Jazz
Earshift Music · 3 April 2026
“Riff” (8:07) opens the album and is the long piece. It starts with unaccompanied guitar, moves through unison lines with the piano and ends on open ground, and it is the track that best explains Hilary Geddes’ range; it is also the one that least resembles the rest. Redleaf is eight pieces and forty-six minutes, and a good part of it lives on texture rather than on the line: piano notes falling one by one, strings left to ring, slow bass pulses and repeated refrains.
The quartet is the one from Parkside (ABC Jazz, 2021), the debut: Matthew Harris on piano, Maximillian Alduca on double bass and Alexander Inman-Hislop on drums. Harris and Geddes split the work evenly, and the record holds up above all on how they comp rather than on how they solo: the piano’s ornamentation on “The Needling” (5:59), the ring of “After Rain”, which at 3:05 is the shortest cut. The way she manipulates her guitar tone, with pedals and without, no longer owes anything to the Bill Frisell audible on the debut.
The calendar of Redleaf explains part of what you hear on it. The pieces were written not long after Parkside, the recording copyright reads 2025 and the album only came out on 3 April 2026, preceded by two singles, “First” in October 2025 and “The Needling” in February. It therefore lands as a document of the moment right after the debut and not of where the guitarist stands today, and it shows wherever the quartet formula repeats: five of the eight tracks fit between 5:14 and 6:46 and all five draw the same curve.
Eight tracks, forty-five minutes and fifty-one seconds, released by Earshift Music. Geddes is Australian, has played with Jeremy Rose’s Earshift Orchestra, and Redleaf is her second album as a leader.
Rating: 7.3/10
Text by Aina Torrents