Jazz
Self-released · 2 August 2026
This album ends twice. “Time Flows For You” is track eleven and runs 2:47; “Time Flows For Us” is the thirteenth and last, runs 1:05 and is Finger more or less alone. Between them sits “Five Secrets II” (3:33), picking up a piece left open back at track eight as “Five Secrets I” (5:44). Zeit Zirkel means circle of time, and the way the final third is assembled is where that idea actually registers: the ending doesn’t close, it turns.
It is the fifth album as a leader for Christian Finger, a drummer and composer born in Germany and settled in New York for a quarter of a century, with Lee Konitz, Ron Carter and Donny McCaslin on his CV. He cut it in a single day, on 6 July 2024, at Big Orange Sheep in Brooklyn with Chris Benham at the desk, who also mixed and mastered it the following January; it came out on 2 August 2026, self-released. The quintet is Ralph Alessi on trumpet, Ben Monder on guitar, Vadim Neselovskyi on piano and Adam Armstrong on bass, and he has played with the last two since 2006. The starting point is grief and the way it bends the sense of time, which loops instead of moving forward.
That works out as a dark, searching first half and a second that gradually settles. “Alta Anima”, the longest track at 8:03, opens the record with Alessi out front carrying the theme. The high point is “Stimmung M” (5:30), where Monder produces the precise tone and the rough crunch we know from the Maria Schneider and David Bowie records. “Dawn Dream” (7:13) shares the space out among the three soloists — Monder, Alessi and Neselovskyi take it one after another — and on “Gentle Garden” (3:20) it is Armstrong’s bass that carries the sense of the piece.
“Fifteen PM” (6:22) is the most immediate thing here and the furthest from everything around it: a two-phrase theme you remember on first hearing and a rhythm section that pushes like a song. All About Jazz’s reviewer thought it could be trimmed into a single; from where we’re sitting the problem runs the other way, because the part that isn’t the theme stretches on without adding much.
Thirteen tracks across sixty-three minutes, four of them under 3:35: “Gentle Garden”, “Time Flows For You”, “Five Secrets II” and “Time Flows For Us”. The circularity is declared by the titles and the numbered pairs far more than it is played, and with the names covered up what’s left is a very well played quintet session with a hesitant last third. For a drummer’s record, Finger spends almost the whole running time holding the pulse so the others can work. It is a generous decision and it makes Zeit Zirkel sound more like Monder’s and Alessi’s record than his own; the one place he steps forward is the closing minute.
Rating: 7.0/10
Text by Aina Torrents