Contemporary music

The Garden: How Asuka Kakitani and Mark Urness Grew an Entire World from a Single Double Bass

There is a certain boldness in asking an instrument, especially when it is not a piano, played by one musician, to carry an entire album. No rhythm section to lean on, no horns to answer a phrase, no piano or guitar to fill the silence, just four strings and whatever imagination can conjure from them. The Garden, the new release from composer Asuka Kakitani and bassist Mark Urness takes on that challenge and turns it into something quietly extraordinary: an eleven-track meditation on growth, patience, and the unseen labour of living things, performed entirely on solo double bass.

The idea for the album took root in Kakitani’s own fascination with how plants realize their potential, through soil, sunlight, water, insects, birds, and the countless organisms most of us never think to notice. As she wrote the music, she has said she often felt as though she were tending a small garden of her own: imagining seeds taking hold, shoots reaching for light, flowers opening, pollinators arriving, and seeds eventually returning to the earth to begin the cycle again. That sensibility shapes the entire record. The Garden doesn’t rush. It asks listeners to notice the unfurling of a leaf or the quiet work of a pollinator the way they might notice a subtle chord change, patiently, and with the reward of discovery rather than spectacle.

What makes the project especially personal is its origin story. Although Kakitani has written extensively for classical ensembles, jazz large ensembles, orchestras, chamber groups, vocal music, electroacoustic works, film scores, The Garden is her first major work for unaccompanied double bass, and it grew directly out of a longstanding friendship with Urness. His artistry and curiosity, she has said, pushed her to imagine new possibilities for an instrument she hadn’t written a full solo program for before. That collaborative trust is audible throughout: this is music written for a specific musician’s voice, not adapted to fit it.

A lovely intimate touch runs through the record as well. Each movement opens with a spoken title, voiced by Kakitani, Urness, and Kakitani’s daughter, Mia. These brief spoken introductions work like small doorways into each piece, and they thread a personal, almost domestic warmth through an album that could otherwise feel austere in its single-instrument concept.

The real structural genius of The Garden lies in how it’s built. Seven of the eleven tracks, “Seeds,” “Germination,” “Ditch the Chemicals,” “Rooting,” “Pollinators,” “Fly, Fly, Fly Away, Seeds,” and “Beneath Our Feet”, are fully composed by Kakitani. But woven between them are four shorter pieces, “Ants’ House,” “Apple Tree,” “Fireflies,” and “Hummingbird Moth”, that are entirely improvised by Urness, working from titles drawn from Kakitani’s own reflections on her garden.

This is where the album becomes something rarer than a simple “composer plus performer” record. Urness isn’t just interpreting Kakitani’s writing with sensitivity, though he does that superbly, he’s composing in real time, in the moment of recording, conjuring the fleeting, camera-flash quality of an ant colony’s industry or a hummingbird moth’s hover-and-dart flight entirely from a title and his own instincts. That he can do this so convincingly, shifting so naturally between fully notated material and spontaneous invention that the seams barely show, says as much about his musicianship as any of the composed material does. It’s a genuinely rare skill: to create fully formed, evocative miniatures on the spot, on an instrument that is more often asked to support than to speak alone.

The pacing that results is one of the album’s great pleasures. The longer, composed movements, “Germination” at nearly eight minutes, “Pollinators” close behind it, give Kakitani’s ideas room to develop, tracing arcs that feel almost narrative, like a season passing. The brief improvised interludes, several under a minute, function like held breaths between chapters: “Ants’ House” and “Apple Tree” barely last forty-five seconds each, but they land with the precision of a haiku, sketching a whole scene in a handful of gestures.

None of this would land without a player capable of drawing an entire emotional and coloristic range from a single double bass. Urness, associate professor of music at Lawrence University and principal bassist of the Weidner Center Philharmonic Orchestra, is equally at home across classical, jazz, and contemporary idioms, and The Garden asks him to move fluidly between all three vocabularies within a single track. Across this album he pulls a genuinely wide palette from the instrument: singing arco lines that could pass for cello, percussive pizzicato that mimics rustling leaves or scurrying insects, harmonics that flicker like fireflies, and passages of near-vocal expressiveness in the lower register that feel like the instrument breathing. It’s the kind of playing that only comes from decades of teaching as well as performing, the instinct to make every technical device serve the music rather than show it off.

That teaching background is worth pausing on. Urness has spent over two decades at Lawrence University shaping young bassists, following earlier posts at the University of Iowa, Coe College, and the University of Northern Iowa, and he brings the same generosity of communication to The Garden that a great teacher brings to a lesson: nothing here feels like it’s performed to impress. It’s performed to be understood.

Listeners familiar with Kakitani’s records may find themselves hearing The Garden in conversation with an earlier work: The Nights, her collection of solo piano pieces performed by Shannon Wettstein. Where The Nights moved through moments of personal transformation, the hush of a first snowfall, the restlessness of sleepless hours, the instant her daughter was born, The Garden moves through cycles of growth in the natural world. The two albums share more than a solo-instrument format, they share a compositional instinct for turning something small and easily overlooked, a scattered night, a scrap of a child’s refrigerator-magnet poem, a bud opening, into a fully realized musical statement. Both records also carry that same thread of family intimacy: Mia’s spoken words on The Garden echo the way Kakitani’s daughter inspired a piece’s title on The Nights. Taken together, the two works suggest a composer increasingly drawn to intimate, unaccompanied forms as a way of getting closer to the quiet, easily missed textures of everyday life, whether that life unfolds indoors, in memory, or in soil.

At just over 41 minutes across eleven tracks, The Garden never overstays its welcome, and its brevity is part of its wisdom, like a well-tended garden, it doesn’t try to show you everything at once. What lingers after the album ends is the sense of two musicians who trust each other completely: a composer willing to leave real space for spontaneous invention, and a performer generous and skilled enough to fill that space with something as fully formed as anything written down. For an album built on a single unaccompanied instrument, The Garden is remarkably full, patient, alive, and quietly rewarding on repeat listening. A great album, a real favourite, something I absolutely fell in love with.

Frankie Pfeiffer
Editor in chief – PARIS-MOVE

PARIS-MOVE, August 16th, 2026

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To order the album on the Bandcamp

To order the album on Neuma Records’ Website

Tracklisting:
1.Seeds    03:50
2.Germination   07:59
3.Ants’ House   00:42
4.Ditch the Chemicals  05:22
5.Apple Tree    00:48
6.Rooting     04:41
7.Fireflies     01:21
8.Pollinators    06:48
9.Hummingbird Moth    00:34
10.Fly, Fly, Fly Away, Seeds   06:06
11.Beneath Our Feet    03:53

All compositions (1, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 11) by Asuka Kakitani except tracks 3, 5, 7, and 9, improvised by Mark Urness

Musician:
Mark Urness, double bass