hope running through Feathered Things never arrives easy. It gets fought for, feather by feather.
Desafío Candente Records
Emily Kuhn – trumpet; Meghan Stagl – piano and vocals; Erik Skov – guitar; Kitt Lyles – bass; Gustavo Cortiñas – drums
Feathered Things opens with a trumpet standing alone in a room, tone so clear and open it could have wandered in from a baroque sonata, before the rhythm section arrives and drags “Telephone” into a loping post-bop stride. That’s the tension running through the whole record — music that can sit in open, unhurried space one moment and then lock into a hard groove the next — Emily Kuhn’s follow-up to 2023’s Ghosts of Us. The Chicago trumpeter wrote these eight pieces during a residency at OxBow, snowed into the woods between the Kalamazoo River and Lake Michigan, and the winter got into the bones of the music — you can hear it in the pointillist flurries of “Snowfall,” piano and guitar dropping single notes like flakes catching light before a gust scatters them.
There’s a folk sensibility running through “For Those Left Behind” that traces back to the Appalachian and klezmer music Kuhn grew up on. It opens with a trumpet phrase stated once, paused over, then repeated — lonesome, in no rush to be understood. Piano creeps in quietly, barely audible, but then the whole band leans into a circular rhythm that keeps swelling, electronics thickening the air, until it all pulls back and dissolves — bowed bass, a few last piano notes, the sound just floating off.
Then comes “Icarus,” where pianist Meghan Stagl’s voice enters half-sung, half-spoken, almost childlike, drums underneath like marching feet. It feels like eavesdropping — a woman singing to herself about someone she misses, unsure the words are meant for anyone else, until she can’t hold that privacy anymore and the singing breaks open, wordless, loud, trumpet egging Stagl on.
“Wingspan” is where the album bares its teeth. It’s grief responding to the normalization of violence, and it plays like it — trumpet and guitar chasing each other in anxious, searching lines over a percussive odd-meter ostinato that won’t sit still, piano banging out rhythm alongside the drums before pulling back into something quieter, more lyrical, bass taking its turn against a suddenly delicate piano. When the trumpet returns, the guitar’s stopped agitating her, and she sounds almost relieved to have the space back to herself — before the drums lock back in, insistent, and the whole thing closes ranks again, still reaching, somehow, toward hope.
If “Wingspan” is the record’s clenched fist, “As the Crow Flies” is the hand opening back up. It starts lonely — trumpet by herself, piano trilling, guitar picking out single notes like it’s looking for what to say — everyone contributing their own separate piece, drums cutting in short and sharp, until gradually those fragments stop and things settle into one clear, unified melody. “Gratitude” closes the way a long day ends — a bluesy, late-night exhale, hymn-simple and in no hurry to go anywhere.
What’s new since Ghosts of Us is a band that sounds fully grown into itself — five musicians a decade into a shared language, comfortable enough to let the music fray a little instead of sanding it smooth. But the hope running through Feathered Things never arrives easy. It gets fought for, feather by feather.
