Jazz
Northern Spy Records · 2 October 2026
“Passing Fires” begins with thirty-eight seconds of a child’s voice shouting “Oh, I don’t want to go to school” over a mellow piano, and the track carries exactly that title. The child is Jeremy Cunningham’s son and the record is dedicated to his late father: three generations in the opening track, and the only one you can’t hear is the one who’s gone. Out of that come the twelve tracks and forty-five minutes sixteen that Northern Spy released on 2 October.
There are, in fact, two drum solos on the whole album: the closing section of “Union Pier” (five twenty-five, a duo with Dustin Laurenzi, who plays tenor, guitar and synth) and a free, muffled passage on “You’re Still Here”. The rest of the pieces are built out of the conversation between saxophone and guitar: “To the Sky” is a bossa nova with Matt Gold on guitar, bass and pandeiro, Makaya McCraven on drums and Sen Morimoto’s wordless vocal; “Kobi Shobi” turns towards hip-hop with an alto solo from Josh Johnson over Jeff Parker’s syncopated comping; “Windows”, three twenty-two, rests on Will Miller’s Rhodes alone. The title track is a piano-and-cello dialogue with Lia Kohl.
The flip side of that spread is that the record has no centre. Four of the twelve tracks sit under three and a half minutes and two are fragments (“The Kids Are Asking” runs one thirty-nine), so the emotional arc Cunningham is after depends on the running order more than on any single piece: pulled out of the sequence, “Some Days” and “Somewhere to Be” are two sophisti-pop songs with Morimoto’s voice, and that is all. It should be said that unity is not what is at stake here, and that the mix of studio recordings with piano sketches taped at home is deliberate.
It is Cunningham’s third record for Northern Spy, four years after “A Better Ghost” (29 July 2022) and six after “The Weather Up There” (28 February 2020). “Some Days”, “Windows” and “To the Sky” came out as singles in August and September.
Rating: 8.0/10
Text by Aina Torrents