Jazz
Intakt Records · 21 August 2026
“In Circles – Yellow Crane” takes sixteen minutes twenty-seven of the album’s fifty-four, and it is two pieces stitched together: Co Streiff’s “In Circles”, which gave the quartet’s 2012 debut its title, and Russ Johnson’s “Yellow Crane”. This band has no harmony instrument, and across sixteen minutes you hear what that buys: alto saxophone and trumpet can change direction without anyone reharmonising beneath them, and the question of how much pressure to apply belongs to Christian Weber on bass and Gerry Hemingway on drums.
All of it was recorded live between 20 and 30 April 2023. Weber edited it, and it did not reach a mixing desk until May 2026, with Hannes Kumke at the controls and Michael Brändli mastering at Hardstudios in Winterthur. Streiff and Johnson have played together since 2004; the quartet went quiet after “In Circles” (2012) and only reconvened in 2019, by then with Hemingway. Peter Margasak’s liner notes place the group in the line of keyboardless quartets running from Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker to, above all, Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry.
Johnson’s “Horizontal Heartburn” (8:17) opens on abrupt shifts of tension and a staccato section that turns itself into a lyrical theme. Streiff’s “Remember Little Feather” (9:57) is the piece that comes closest to Margasak’s reference: a free-bop ride where she pulls out short motifs and keeps turning them over.
That sixteen-minute block takes up nearly a third of the album, and the other five tracks have to live next to it: after it come “Saguache” (7:02), “Remember Little Feather” and the five minutes seven of “Oracle”, which sound like the end of a set rather than the end of an album. There is no way of telling which night any given take comes from: the credits give the whole stretch and not the individual dates.
Intakt Records, 21 August 2026. Six tracks, 53:49.
Rating: 7.8/10
Text by Aina Torrents