Hristijan Risteski releases 2nd Single “Summer,”

Hristijan Risteski releases “Summer,” the second single from his debut album Waters Dance, tomorrow — a change of pace from “Coming Home” that gives a good sense of where the rest of the record is headed.

I wrote about the album back in July, when Risteski put out “Coming Home” and confirmed Waters Dance for an October release. That first single was inward-looking, built on childhood memory and a sense of return. “Summer” moves in a different direction: an up-tempo Sax forward track with a Latin feel, and by some distance the oppersite of the previous track.

In the albums liner notes, Risteski describes it as the shortest track on the album, “about energy, lightness, and spontaneity,” built on a straight eight Latin groove with what he calls a direct, catchy melody. After the theme, the tune opens into a vamp for his saxophone solo and rides that groove out to a fade. It’s built to connect quickly, and by his own account it already does — he says it consistently gets the strongest response of anything in the band’s live sets.

Risteski says he works from ideas rather than formulas, starting with a rhythm, a melodic fragment, or a harmonic shape that develops over time. That approach carries through most of the album’s writing, including the four-chord foundation under “Coming Home” and the shifting 7/8 figures on “High Away.” “Summer” works more directly, a groove and a melody line without much harmonic detour, which is likely part of why it plays so well live.

Waters Dance is Risteski’s debut as a leader. Macedonian-born and Graz-based, he started on clarinet and trained classically before moving into jazz and saxophone, eventually landing in Austria to study at the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz (KUG). The quartet behind the record didn’t come together for the session alone. He built it around musicians he already had real relationships with: bassist Hrvoje Kralj is a longtime friend and former roommate who supported him in his early years in Graz, and he’d heard pianist Marko Churnchetz live in Graz before the two ended up on a recording session together in Ljubljana. Drummer Chris Smith, the only American in the group, is a respected figure on the scene in his own right.

The band played together for the better part of a year, club dates and festival appearances, before going into ArteSuono Studio in Italy with engineer Stefano Amerio. Even then, the final charts only reached the group ten days before the session, so a good deal of the record was worked out close to real time, layered over a band that already knew each other’s playing well.

The nine tracks move through what Risteski calls themes of identity, change, and motion, with Macedonian odd meters running underneath much of the writing. “Summer” sits apart from that, which is presumably the point of putting it out second: after “Coming Home” set the emotional register, this one shows the record has range.

The title track is one measure of that range. Written in Vis and Ohrid, “Waters Dance” is shaped by water and landscape, a steady bass ostinato under folk-like melodies that Risteski says builds toward an almost ancient atmosphere by the end. Set next to “Summer,” it’s a good early sign of how much ground this album is going to cover.

Waters Dance is out in October on CD, LP, and streaming platforms, with more singles and live dates planned before then. “Summer” is out tomorrow, and you’ll find it on this week’s New Release playlist below. I’ll have a full review of the album once it’s out. In the meantime, you can read my original coverage of the announcement here.

New Release Spotify Playlist

The Jazz In Europe New Release playlist features tracks from the new releases reviewed on Jazz In Europe. Updated weekly, it is the best place to discover music selected by our editors — not algorithms. Follow the playlist to keep up with the kind of records we believe deserve attention and to stay ahead of the curve.