On South Korean singer Yeahwon Shin’s debut for ECM Lua ya released just last week former Terence Blanchard pianist, the prodigiously talented Aaron Parks, provides little hints and nudges quietly probing and navigating on a beyond-genre late night listening lullaby album.

The album is an oddity perhaps, but captivating nonetheless; and Parks in this lambent quietude is in his element. Parks who besides his tenure with Blanchard put out several highly rated albums most notably Invisible Cinema for Blue Note five years ago and he’s just self-released a standards album Live in Japan joined by bassist Thomas Morgan (who appears to such effect on Tomasz Stańko’s 2013 album Wisława) and drummer R.J. Miller, recorded on his iPhone, then mastered, and put out free to download. The album contains a bunch of standards and it’s a very refined collection, and both Lua ya and Live in Japan act independently but unmistakably as a build-up to the big Parks story this autumn, the release in early-October of Arborescence.

Early listens strongly suggest a major moment in Parks’ career and it may even come to be regarded as one of ECM’s best releases of the year. A solo album, definitely not recorded on an iPhone but made in the same studio in Massachusetts as Lua Ya, it's his first for the label the title ECM glosses refers to the “way something grows, seeking and adaptive, like a tree – its roots and branches moving under and around things whether they need to go toward water, toward the sun.” Released on a label that owes a big chunk of its critical and commercial reputation to the success of a best selling solo piano album in 1975’s The Köln Concert the stakes could not be greater for Parks at this juncture in his career, and Arborescence could not have found a better home. Stephen Graham
Aaron Parks above photo: Bill Douthart/ECM