And it just kind of stuck in the back of my head, like, 'Hey, if we ever want to move, this would be a nice place."Įckroth plans to do a little singing at the Nash with a trio that features Lefebvre and Euman. I lived here for a short time when I was young.' It was so beautiful. "And I was like, 'Oh yeah, Tucson's really cool. She'd revisited Tucson before the pandemic on a drive to Sonic Ranch. I drove down for a Wednesday night gig at a little bar." Eckroth's music is constantly evolving So he had me come down for maybe three weeks in a row. "He's a year older than me, and he's a pianist. "I did my first gig in Tucson because my brother Mike needed a sub," she says. "Which was really a big deal."Įckroth also played some early gigs in Tucson.
"He sort of took me under his wing when I was young and let me jam with those guys," she says. That was what I liked about it."Įckroth also started making inroads on the Phoenix jazz scene, sitting in with Dennis Rowland's band while still in high school.
When you're playing jazz, it's all up to you at the moment. "I was like, 'I don't really know why I'm doing this.' And then I found it in high school. "There was a point when I was little that I wanted to quit piano," she says. She'd been playing piano for almost a decade by then, having started at 6, and the thrill had long since faded. "And they sent me to a jazz camp one summer, where I really was amazed at learning about chords and harmony and improvising and just being able to create on the spot." "For a long time, they had a really great jazz band there," she says. "I wasn't really singing my own stuff until I was 30." Eckroth got into jazz at Thunderbird High SchoolĮckroth started getting into jazz "really hard" at 15 while living in Phoenix and playing in the jazz band at Thunderbird High School. "This instrumental record is me taking a little break from being a singer, or being recognized as a singer and sort of making my mark as a keyboard player, because I started off that way," she says. She'd written a lot of lyrics, though, so she ended up singing more on that one. So it was kind of leading into this next project." 'When it Falls' had a lot more synth and electronic stuff happening. "The album before that was a singer-songwriter album called 'Let Go,' with more acoustic instruments. "It was a similar starting point, I guess," she says. In some ways, Eckroth sees "The Garden" as a logical extension of what she and Lefebvre had done on her previous album, "When it Falls," which he also produced. And Tim produced it in a way that made it kind of further out than jazz." So I just kind of took my jazz background and wrote a bunch of songs. "It was more like, 'Let's do a record' and then I started writing it. "It's not like I was just writing and then we were like, 'Dude, let's do a record,'" Eckroth says. It was a lot of fun, but also very focused on creating something special. Being a keyboard player, I want to collect as many keyboards as possible." 'The Garden' was a logical next step for Eckroth "And we've been dabbling in modular synthesis and synthesis in general So we've got a good number of synthesizers here and effects pedals, things like that. "Tim is kind of a master at pedals," she says. The couple spent a lot of downtime during the pandemic improvising on their synthesizers, drums machines, effects pedals and other "weird stuff," Eckroth says, to arrive at the synth-driven, improvisational splendor of "The Garden." On top of that, Rainy Days Records approached me and my husband, Tim, to make a record like that." "I wanted to do, basically, a compositional record," she says, "and not think about singing. This is the keyboard-playing singer's first primarily instrumental album. "So I've actually not met him, but he's on the record," Eckroth says. Krasilnikov, for instance, cut his sax in Russia.