The five tracks here come hot on the heels of An Ancient Observer; and in a sense they are a companion to the album. For Tigran, all these pieces - on the album and on the EP - are musical observations of the world in which we live and the weight of history that we all bear. The Gyumri of the title is the Armenian pianist's home town. He was born there in 1987 before his family moved to Los Angeles in 2003.
Now based in Yerevan, the Armenian capital, he has touched the sublime by returning to fundamentals. A jazz player with wide-ranging skills, his atypical jazz is highly narrative, because it is stripped bare of any artifice. And as ever in such a context, his improvisations are suffused with poetry, and his piano speaks a marvellous language which is his and his alone. © Max Dembo/Qobuz