Yelena Eckemoff is a renowned Russian-born pianist, composer, poet, and visual artist. She organically blends classical elements with jazz improvisation in evocative and uniquely distinctive works that strike a delicate balance between through-composed frameworks and open-ended improvisation. Her career can be divided into halves: Before 2009, she issued modern oratorios such as 2000's The Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ and 2005's Travel, where her focus was shared between jazz, classical, new age, and sacred music. After 2010's Flying Steps, jazz became her primary mode of expression. Eckemoff works with an astonishing variety of session players. Marilyn Mazur and Mats Eilertsen assisted her on 2011's Forget-Me-Not, while Arild Andersen and Peter Erskine appeared on 2013's Glass Song. On 2017's In the Shadow of a Cloud featured a quintet with Chris Potter and Gerald Cleaver. 2021's Adventures of the Wildflower was recorded with an all-star Finnish sextet in Helsinki, and 2022's I Am a Stranger in This World, offered an instrumental setting of biblical psalms by a New York-based band.