| Contemporary music |
Forever Eve: Kyle Grimm Puts the Double Bass Where It Belongs, Front and Centre
The double bass has one of the strangest jobs in music: it’s almost always present and almost never the point. It anchors orchestras from the back row, holds down jazz and rock’n’roll combos from the shadows, and rarely gets asked to simply stand up and speak for itself. forever eve, the solo debut from composer and bassist Kyle Grimm, exists to correct that. Across five works for double bass and electronics, two of his own, three commissioned from friends and colleagues, Grimm turns an instrument built for support into the sole voice of an album, and the results are absorbing precisely because of how differently each piece imagines that voice.
forever eve has a clear origin story, and it’s a personal one. In March 2023, composer and pianist Aaron Wyanski invited Grimm, by then focused primarily on composing, with performing pushed to the margins, to give a recital of double bass and electronics works on his campus. That single concert changed something. “After this concert I had the realization that performing is, and always had been, an essential part of who I am as an artist”, Grimm has said, and the project grew directly out of that realization, alongside what he describes as a love of collaboration. The recital eventually became a full program, Bottled Chaos, premiered in West Hartford in February 2025, and forever eve is its recorded distillation, all five pieces performed, recorded, mixed, and mastered by Grimm himself.
The album’s title captures its emotional register well. If the future stretches out endlessly and tomorrow always arrives, forever eve is the night just before, expectant, unresolved, looking forward rather than settled. That sense of anticipation runs through the whole record, which plays less like a fixed statement and more like a document of an artist mid-reawakening.
What makes forever eve especially compelling as a listening experience is that no two tracks treat the bass-and-electronics relationship the same way. Grimm didn’t just commission four other pieces to fill out a solo record, he assembled a small survey of what that pairing can mean.
The opener, Aaron Wyanski’s “Twist, Then Pull,” is the album’s most conceptually unusual entry: a fixed-media track built almost entirely from recordings of Max Roach and Jimmy Garrison, with a few sampled chords from Duke Ellington folded in, layered into what’s been called a “fugue of pulses”. The title nods both to the physical mechanics of tuning and plucking a string instrument and to a private joke between composer and performer, a small human detail that suits an album so rooted in friendship and collaboration.
Grimm’s own “Serendipitous II” follows, the second entry in an ongoing series exploring randomness, predictability, and feedback. Here the electronics record and granularly reorder Grimm’s live playing in real time, so that he ends up improvising alongside a transformed echo of what he just played, a performer in duet with his own immediate past.
Maria Kaoutzani’s “All About It” shifts the focus to transitions: from expansive lyricism to rhythmic drive, from subtle amplification to electronics that go their own independent way, and from fully notated writing to improvised endings. It’s the piece on the album most interested in watching boundaries dissolve in real time, and it stands as a highlight for how many transformations it manages inside a single continuous arc.
The title track, “forever eve,” is Grimm’s second composition on the record and arguably its most technically pure distillation of the album’s premise: every sound in the piece is derived from the double bass itself, processed in real time through reverse delays and shimmer reverbs. The result is a self-contained sonic world where beauty and tension coexist, the sound of an instrument perpetually trailing and chasing its own reflection.
The closing piece carries the album’s most poignant weight. Ken Steen’s “…and in what flows between them,” subtitled in memoriam Robert Black, is an elegy built from live loops, pre-recorded passages by Grimm, and, remarkably, elements recorded by the late bassist Robert Black himself, drawn from Steen’s 2004 work Drifting Off. The piece becomes a musical conversation among friends across time, honouring both an extraordinary bassist and, as the album’s notes put it, a generous human being. The connection is not incidental: Grimm has performed under Robert Black’s direction earlier in his career, which lends the piece’s quiet act of remembrance a genuine sense of lineage, one bassist honouring another through the very medium, electronically extended solo bass, that this whole album is built to explore.
forever eve is as much a portrait of Kyle Grimm’s musical community as it is a solo showcase. Grimm, currently Assistant Professor of Music Composition at The Hartt School, University of Hartford, and described by Roger Zahab as possessing a “feisty technicolour” musical voice, built his career at Hartt studying under Robert Carl, David Macbride, Ken Steen, and Gilda Lyons, and he has remained an active advocate for his colleagues’ work ever since, championing premieres by figures like Steen and Paula Matthusen. That advocacy is written directly into forever eve‘s structure: rather than filling a solo album entirely with his own material, Grimm hands three of its five slots to Wyanski, Kaoutzani, and his former teacher Steen, each of whom brings a genuinely distinct compositional sensibility, Wyanski’s sample-built historical layering, Kaoutzani’s interest in transitional forms, Steen’s memorial lyricism, to the same instrumental and electronic palette.
That generosity extends to the composers’ own résumés, all of them accomplished well beyond this record. Wyanski’s work spans jazz, classical, and free improvisation, and has been performed at Carnegie Hall and New Music Miami. Kaoutzani, a Cyprus-born, Illinois-based composer, has written for the Grammy-winning ensemble Eighth Blackbird and the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. Steen, Professor Emeritus at Hartford since 1992 and a Larsen Award winner for teaching excellence, has had his sound-based work performed on five continents, from Mumbai to Reykjavík. Hearing three such different voices funnelled through one performer’s hands, on one instrument, is a quiet demonstration of how much range a single “solo album” can actually contain.
At just under fifty minutes, forever eve never feels padded, each of its five pieces earns its place by approaching the bass-and-electronics pairing from a genuinely different angle, from sample collage to real-time processing to memorial tribute. What ties it all together is Grimm himself: a performer clearly relieved to be back in front of an audience, and generous enough to spend much of his own spotlight sharing it with the people who shaped him. It’s a fitting way to reintroduce an instrument, and an artist, that have both spent too long working from the shadows.
Frankie Pfeiffer
Editor in chief – PARIS-MOVE
PARIS-MOVE, August 17th, 2026
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Tracklisting:
- Twist, Then Pull (Aaron Wyanski) 07:09
- Serendipitous II (Kyle Grimm) 11:43
- All About It (Maria Kaoutzani) 09:16
- forever eve (Kyle Grimm) 09:50
- …and in what flows between them (Ken Steen) 11:12
(total 49:28)
All works performed, recorded, mixed, and mastered by Kyle Grimm
Tracks 2 and 4 composed by Kyle Grimm
Musician:
Kyle Grimm: double bass, electronics
Album to order on the Bandcamp
Album to order on Neuman Records’ website
Kyle Grimm on the University of Hartford’s website