| Contemporary music |
Second Life: Jason Kao Hwang’s Human Rites Trio Finds New Ground in Uncertainty
Five years on from their fierce, pandemic-forged debut, the Human Rites Trio is back, and Second Life, out October 1, 2026, sounds like a group that has spent that time deepening rather than repeating itself. Led by violinist and composer Jason Kao Hwang alongside bassist Ken Filiano and drummer-percussionist Andrew Drury, this second album trades the debut’s six shorter movements for four long-form pieces, stretched across 45 minutes, that let the trio’s collective instincts unfold at full length.
The group’s 2020 self-titled album, Human Rites Trio, was recorded and released in the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic, and Hwang was explicit about what he wanted the music to carry. In his own words, the album was built from “a progression of gestures, songs, movements and locations that bring participants into a state of discovery and compassion“, music intended as both an honouring of frontline workers and a memorial for those the world had lost. That record’s six tracks, among them the two-part “Words Asleep Spoken Awake” and the eleven-minute centrepiece “Battle for the Indelible Truth”, established the trio’s language: violin and viola trading register and colour against Filiano’s string bass and Drury’s drum set, structure and freedom held in constant negotiation.
Second Life picks up that negotiation and gives it more room to breathe. Where the debut moved through six compositions in under an hour, the new album distils the trio’s ideas into just four: “Galaxies Twist Under Before It”, “What to Keep, What to Let Go”, the title track “Second Life”, and “Ricochet”. Each one is long enough to develop its own internal weather system, and the result feels less like a suite of separate statements and more like a single extended conversation captured in four movements.
The opener, “Galaxies Twist Under Before It”, announces the album’s scale immediately, unfolding across more than ten minutes through shifting tempos and moods. Drury is especially vivid here, driving the piece’s energetic first half with a momentum that sets the tone for everything that follows. That momentum is only part of his contribution, though, across the album he reaches well beyond a standard kit, incorporating gongs, aluminium pots, stainless steel bowls, a Tibetan prayer bowl, bells, seed pods, oyster and mussel shells, a wood block, cowbell, bronze gear, and even a sink faucet escutcheon into his palette. On paper it reads like a junk-shop inventory, but in practice, that expanded sound world gives the trio a far wider textural range than drums and cymbals alone could offer, and it fits naturally within Hwang’s compositional world, where timbre carries as much narrative weight as melody or harmony.
That percussive variety comes into sharpest focus on “What to Keep, What to Let Go,” which turns toward more reflective territory, with Hwang taking a comparatively restrained role at the piece’s opening and close and leaving space for Drury’s textures to speak. The title track, at over thirteen minutes, sits at the album’s centre as its most expansive statement, before “Ricochet” closes the record with some of the trio’s most intense collective improvisation, a fitting release after the patience built up over the preceding three pieces.
Across all four compositions, what stands out is how the trio moves between freedom and underlying logic without ever losing the thread. Lines can fracture into three separate, seemingly unrelated ideas and then suddenly cohere into a single shared direction, as if the musicians had planned the reunion all along. That combination, spontaneity that behaves, in hindsight, like inevitability, has always been at the centre of Hwang’s music, and here, stripped down to trio format, there’s nowhere for anyone to hide. Every gesture from any of the three musicians can redirect the entire piece, and that exposure becomes the album’s real subject: what virtuosity looks like when it’s entirely in service of listening.
Hwang’s music has long lived in the space between composition and improvisation, and between musical traditions. Raised in a household where his immigrant parents spoke Chinese to each other, a language he never learned to speak himself, only to listen to for its inflection, pitch, and rhythm, Hwang has described that listening experience as the foundation of his creative instincts, alongside inspirations drawn from the Chinese erhu and pipa and the Korean gayageum.
That foundation has produced a substantial and widely honoured body of work. Hwang was voted the El Intruso International Critics Poll’s top violin/viola player five times over the past decade and a half, DownBeat named his quintet Sing House among its best releases of 2017, and his large-ensemble and chamber projects, including Spontaneous River, EDGE, and the chamber opera The Floating Box, have repeatedly landed on year-end best-of lists. He has performed and recorded alongside a striking range of improvising and composing peers, from Henry Threadgill, William Parker, and Anthony Braxton to Billy Bang, Leroy Jenkins, and Oliver Lake, a lineage that runs directly through the same downtown New York scene where his own voice as a violinist first took shape.
Second Life doesn’t try to outdo its predecessor’s urgency, it trusts the trio’s chemistry enough to let the music stretch out. For listeners drawn to adventurous, deeply conversational jazz and improvised music, it offers a demanding but ultimately rewarding portrait of three musicians who have figured out how to make uncertainty sound purposeful, proof that some collaborations only get more interesting the longer they’re given to breathe.
Frankie Pfeiffer
Editor in chief – PARIS-MOVE
PARIS-MOVE, August 16th, 2026
Follow PARIS-MOVE on X
::::::::::::::::::::::::
Tracklisting:
- Galaxies Twist Under Before It 10:53
- What to Keep, What to Let Go 9:40
- Second Life 13:17
- Ricochet 11.48
All compositions by Jason Kao Hwang
Musicians:
Jason Kao Hwang – composer, violin
Andrew Drury – drum set, gongs, aluminium pots, stainless steel bowls, Tibetan prayer bowl, bells, seed pods, oyster & mussel shells, wood block, cowbell, bronze gear, sink faucet escutcheon
Ken Filiano – string bass