Jazz
ACT Music · 13 November 2026
From 28 to 30 April, pianist Bill Laurance and Michael League, on oud, fretless bass and vocals, set up at Château Palmer, the wine estate in Margaux-Cantenac in the Bordeaux region, to record “Close to Home”, their third duo album, out today, 13 November, on ACT. It’s the fourth instalment of the ACT x Château Palmer series, launched by ACT’s director, Andreas Brandis, and the estate’s director, Thomas Duroux, which has put out one album a year since 2023.
There are twelve pieces, all co-written by the pair, running to around forty-four minutes. “Never Miss a Thing” and “Luray” have been on streaming services since 2 and 23 October. According to the label, many of them were written at night, between 2 and 5 a.m. Nic Hard recorded and mixed it, Dave McNair mastered it, and it was produced by Brandis and the two musicians; the cover reproduces “Blue Square”, a 2024 oil painting by Bettina Blohm.
The duo’s two previous albums, “Where You Wish You Were” (January 2023) and “Keeping Company” (2024), also came out on ACT. In the liner notes, Laurance and League write that “Close to Home” “goes deeper into what the duo is in its purest form”, and that they’ve tried to get closer “to the root” of what they do “as two musicians in dialogue”. The tour runs from 14 February 2027 in Landsberg, Bavaria, to 4 March at London’s Cadogan Hall.
Text by Aina Torrents