| Jazz |
Cornea: Sebastian Zawadzki’s Nordic Trio Make an Album Out of Silence Itself
Cornea, the new record from Copenhagen-based pianist and composer Sebastian Zawadzki and his Nordic Trio, asks something rare: to be sat with, to immerse yourself in it completely, shutting out the world around you. Across eleven tracks and just under fifty minutes, this is music that trusts silence as much as sound, and the result is one of the most quietly captivating jazz piano trio records to come along in some time. It is, without qualification, a must-hear.
Zawadzki is not a musician who arrived at this restraint by accident. Based between Nordic jazz, contemporary classical composition and film scoring — he has arranged for Academy Award-winning composer Jan A.P. Kaczmarek, performed solo piano at Chopin’s own birthplace on invitation from the Fryderyk Chopin Institute, and appeared at the Berliner Philharmonie by invitation of the Berliner Philharmoniker itself — he brings a composer’s discipline to a trio format that too often rewards showmanship instead. On Cornea, that discipline is the whole point.
The album’s title refers to the eye’s transparent outer layer, the point where light first meets perception, and that idea of a threshold, between clarity and obscurity, sound and silence, form and atmosphere, runs through every track here. It’s telling that nearly all eleven pieces carry Latin, Greek or Polish titles drawn from anatomy and natural phenomena: a peat bog, an air sac, ivy, the gap through which light enters a room. Taken together, the sequence reads less like a track list and more like a small vocabulary of membranes and apertures, appropriate for an album so preoccupied with the exact moment perception begins to take shape. What’s remarkable is how completely the music honours that concept rather than simply gesturing at it. All eleven Sebastian Zawadzki’s compositions don’t rush to reveal themselves. They accumulate gradually, through repetition, resonance and the smallest shifts in dynamics, so that by the time a melody fully arrives, it feels less like a statement than something that has slowly come into focus, the way a room does as your eyes adjust to low light.
Zawadzki’s piano work throughout is genuinely mesmerizing, light, airy, almost weightless at points, with a delicate, spellbinding quality that never once tips into decoration. He plays with the patience of someone who trusts a single sustained note as much as a full phrase, and that patience extends to his two partners. Double bassist Mariusz Praśniewski, who has worked alongside Zawadzki since the 2013 project Tåge, brings a rounded, unhurried tone that never competes for space, while drummer Haim Peskoff works almost entirely in texture and detail rather than propulsion, brushes, resonance, near-silence, so that the trio breathes as a single instrument rather than three.
The longer pieces are where this approach pays off most vividly. “Katalaxia” and “Alveola” both unfold over five to seven minutes without ever feeling stretched, each new idea arriving exactly when the previous one has finished dissolving. Elsewhere, Zawadzki isn’t afraid to let a track exist as pure miniature: “Hedera”, barely over a minute of solo piano, and “Substrata Umbrae”, shorter still and carrying the album’s only real moment of tension, both function like brief intakes of breath between longer meditations, proof that on this record, even a few seconds of music can carry real weight.
Recorded in Copenhagen in 2025 and mixed with real clarity and warmth, Cornea sits comfortably alongside the best of the Scandinavian jazz tradition, the kind of record that ECM devotees will recognize instantly, built on space, transparency and the conviction that what you don’t play matters as much as what you do. But it never feels derivative of that lineage, Zawadzki’s background in orchestral and film composition gives the writing here a structural intelligence that’s distinctly his own, and the trio format lets every one of his decisions be heard in full.
Cornea is a genuinely rare album that invites meditation without ever feeling static, and that rewards close, attentive listening precisely because it never overplays its hand. It is restful without being background music, spacious without ever feeling empty, and endlessly rewarding on repeated listens. Sebastian Zawadzki and his Nordic Trio have made an album built almost entirely out of the space between notes, and in doing so, they’ve created something genuinely spellbinding. A must.
Frankie Pfeiffer
Editor in chief – PARIS-MOVE
PARIS-MOVE, August 26th, 2026
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Musicians:
Sebastian Zawadzki — piano
Mariusz Praśniewski — double bass
Haim Peskoff — drums
Tracklisting:
1.Cornea 03:10
2.Turbarium 05:36
3.Katalaxia 07:00
4.Hedera 01:08
5.Fractura Somnii 05:34
6.Prześwit 04:15
7.Alveola 05:53
8.Pastellium 06:44
9.Monochrome III 04:39
10.Substrata Umbrae 01:05
11.Luminaria 03:11
Compositions: Sebastian Zawadzki
Recorded in: Copenhagen, 2025
Recording engineer: Jason Shooster
Mixed and mastered by: Mateusz Banasiuk
Cover design: Eldan Alomerovic
Label: Sebastian Zawadzki Music
Total time: 48:17