| Jazz |
Zeit Zirkel: Christian Finger Turns Grief Into a Circle of Time.
The title alone tells you most of what you need to know about the emotional stakes of this record. Zeit Zirkel (German for “Time Circle”) is drummer and composer Christian Finger’s meditation on the wide-open, disorienting sense of time that grief produces, the way loss can seem to loop and return rather than move cleanly forward. It’s a heavy subject for an album to carry, and Finger carries it beautifully, surrounding himself with four musicians, trumpeter Ralph Alessi, guitarist Ben Monder, pianist Vadim Neselovskyi, and bassist Adam Armstrong, capable of translating that emotional weight into thirteen tracks that never once feel like an exercise in mourning for its own sake. This is music that moves through darkness toward genuine hope, and it’s one of the finest, most fully realized records Finger has made in a career now spanning a quarter-century in New York.
Finger’s own story is one of remarkable range. Born and raised in Germany into an artistic family, he was recognized as a young talent at the Hochschule für Musik Detmold before a musical education that carried him across Germany, the United States, and the Netherlands, earning degrees in both teaching and percussion. He built a career in Europe, then spent time in Sydney, Australia, before finally settling in New York City in 2001, beginning what is now more than two decades at the centre of the city’s creative music scene. Since then he’s shared bandstands and studios with figures like Lee Konitz, Ron Carter, and Jeff Ballard, worked with multiple Grammy-nominated artists, and picked up a Best Composer nomination at the Cannes Shorts Film Festival for his work beyond the concert stage. He now also runs the New York Drum School, passing that accumulated experience on to a new generation of players.
Zeit Zirkel marks his fifth album as a leader, and it arrives with real continuity behind it: Neselovskyi and Armstrong have been playing with Finger since 2006, and the Christian Finger Band built around that trio has hosted an enviable list of guests over the years, including Donny McCaslin and Rich Perry. That two-decade rapport with his rhythm section shows throughout this record, even surrounded by two towering new partners in Alessi and Monder, the band never sounds like a one-off summit meeting. It sounds like a unit that already knew exactly how to breathe together before the session began.
The album opens with “Alta Anima” (Spanish for “High Soul”) an eight-minute statement that immediately sets the emotional register: a thoughtful theme carried by Alessi’s trumpet, a countermelody woven in by Monder, and a trumpet solo that catches fire as the piece develops. It’s a patient, confident opener, unafraid to take its time establishing the album’s world before asking anything more urgent of the listener.
“Hope and Hope” shifts into a brisk trumpet-bass-drums trio to start, guitar joining midway through before the piece settles into a calm, almost hymn-like close, a small structural arc, from restlessness to peace, that mirrors the album’s larger emotional trajectory in miniature. “Fifteen PM” is one of the record’s genuine high points: blazing trumpet lines, a rock-inflected edge from Monder’s guitar, powerful, propulsive drumming from Finger himself, and a piano solo from Neselovskyi that ranks among the most creative playing on the entire album.
The picturesque “Dawn Dream” and the exuberant “Stimmung M” offer two contrasting moods back to back, before “Frei Geist” (“Free Spirit”) gives Neselovskyi room to swing in a genuinely personal, idiosyncratic way, a highlight for anyone drawn to pianists who bend swing feel into their own shape rather than reproducing it by formula. “Wellenklang” (“Wave Sound”) brings real intensity, while “Five Secrets I” pulls back into stark, exposed ballad territory, one of the album’s most emotionally direct moments.
“Gentle Garden” gives bassist Armstrong particular room to shine, its peaceful character offering a welcome exhale before the album’s title track, “Zeit Zirkel”, which showcases especially close, attentive interplay between Alessi and Neselovskyi, trumpet and piano circling each other with real intimacy. “Time Flows For You”, a concise, colorful drum feature, leads into “Five Secrets II”, a free-form piece built on thoughtful, unhurried interplay among all five musicians, before the album closes with “Time Flows For Us”, a brief companion drum solo that brings the whole thirteen-track arc full circle, quite literally, given the album’s title.
Taken as a whole, the sequencing does real emotional work: darker, more searching material in the album’s first half gradually gives way to more settled, hopeful territory by its close, without ever feeling like a forced or simplistic arc from sadness to resolution. It’s a genuinely sophisticated piece of programming for a thirteen-track record to pull off.
