Behind the Yashmak

"Behind the Yashmak" opens with a piano figure that refuses easy resolution — e.s.t. at their most harmonically searching, Svensson playing with intervals that create a persistent, productive ambiguity. A yashmak is the traditional double veil worn by some Muslim women, covering the face below the eyes, and the piece seems genuinely interested in the metaphor: what can be seen, what is concealed, and whether concealment is absence or invitation. The melody, when it fully emerges, is plaintive and ornamented in ways that suggest folk music from somewhere east of the standard jazz canon — a modal inflection that gives the theme its particular character. Berglund's bass in the middle section becomes almost percussive, bowing with a roughness that introduces tension the piano solo must navigate. Öström's drumming frames without constraining, and the trio achieves here one of their recurring signatures: the sense that three people are simultaneously listening and speaking, each response shaping what the others will say next. The production locates you in the room with them, close enough to hear the breath of the instrument, and that proximity is itself a kind of revelation — the face behind the title's concealment glimpsed, then withheld, then offered again in the final chord's sustained, questioning resonance.