Gifts by Makiko Hirabayashi

Gifts marks the tenth studio album by the Tokyo-born pianist and composer Makiko, who has been based in Copenhagen for over 30 years. Following her previous trio album, Meteora, which drew inspiration from the monastic retreat of the same name in northwestern Greece, Gifts - recorded with her quartet Weavers - serves as a deeply personal musical memoir. Raised in Tokyo and Hong Kong, Makiko received classical training on the piano from an early age, before discovering her love for jazz at the Berklee College of Music in the USA. In 2023, now an internationally acclaimed musician, Makiko received a composition commission for the Handel Festival in Halle/Saale, which sparked a musical flashback. During Makiko's childhood, her mother was involved in the annual performances of “Messiah” as a choir singer. On this album, the reference to various pieces by Handel symbolizes not only the gift of music, passed on through generations and time, but also its transformative power. Sometimes, a Baroque suspension is enough as an improvisational impulse. In “High Tide,” strict fugato approaches repeatedly veer into the open form. “Weightless” starts as a piano solo improvisation, from which the quartet extracts some motifs from Largo of “Xerxes,” culminating in a weightless ping-pong of high notes between sax and piano in the tree shade of an endless summer. “Darkness And Light” emerges from the sounds of the night and sneaks into a bright morning, while “Red” channels the intensity of Messiah’s themes. “Up River” revisits motifs from “Water Music” to cleanse lingering scars. Handel’s unique ability to write melodies that speak of humanity and emotional landscapes has kept his music relevant and alive through generations. The Weavers - winners of Jazz Album of the Year at Danish Music Awards 2021- take the journey further as an intricate, close-knit unit. The sensitivity of the quartet is perhaps most evident at the album's conclusion: “Echoes.” This piece, with its shimmering ambiguity, references the dreamlike Larghetto from Handel’s D-major violin sonata, illustrating that Gifts is not merely a musical journey but also a spiritual exploration, navigating the spaces between origin and development, reflection and projection.