The COVID-19 Pandemic proved a fertile stress on music and musicians. It spawned countless projects among which were vocalist Gabriela Martina and pianist Maxim Lubarsky’s recording, Explorations in Sound. Born as a Zoom collaboration during the pandemic, the project developed as Martina and Lubarsky considered various ideas and approaches, establishing a creative foundation upon which to build what would become Explorations in Sound.

The nine pieces comprising the album derive from an idea, a note, a song wishing to be sung, a poem to be recited against music and, thus, with it. We find all of them represented here. The freely improvised pieces: “One Note,” “In Momentum,” and “Crazy” bear a bit of their titles in their souls. Rather than the mess Ornette Coleman made with the same idea in 1961 with Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation (Atlantic), Lubrarsky and Martin meet at some spiritual place that makes sense and love at the same time.

The “standards” included stand up as powerfully, their interpretation potent and powerful, similar to what Emelia Vancini and Augusto Pirodda accomplished on their definitive postmodern standards treatment, And If You Fall, You Fall (Espira, 2020). The duo presents the contemporary song, Amanda McBroom’s “The Rose” (featured in the movie, The Rose (20th Century-Fox, 1979), starring Bette Midler) as a commitment to setting free a memory, delivered plaintively. “Exactly Like You,” the 1930 Jimmy McHugh and Dorothy Fields vehicle for Lew Leslie's International Revue the same year, is the curveball delivered, straight and jaunty, as if in a swank salon in New York City.

This project is bold, daring, and fearless. Martina and Lubarsky are intent on pushing boundaries without dismantling what we understand is music. They do this artistically and with reverence…just not too much of the latter to cloud their direction.