Jazz
AKÌLÒ MUSIC · 15 May 2026
The titles on “Stay Still” are in Yoruba and they aren’t decoration: “Ogunjobi” is a name meaning the child is a gift from the deity Ogun, “Òmìrán” means giant and “Moroko” is a dirge. Timothy Digba Ogunbiyi, a Nigerian-born pianist and composer, started out playing drums in church in Lagos and left engineering for music; the eleven tracks here set that material alongside jazz improvisation without hiding the seam.
The core line-up is a quartet — Ogunbiyi on piano, Adam Aronesty on tenor, Zach Walgren on double bass and Chidiebere Joseph Emmanuel on drums — with guests who come in when a piece calls for them. “Extinct Man” opens with a piano introduction and lets the tenor carry a slow melody while the piano picks up speed underneath, a mechanism that returns a few times. On “Ogunjobi” Namisa Mdalose Bizana sings and the piano steps back into chords; on “A Peacemaker’s Lot” Aaron Ouellette’s trumpet takes the main line; and “Moroko” is carried by talking drum and Temidayo Balogun’s voice under Aronesty’s sax. The closing title track mixes Yoruba folk rhythms, classical piano and bebop, and is the calmest thing here.
Of the eleven titles, “Zach!” is a double-bass transition rather than a piece, and “A.O. (Fading Light)” and “A.O. (After Glow)” are the same material in two states: between them that’s a quarter of the album’s entries with nothing that stands on its own. And there’s an underlying asymmetry. The Yoruba material is nearly always carried by voice and percussion, while the piano’s harmony stays inside post-bop, so the meeting the album announces happens more at the surface than in the structure. Where it does happen is “Adépèlé”, with Balogun on tenor beside the piano, and “Òmìrán”, where Aronesty and Ogunbiyi finally find each other in a crescendo.
Rating: 7.0/10
Text by Aina Torrents