Jazz
Buckyball Records · 5 October 2026
The repertoire is the album’s strongest decision. Of the thirteen tracks, three are by Charles Mingus (“Duke Ellington’s Sound of Love”, “Tonight at Noon” and “Eclipse”), one by Egberto Gismonti (“Café”), one by Pat Metheny and Lyle Mays (“The First Circle”), one by Chick Corea (“500 Miles High”) and one by Sérgio Mendes (“So Many Stars”). Alongside them come Irving Berlin’s “Blue Skies”, Dizzy Gillespie’s “A Night in Tunisia”, eden ahbez’s “Nature Boy” and the traditional “Wayfarin’ Stranger”.
Sarah Pillow cut it last January at Raw Recording Studio in Patterson, New York State, with a septet: Donny McCaslin on tenor, Nicola Caminiti on alto, Joey Curreri on trumpet, Dave Kikoski on piano, Joe Martin on bass, Mike Clark on drums and Marc Wagnon on vibes. Wagnon, who is her husband, also wrote the arrangements and produced. It came out on Buckyball Records as BR046.
The argument about this record is an argument about a voice, and the voice goes back a long way: Pillow sang at the Montreux festival at eighteen, studied jazz at the University of California and classical music at the Oberlin Conservatory, and has sung opera at Carnegie Hall and early music with the ensemble Galileo’s Daughters. In Jazz Journal the reviewer dismisses the record as not really jazz, suggesting “jazz-adjacent” would be nearer the mark: he objects to what he calls a semi-operatic mode of singing —which is to hold her whole training against her— and finds the presence of McCaslin, Kikoski, Martin and Clark perfunctory. In Modern Drummer’s September issue the review is given over entirely to Mike Clark, praising his relaxed bossa on “So Many Stars” and choosing Gismonti’s “Café” as the best thing on the album. Both are writing about the same session.
One figure half-supports the first of them. Of the thirteen tracks, only two run past six minutes: “The First Circle”, seven twenty-eight, and “A Night in Tunisia”, six twenty-six. The rest sit between three forty and five thirty-three. With a septet of this calibre, that size of track means the voice fits whole and the solos fit in pieces. The band is half wasted, and that is an arranging decision before it is a question of how anybody sings.
On 30 October she presents the album at the Church of the Incarnation on Madison Avenue, with a screening of the 1922 “Nosferatu” with organ accompaniment afterwards.
Rating: 6.5/10
Text by Aina Torrents