the overdubbed duo recording to drum legend Peter Erskine in Los Angeles. Duly impressed by her music, he added his contribution, which is how she created her breakout 2010 concept album Cold Sun.

Eckemoff was off and running. Later that year she released Grass Catching the Wind working remotely with Vinding and Danish drummer Morten Lund, and the live session Flying Steps, featuring Erskine and first-call L.A.-based Polish bassist Darek Oles. She’s produced at least one album a year since then, working with the finest improvisers in Europe and the U.S., leading to critically hailed albums such as 2014’s A Touch of Radiance with Mark Turner, Joe Locke, George Mraz, and Billy Hart, and 2017’s In the Shadow of a Cloud with Chris Potter, Adam Rogers, Drew Gress, and Gerald Cleaver.

“It is how an avalanche starts,” Eckemoff says about her ever-expanding creative community. “You make a snowball and throw it down. It rolls down gathering more and more snow, and before you know there is a mass of snow, ice, and rocks falling rapidly down a mountainside.”

The rock supporting all of Eckemoff’s expression is her faith, which she brought to the fore on 2016’s Better Than Gold and Silver, a double album featuring her vocal and instrumental settings for ten Psalms. She returned to the Bible in 2022 with I Am a Stranger in This World featuring Ralph Alessi, Drew Gress, Adam Rogers, and Nasheet Waits on a program of gospel-inflected instrumental settings for another selection of Psalms.

Whether a project is driven by a narrative or not, “every album I do is conceptual,” Eckemoff says. “I’ve been composing music since I was four. I don’t even try. Tunes come to me. Sometimes it’s too much. God created me like that. That’s why I don’t perform that much, and don’t want to perform anymore. I have so much to compose. And in the genre I compose, the project is only finished when recorded with jazz musicians. I design the project for them to be able to express themselves.”