Part of what makes Zeit Zirkel such a rich listen is the sheer depth of experience surrounding Finger’s compositions:
Ralph Alessi, an ECM recording artist born into a genuinely remarkable musical family — his father a classical trumpeter, his mother an opera singer, his brother Joe Alessi a world-renowned classical trombonist — brings both technical precision and an avant-garde spirit shaped by his California Institute of the Arts training and decades collaborating with Steve Coleman, Ravi Coltrane, Jason Moran, and Fred Hersch. His 2013 ECM album Baida landed on multiple best-of-the-year lists, and his 2024 release It’s Always Now was praised by critic Jim Macnie for its poignant lyricism, a quality that comes through clearly in his playing on Zeit Zirkel as well, whether he’s stating a thoughtful theme on “Alta Anima” or trading close, searching phrases with Neselovskyi on the title track.
Ben Monder, a fixture of the New York scene for over three decades, brings a résumé that spans jazz royalty (Lee Konitz, Paul Motian, Maria Schneider) and rock history alike, he contributed guitar to David Bowie’s final album, Blackstar. A recipient of both a Doris Duke Impact Award and a Shifting Foundation grant, and the leader of six albums of his own including Amorphae on ECM, Monder’s countermelodies and rock-tinged textures give Zeit Zirkel an edge that keeps its more reflective material from ever tipping into sentimentality.
Vadim Neselovskyi‘s own story is remarkable on its own terms: a child prodigy in still-Soviet Ukraine who became the youngest student ever accepted into the Odessa Conservatory, he absorbed Keith Jarrett, Chick Corea, and Thelonious Monk from bootleg tapes passed along by sailors before eventually studying at Berklee and being selected by Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, and Terence Blanchard for the Thelonious Monk Institute. The Guardian has called him “the most promising of the young improvisers,” and his playing throughout Zeit Zirkel, especially his standout solo on “Fifteen PM” and his idiosyncratic swing on “Frei Geist”, makes an easy case for why.
Adam Armstrong, who relocated from Sydney to New York in 2000, rounds out the rhythm section with a bassist’s résumé built on real range: work with Kenny Kirkland, Kenny Wheeler, Maria Schneider, and Billy Cobham, appearances at festivals from North Sea Jazz to Montreux to Wangaratta, and credits on more than eighty albums including two ARIA Award winners. His feature on “Gentle Garden” is a quiet album highlight, understated in exactly the way the piece calls for.
Zeit Zirkel joins a leader discography that already includes Balance (2001, featuring Lee Konitz), Merge Into Beauty (2006, with the Momenta String Quartet), the ambitious Ananda – The World Is Bliss (2015, featuring a rare drum duet with Jeff Ballard and the Mivos String Quartet), and Dignity and Passion (2018). Across that arc, Finger has consistently paired his own compositional voice with genuinely first-rate collaborators, but Zeit Zirkel may be the fullest realization, yet of what that approach can produce: a program of deeply personal music, given room to breathe by musicians capable of matching its emotional ambition at every turn.
This is a record about facing loss without being consumed by it, and it succeeds precisely because Finger never overstates the point. He simply lets thirteen carefully sequenced, beautifully played tracks do the work, trusting his listeners to feel the arc from darkness toward hope without being told to feel it. A genuinely excellent, deeply moving album, and easily one of the year’s most rewarding jazz releases. A must!
Frankie Pfeiffer
Editor in chief – PARIS-MOVE
PARIS-MOVE, September 3rd, 2026
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Musicians:
Ralph Alessi: trumpet
Ben Monder: guitar
Vadim Neselovskyi: piano
Adam Armstrong: bass
Christian Finger: drums/composition
Tracklisting:
- Alta Anima 08:03
- Hope And Hope 03:55
- Fifteen PM 06:21
- Dawn Dream 07:12
- Stimmung M 05:29
- Frei Geist 04:38
- Wellen Klang 05:49
- Five Secrets I 05:44
- Gentle Garden 03:20
- Zeit Zirkel 05:21
- Time Flows For You 02:47
- Five Secrets II 03:33
- Time Flows For Us 01:05
Recorded July 6, 2024, at Big Orange Sheep Studios Brooklyn by Chris Benham
Mixed and mastered by Chris Benham January 2025
Cover Art by Christian Finger and Chris Drukker
Christian Finger’s album “Zeit Zirkel” Release concert at Mezzrow Jazz Club
Mezzrow Jazz Club, 163 W 10th St, New York, NY
Wed, September 16, 2026
Sets at 9:00PM & 10:30PM
Get Ticket