Paul Hecht

Pyrography II
Release Date: May 29, 2026
Label: ears&eyes Records

Pyrography II is the forthcoming album by pianist and composer Paul Hecht. Hecht joins bassist Ben Dillinger, drummer Gustavo Cortiñas, and trumpeter James Davis, with alto saxophonist Michael Hudson-Casanova joining on select tracks, shifting between quartet and quintet settings. The expansion grew out of the band’s live sets, where the blend between trumpet and alto became a compositional focus. “I heard how beautifully Michael’s sound combined with that of James on trumpet,” Hecht says, “and I wanted to write for them.”

Before turning fully to music, Hecht spent years in academia. He studied at Amherst College with Yusef Lateef, then completed a joint PhD/MFA at Cornell, where he studied poetry and poetry writing. He went on to teach English, direct and teach theater, and publish What Rosalind Likes (Oxford University Press, 2022). He left academia in 2020 to focus on composition and performance.

His writing develops through long-form structures, juxtaposition, and revision — ideas worked out, broken apart, and reassembled in rehearsal and performance. Hecht also draws on his background in theater and directing, shaping the band around the strengths of the players. Pyrography took shape as a working band with Dillinger, Cortiñas, and Davis; the addition of Hudson-Casanova extends that approach into a larger ensemble.

Hecht calls the album “a more outward-facing record, a bigger discussion.” On the first record, he worked from an abstract vocabulary partly derived from Prokofiev, using outside material as a kind of provocation. Here, he pushes further toward an abstract language that feels like his own — most clearly in pieces like “Seriously” and, to a lesser extent, “LDD,” where dense written lines place near-impossible demands on the musicians and open the music in performance.

But that’s only one side of the record. Elsewhere, the writing leans into direct lyricism and simpler materials, often drawing on the romantic strain of the contemporary Chicago scene and indie-folk sensibilities. In pieces like “Hero Complex,” those elements sit alongside — and sometimes against — more demanding language, giving the album its internal tension.

Playing music from trumpeter Dave Douglas’s Infinity and hearing him perform with saxophonist Joe Lovano formed another clue to Hecht’s sense of quintet possibilities, leaving him with a sense that the material could be continually broken apart and recombined. The album’s title, from poet John Ashbery’s “Pyrography,” remains a reference point. The word itself means “fire writing,” a fleeting mark that parallels improvisation, where seriousness and irony coexist. This, Hecht says, is an apt metaphor for jazz. He also notes Ashbery's special talent for mixing kitsch and camp elements into new amalgams, for pressing through irony to something earnest and real.

The album includes three standards — “Countdown,” “Like Someone in Love,” and “My Romance” — juxtaposed with new compositions. Collective improvisation runs through the album across both quartet and quintet settings. “Seriously” builds from an extended line designed to challenge the ensemble, with Cortiñas shaping the rhythmic motion and transitions — “he doesn’t play a groove; he plays the music.” “Wayne” brings together contrasting materials, shifting abruptly when James Davis’s solo enters.

“Hero Complex” draws on harmonic ideas from the contemporary Chicago scene alongside indie-pop references, including Phoebe Bridgers, while pushing against the idea of heroism in improvised solos. Elsewhere, “Femme R,” first heard on Pyrography, returns in a quintet arrangement shaped through performance, where the form stretches in ways worked out onstage.

The standards function as starting points. “Countdown,” built on Coltrane’s harmonic framework, becomes a vehicle for group improvisation. “Like Someone in Love” is reharmonized. “My Romance” appears as “My Chromatic Romance,” with its structure exploded and extended into longer ensemble passages.

The quartet tracks narrow the aperture. “WWFH” is a ballad featuring an extended bass solo; “A Lullaby” focuses on ensemble sensitivity and lyricism. “LDD” (Low Dissonant Development) unfolds as a nocturne built from, as the title indicates, sustained, dissonant textures; for the session, Hecht asked Davis to approximate a close violin double-stop on trumpet, producing exotic sounds, harmonies, and employment of breath: “The instrument fights back, but in a fascinating way.”

Hecht shapes the music with the band in rehearsal and performance, responding to how the players handle the material. “The thing to do is to keep reshuffling possibilities,” he says, “reconfiguring to bring out new combinations and energies.”

Pyrography
Release Date: April 4, 2025
Label: ears&eyes Records

Paul Hecht is a multifaceted artist with expertise that spans far beyond the discipline of music. A trained jazz pianist whose language and form was nurtured through an early encounter with Yusef Lateef, Hecht quickly became fascinated with realms of creativity outside a single genre and medium. Moving from the background of a professionally trained musician to that of language, Hecht earned a joint PhD and MFA from Cornell University in poetry and poetry composition, during which time he also became trained as a classical violinist. Eventually settling in Chicago, Hecht befriended members of the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) and Gidon Kremer’s Lockenhaus Festival in Austria, and worked to connect the two, culminating in a performance by then-ICE director Claire Chase at Lockenhaus. 

