By Michael J. West | Published March 2026
Jazz critics are often accused of bias towards novelty: not unfairly. (Try listening to 100 new albums a month and see if you’re not disproportionately thrilled to hear something different.) Sometimes, though, a record penetrates the critic’s defenses just by being gorgeous. Rivermind — the sixth album by Mexican-born, Berlin-based guitarist Hugo Fernandez — is such a record.
With its quartet lineup of guitar, piano (Daniel Stawinski), bass (Giacomo Tagliava) and drums (Matthias Ruppnig), Rivermind isn’t an album of fireworks. This isn’t to say that there’s no audacity at work here. The title track and “Dancing Leafs” play games with form and meter, while “Playing Chase” and “La Sonaja” throw unexpected change-ups. But all of these are handled with light touches and attention to fine detail. That, not the post-bop playfulness, is what gives the record its distinction.
Well, that and the lyrical poise that the soloists, in particular, bring to the party. Tagliava carries an unusual amount of weight here; he takes frequent solos, including the first on opener “Babaob,” a nimble, traipsing passage that for all its softness hews close to the low register. Stawinski’s tender, luminous tones impress throughout the session, though his highlight is on the 7/8 “Big Hope,” wherein he brings a Monkish harmonic perspective and manages to make the odd meter suggest clave (though part of that credit goes to Ruppnig, who never solos but also never fails to invent with his comping patterns). Fernandez, meanwhile, sounds beautiful everywhere. He has a clear, open tone (sometimes with a very thin veneer of distortion), brought to great effect in his poetic structure on “Brightsteps” and long, exploratory line on “La Sonaja.”
And that’s it. No reinvention of the wheel, few and simple tricks: That’s all Fernandez and the quartet need to elevate Rivermind to the superlative.
