Brooklyn-born, Los Angeles-based guitarist Nicholas Mycio returns with Please Plant Flowers, an intimate and unflinching new trio album arriving March 20, 2026. Recorded with bassist Kyle Colina and drummer Sam McCarthy, the record documents a working band shaped over time—long before studio dates were scheduled—while war, displacement, illness, and death unfolded in Mycio’s life and the lives of those closest to him. The music was not conceived as a concept album. It emerged because he kept writing. “Music lets you express things very directly because it’s abstract,” Mycio says. “You don’t have to litigate how you feel.”
Today, Mycio shares the second single, “Shadow Puppets.” The piece draws from experiences that lingered after time spent in active war zones. He recalls walking home from a gig in New York with his wife when they heard a sound resembling an air-raid siren. “We immediately began to freak out looking for a shelter,” he says, before realizing they were not in danger. The tune captures how those reflexes persisted. “Those experiences are like a shadow on a wall,” he explains. “It can’t harm you, but it’s there and it follows you.” “Shadow Puppets” balances tension and release, tracing the outline of fear without succumbing to it.
Born in Brooklyn, Mycio began playing guitar at four under the guidance of his father, guitarist and music theorist Wasil Mycio. Immersed in jazz from an early age, he developed his language through straight-ahead study and performance before attending Berklee College of Music on a full-tuition scholarship. There he studied with leading voices including Terri Lyne Carrington, Kris Davis, and Nir Felder, refining a style that bridges foundational jazz vocabulary with contemporary harmonic exploration.
By his early twenties, Mycio was drawing critical attention for both technical clarity and aesthetic range. His debut album, Secrets from the Streetlights (2021), paired originals with standards from his working repertoire. NONSTANDARD (2024) expanded the palette further, weaving breakbeats and electronic textures into jazz frameworks. With Please Plant Flowers, however, Mycio narrows the aperture. The instrumentation is stripped to guitar, bass, and drums, and the trio recorded live, preserving what happened in the room. There are no elaborate overdubs or protective layers. “There’s no protection. There’s no hiding,” he says. Without piano, the guitar carries harmonic weight, and Mycio avoids heavy prearrangement, bringing lead sheets into the session and allowing the group to determine shape and direction in real time. “We play improvised music. We’re going to improvise.”
The period during which Mycio composed the album was relentless. His cousin Marcus was killed after being lured to a party and shot. Soon after, the war in Ukraine began. Having lived in both Kyiv and Moscow, with family in Ukraine and Russia, Mycio watched as relatives fled and places he had eaten, performed, and known were destroyed. His sister Ava underwent invasive brain surgery after her medication stopped working. His great-grandfather Norman Cohen died. His grandmother Gloria shattered her hip in a fall and was given a grim prognosis. “It felt like everything was happening one after the other,” he says. “Nothing seemed like it could let up.”
The trio format became both challenge and refuge. McCarthy, a longtime collaborator dating back to Berklee and a drummer Mycio calls both excellent and a close friend, brings elasticity and trust to the sessions. Colina, a seasoned presence on the New York scene, offers grounding and decisiveness shaped by experience. Together, the three musicians navigate shifting emotional terrain without excess ornamentation, allowing the music to breathe and fracture naturally.
The album opens with “Siny,” an E-flat minor blues nodding to The Next Step by Kurt Rosenwinkel. The title translates to “dark blue” in Russian, a color that fit the mood. Less programmatic than other pieces on the record, it reflects the language Mycio has internalized over years of study, shaped to avoid rigid cycles and invite rhythmic and harmonic elasticity.
“Elegy for Norman,” written shortly after the passing of his great-grandfather, resists overt sorrow. “He lived a long full life,” Mycio says. “I didn’t want the song to be sad.” In a time defined by unresolved tension, the piece acknowledges loss without dwelling inside it. “Signals in Black” arose during a period when recognizing joy felt difficult. Mycio links the tune to both that emotional state and to time spent studying the music of Thelonious Monk, channeling angular clarity and subtle defiance.
The title track, “Please Plant Flowers,” anchors the album. Written during years marked by war, death, and uncertainty, it carries a quiet plea. “I was very tired when I wrote this tune, and very scared,” Mycio says. “This song is about how when I die I want things to be peaceful enough for someone to plant flowers at my grave.” The vulnerability is direct but unsentimental, suspended between exhaustion and hope.
“Melancholia” reaches back to Mycio’s teenage years, when he was hospitalized for several months following a suicide attempt. The tune explores the strange gentleness that can accompany depressive states. “It can be gentle in a weird way,” he says. “It can even feel inviting.” “Dreams of Many,” one of the earliest compositions included, once felt too painful to perform, tied to a period of greater optimism before events intensified. The album closes with “When I’m Gone,” completing the phrase introduced by the title track. “This tune and ‘Please Plant Flowers’ make a full phrase,” Mycio explains, connecting the piece to a wish that wars had never happened and that his family could return home. “This song,” he says of the album as a whole, “is about that desire.”
Across Please Plant Flowers, Mycio plays with the intention of speech—seeking to connect thought and improvisation as seamlessly as conversation. The trio’s live recording approach underscores that aim, capturing nuance, hesitation, and surge without polish. What emerges is a record that neither dramatizes nor minimizes its circumstances. Instead, it inhabits them fully, allowing abstraction to hold what words cannot.
Please Plant Flowers is available March 20, 2026.
No comments:
Post a Comment