| Contemporary music |
You, Me, Us by Nick May & Alex Siu Lun Li: A Triumphant, Must-Hear Testament to Queer Voices in Music
You, Me, Us is a record built on generosity: the generosity of seven living composers who handed Nick May and Alex Siu Lun Li their most personal material, and the generosity of two performers who play every note of it as though their own lives depend on it. The result is one of the most quietly radical and emotionally direct chamber albums of the year, an unqualified must for anyone who cares about where contemporary and classical music is heading.
You, Me, Us grows out of May’s I Exist Project, an ongoing initiative devoted to commissioning, performing, and championing music by queer composers. That mission could easily have produced a worthy-but-dutiful record, the kind of album you admire more than you enjoy. Instead, May and Li have assembled a program that never once feels like homework. Across seven works by seven distinct voices, Sebastian Zhang, Stuart Beatch, Aaryn S. Ricucci-Hill, Darius D. Edwards, Jennifer Higdon, Xenia St. Charles Iris Llyllyth, and Spencer Arias, the duo finds an emotional throughline without flattening any of the individual personalities involved. Anger sits beside tenderness, satire beside grief, minimalism beside maximalism, and somehow it all coheres into a single, sustained statement about what it means to claim your own story.
What keeps the album from ever feeling like a lecture is the sheer instrumental communication between the two players. May and Li aren’t simply presenting new repertoire, they’re having a conversation with it, and with each other, in real time. Recorded over three days at Swarthout Recital Hall at the University of Kansas under producer Geoffrey Landman, the sound is warm, immediate, and beautifully balanced. You can hear the room breathe around the instruments without ever losing detail in the saxophone’s upper register or the piano’s inner voicings.
Nick May has spent years building a reputation as one of the saxophone’s most persuasive contemporary advocates, praised by composer David Del Tredici as “a highly expressive, virtuosic, and fresh performer”. His résumé already includes Carnegie Hall appearances, international touring, and premieres with composers like Jennifer Higdon, Kevin Day, and Ingrid Stölzel, but You, Me, Us feels like a culmination rather than another entry on the list, the project where his technical command and his advocacy work finally share the same stage.
Alex Siu Lun Li, the Hong Kong-born, Kansas City-based pianist now pursuing a Doctor of Musical Arts at UMKC, proves the ideal partner for this material. Li’s background as a sought-after collaborative pianist, accompanying singers, string players, and woodwind soloists across the Midwest, pays off in exactly the way you’d hope: he listens as much as he plays. Nowhere on this record does the piano feel like accompaniment in the diminished sense of the word. Li shapes phrases, pushes tempo, and colours harmony with the authority of an equal storyteller, which is precisely what music this personal demands.
The album opens with Sebastian Zhang’s White Socks?!, and it’s a masterstroke of sequencing, a groove-driven, genre-hopping opener that pulls equally from classical music, jazz and anime soundtracks. May digs into the piece’s rhythmic playfulness with real relish, and Li matches him syllable for syllable in the comping, setting a tone of joy and mischief that immediately signals this won’t be a sombre, issue-driven listening experience.
Stuart Beatch’s on queer survival follows, and the contrast could hardly be sharper. Where Zhang is extroverted, Beatch turns inward: long tones, exposed silences, and a slow-burning emotional weight that asks the listener to sit with discomfort rather than resolve it quickly. May’s control over dynamics here is extraordinary, his softest passages carry as much tension as his loudest ones, and the piece’s patience pays off as a genuine gut-punch by its final minutes.
Queer Turquoise by Aaryn S. Ricucci-Hill is arguably the album’s most underrated highlight, and it deserves far more attention than it typically receives. Its extended, exploratory structure gives May room to range across the saxophone’s full colour palette, from breathy multiphonics to keening high-register cries, while Li’s piano writing works almost as a slowly shifting landscape beneath him, static in the best sense, like weather rolling across a wide horizon. It’s a piece that rewards patience, and this performance earns every one of its eight minutes.