Throughout Hecht’s time in Chicago, he proved his commitment to artistic expansion: working as an English professor, Hecht continued to grow musically, all the while teaching theater, and directing student performances of Shakespeare and Renaissance drama. In 2022, Hecht’s work in English literary tradition came to a head when he published a book on the history of poetry in the English Renaissance with the prestigious publisher Oxford University Press. In totality, Hecht has established himself as one of the most authoritatively well-rounded artists on the contemporary jazz scene, with versatility in motion, speech, and music. It is from this trifecta that Hecht grew the seeds of his newest project: a jazz-rooted album of original compositions entitled Pyrography.

The word “pyrography,” when translated literally from Greek, simply means “fire-writing.” The idea of burning language into wood, creating beauty and language with such control over the otherwise formidable force of flame, is an image that has stuck with Hecht as a prominent metaphor for creativity. In exploring this idea, Hecht notes that “jazz is ephemeral by nature, attuned to the moment, the air, the room, the particular meeting of people in a place,” and he asks, “what does it mean to write for such a medium?” 

Beyond these levels of meaning, the album’s title, Pyrography, is a direct allusion to the poem of the same title by John Ashbery in which the poet seems to explore (in his usual ironic, abstract fashion) an overview of the history of continental America from a societal and geographic lens.

And not just the major events but the whole incredible
Mass of everything happening simultaneously and pairing off,
Channeling itself into history, will unroll
As carefully and as casually as a conversation in the next room 

In this section of the poem, Hecht found a mirror for the duality of composition and improvisation coexisting throughout jazz, and set to work “carefully and casually” to create Pyrography.

The album’s opening track, “He Made Up His Mind,” strikes a balance between Hecht’s attraction to complexity, and his desire to get to the root of things. Using modern jazz harmonic language with hints of Brazilian elements and progressive rock, this piece preserves the earnest beauty of the melody while keeping the environment around it tantalizingly unsettled. “Waltz For Franny” steers closer to the normative jazz tradition in its use of melody and form but steps away for its improvisatory section, which opens up and allows musicians almost total freedom. In so doing, this piece again showcases the simple ideas, or an idea of simplicity, while allowing for urgent, burning elaboration in its solo section. “Frankie’s Place” is a love letter to the music of Mark Turner in which Hecht internalizes and personalizes his engagement with one of the most original and fully-worked out improvisational languages of modern jazz.

One of the most poignantly idea-driven tracks on the album is the title track “Pyrography.” The opening statement and mode of this piece is inspired by what Hecht calls an “apocalyptic” chord from a Prokofiev violin sonata, while the remainder of the piece is almost entirely improvised, guided by a powerful mental image. Hecht describes the image as a dream he had in great lucidity of “a vast factory or warehouse space with flames shooting from blast furnaces into the night sky”—likely inspired by years regularly driving past the industrial expanse of the steel mills of Gary, Indiana. In stark contrast, “Dasha” is a piece inspired in duality: on one hand by the humorous antics of a kitten, and on the other by the people Hecht met during time spent in Ukraine, where “Dasha” is a loving nickname for the common female name “Daria.” The opening of this piece similarly utilizes such a duality, opening with an almost direct transcription from a Schumann symphony, which begins in near-despair before finding its way to a joyous melodic gesture. Throughout this piece, the combination of sounds, mingled with the undertones of implied meaning from the title, Hecht evokes a sense of youthful innocence and hope for a renewal and a brighter future.

The personnel on Pyrography is a trio expanded on four tracks to a quartet. Led by pianist and composer Paul Hecht, Pyrography features acclaimed drummer Gustavo Cortiñas, highly sought after bassist Ben Dillinger, and one of Chicago’s great staples, trumpeter James Davis. Hecht describes Cortiñas as a “dynamo” who is “a remarkable conversationalist as a player, a joy to play with in both traditional and experimental contexts.” Hecht sings similar praise of Dillinger, whom he lauds as “a fierce player, with a deep theoretical understanding of music, and a very wide ear.” Davis is beloved by Hecht as “bringing an incredible amount, from great insights into how to sequence solos and make the best sense of pieces, to his phenomenal and inspiring playing.” All in all, Hecht’s quartet melds seamlessly and walks perfectly between the written and the improvised as they realize Hecht’s vision.

With Pyrography, Hecht showcases the beauty of interdisciplinary inspiration, and his studied, thoughtful inspiration shines through equally in the moments of detailed composition and distilled, emotive improvisation. Truly, even as Hecht’s ensemble burns their sonic imprints into the air like the art after which their album is named, so will the music masterfully inscribe itself upon the hearts and minds of its listeners.