Darius D. Edwards’ Where Will My Flowers Go?, inspired by Whitney Houston’s phrasing, brings a welcome shift into soul and jazz-inflected lyricism. May’s tone turns almost vocal here, bending and sliding with a singer’s instinct, and it’s a lovely reminder of how porous the boundary between “classical” and “popular” really is when the performers are this attuned to phrasing.
Jennifer Higdon’s Echo Dash is the shortest work on the record and also one of its most exhilarating, a breathless two-and-a-half-minute sprint that demands split-second synchronization between the two players. May and Li nail its manic energy without ever sounding rushed or scrappy, it’s a technical high-wire act delivered with total composure and it’s easy to hear why a Pulitzer- and GRAMMY-winning composer would trust these two with her material.
Xenia St. Charles Iris Llyllyth’s Close your eyes, if you can offers the album’s most meditative interlude: gently rocking, repetitive figures that edge toward minimalism without ever losing warmth. It functions almost as a held breath before the album’s final act, and May and Li resist any temptation to over-dramatize it, the restraint is the point, and it’s beautifully judged.
That final act belongs entirely to Spencer Arias, whose four-movement title suite (You, Me, Us, You Broke My Heart; You, Me, Us, You Set Me Free; You, Me, Us, You Taught Me How to Fly, and You, Me, Us – You + Me = Us) closes the record with real ambition. Taken together, the seventeen-minute suite maps a complete emotional arc: rupture, liberation, growth, and unity. The second and third movements in particular showcase the duo at their most exposed and vulnerable, with Li’s harmonic language turning genuinely luminous under May’s long, arching lines. The final movement pulls every earlier idea on the album back into focus, and hearing May and Li land it with such conviction after fifty minutes of committed playing is one of the record’s most satisfying payoffs, proof that this duo can sustain a large-scale emotional argument, not just deliver individual movements in isolation.
It would be easy to praise You, Me, Us purely for its cultural significance, and that significance is real: this is a record that gives space to composers whose stories are too often pushed to the margins, released at a moment when that visibility carries real stakes. But what elevates the album beyond advocacy is simply how good the playing is. May and Li never coast on the strength of their material’s message, they play every single piece as if it’s the most important music ever written, and that conviction is contagious. Few chamber albums this year balance craft, courage, and heart so completely.
You, Me, Us is tender where it needs to be tender, ferocious where it needs to be ferocious, and endlessly listenable throughout. It’s a record that rewards a first spin with pure musical pleasure and rewards every subsequent spin with new layers of meaning. For anyone who loves the saxophone-and-piano duo repertoire, anyone invested in new music by living composers, or anyone simply looking for an album with genuine emotional stakes, this is an essential, must-own release. Highest possible recommendation.
Frankie Pfeiffer
Editor in chief – PARIS-MOVE
PARIS-MOVE, September 17th, 2026
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Album on Neuma Records’ website
Musicians:
Nick May: soprano and alto saxophones
Alex Siu Lun Li: piano
Tracklisting:
1.Sebastian Zhang: White Socks?! 05:54
2.Stuart Beatch: on queer survival 07:13
3.Aaryn S. Ricucci-Hill: Queer Turquoise 08:13
4.Darius D. Edwards: Where Will My Flowers Go? 04:10
5.Jennifer Higdon: Echo Dash 02:33
6.Xenia St. Charles Iris Llyllyth: Close your eyes, if you can 06:13
7.Spencer Arias: You, Me, Us – You Broke My Heart 03:36
8.Spencer Arias: You, Me, Us – You Set Me Free 04:33
9.Spencer Arias: You, Me, Us – You Taught Me How to Fly 05:16
10.Spencer Arias: You, Me, Us – You + Me = Us 04:36
Total: 52:23
Session Engineer/Editing/Mixing/Mastering: PJ Kelly
Producer: Geoffrey Landman
Assistant Producer: Spencer Arias
All works recorded at Swarthout Recital Hall, University of Kansas, Lawrence KS: July 29-31, 2025.
This album was made possible by the generous support from ArtsKC and Légère Reeds.
Design: Philip Blackburn
