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Katie Bull Announces The Hope Etudes — A Luminous, Fearless Meditation on Love, Loss, and the Radical Act of Hope
Acclaimed jazz vocalist, composer, and bandleader Katie Bull returns with The Hope Etudes, her most intimate and conceptually expansive recording to date. Set to release April 10, 2026, on Orchard of Pomegranates Records, the album unfolds as a deeply personal yet universally resonant meditation on mortality, resilience, nonlinear time, and what Bull calls “hope in action.”
Across six critically praised recordings (including All Hot Bodies Radiate, which reached #6 on the NPR Jazz Critics Poll), Bull has built a reputation for fearless interpretation, kinetic ensemble interplay, and a multidisciplinary sensibility rooted in Greenwich Village’s avant-garde lineage. Raised among bebop innovators, postmodern dancers, experimental theater artists, and visual visionaries, Bull absorbed collaboration as a way of life. That collective spirit remains central to her work.
“The band isn’t ‘backing’ me” Bull insists. “They’re not sidemen. We’re a collective. The music is a conversation — sometimes we rehearse the arrangement, and sometimes we just say, ‘Let’s go,’ and something better happens.”
The core ensemble — bassist Joe Fonda, drummer George Schuller, saxophonist Jeff Lederer, and pianist Mara Rosenbloom — embodies that philosophy. Their interplay on The Hope Etudes feels less like accompaniment and more like shared inquiry.
The genesis of The Hope Etudes began in isolation. During the pandemic, living on a Catskill mountain with only her dog for company, Bull invented what she calls “a composing game.”
“I wouldn’t let myself leave the piano,” she explains, “until I either laughed or felt something deeply — maybe cried, maybe found some catharsis. I needed to move myself out of that strange, dark space.”
One piece emerged as the gravitational center of the project: “Home. Coming.” Originally titled Intermittent Appearance, the song flickered in and out — mirroring the sense of people appearing and disappearing, light arriving and receding.
The piece took on new resonance when Bull began caring for her beloved mentor, jazz vocalist Jay Clayton, during Clayton’s home hospice.
“Homecoming can mean returning,” Bull reflects. “It can also mean passing on. I’m not attached to one meaning. It could be someone coming home to your heart. It could be you finding your way back to yourself. Or it could be that final mystery.”
The track opens with striking intimacy, drawing listeners into spacious harmonic terrain before expanding into collective improvisation. It carries the album’s essential paradox: grief and radiance coexisting.
“At some point,” Bull says, “I felt like the song wasn’t mine anymore. It was telling me what it was. That was humbling. The songs started to feel like they had a life of their own.”
Rather than a linear narrative, The Hope Etudes unfolds like what Bull describes as “a hologram.” The album’s flow balances propulsion and spaciousness. Rhythmic surges give way to reflective stillness. The sequencing was refined through live performance, with Bull listening closely for the arc of emotional energy.
“There’s a backbone,” she says, “but it’s not once-upon-a-time storytelling. Depending on where you connect, you might hear a different story. That’s how life feels to me—nonlinear. Past and present fold into each other.”
As with all her albums, Bull pairs originals with reinterpretations. Here, those choices feel deeply intentional. Her reading of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’” is luminous yet questioning. Drawn to its natural imagery, Bull also acknowledges its complex cultural origins. The result is reverent yet expansive, allowing improvisational space to breathe new meaning into a classic.
“The images are so beautiful — the cattle standing like statues,” she says. “At the same time, I’m aware that there are forces working against natural beauty. I feel a hope and longing for the restoration of the earth’s balance in that song. Yet also – who picks the corn that’s as high as an elephant’s eye? How did that ranch come to be? There’s an underbelly. So, when I sing the song, I hold both the poetry of the natural beauty and the simultaneous ache and reckoning in the question of how we arrived at this moment where a harvest carries a complex cultural shadow. It’s the lyric ‘the sounds of the earth are like music’- that gives me the most hope.”
The album also ventures boldly into unexpected territory with a reimagined “Light My Fire.” What begins as blues-inflected sensuality evolves into something more elemental. In Bull’s hands, The Doors classic becomes something akin to an invocation, or like a prayer, reminding us that when everything feels insane, music can reground us in something sustaining.
“I sat with that song and realized—it’s about love that remains,” Bull says. “I watched someone I deeply loved transition from this world. And I thought—this is the deepest love. You stay. The song, for me, mirrors an arc of staying. It grounds me in the light of her vibrant life through to the light of her “pyre.” Love is staying in the literal, gritty sense and in the metaphorical and alchemical sense. Love is persisting through to transformation. Even through the fire.”
Bull’s original compositions anchor the album’s thematic core. In “Jalopy Promises,” momentum falters, fractures, and re-forms — an audible metaphor for plans derailed and resilience rediscovered. “Things crash,” Bull says. “But we’re still here. We keep moving.”
Throughout the album, beauty and devastation coexist. That tension was informed by Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark, which explores activism and resilience in turbulent political times.
“Hope isn’t passive,” Bull explains. “Sometimes you act first. Sometimes hope follows action. Making art together; that’s hope in motion.”
Bull’s artistic roots run deep. The daughter of a jazz pianist trained by Lennie Tristano & a pioneering improvisational dancer and dance anthropologist, she grew up in the Warren Street Performance Loft in Tribeca, a 25-year hub of experimental collaboration. And her mother is a lifelong painter and interdisciplinary artist who ran a gallery for decades. Mentored by Jay Clayton and Sheila Jordan since she was a teen, Katie later created her own hybrid arts companies and eventually formed The Katie Bull Group Project, sustaining decades-long musical partnerships with master improvisers.
Beyond performance, Bull is a distinguished Whole Body Voice coach who believes voice coaching is about speaking or singing truth. “Everything I do as a visceral voice coach is very raw and elemental. It’s very much an exploration of sound coming from the gut, as an expression of the whole body. So that coaching feeds my sense of the elemental connection to singing.”
The Hope Etudes marks the very seamlessness between the realms of her theory and performance. “I don’t want to make music that escapes reality,” she says. “I want to be present in it. The beauty and the loss, at the same time.”
With The Hope Etudes, Katie Bull offers not answers, but presence: a luminous, collective meditation on what it means to endure, to love fiercely, and to remain open to the riddle. At its heart, the album asks listeners to remain awake — to grief, to joy, to mystery.
“It’s radical to not give up hope,” Bull reflects. “Especially now. Jazz has always carried that. It doesn’t deny what’s happening — but it doesn’t surrender either.”
What They’re Saying
Papatamous Redux, Review
Hot House Jazz, Feature Story (pdf)
Neon Jazz, Interview
Don’s Tunes, Spotify Placement, “Home.Coming.”
Nagamag, Track Review, “Home.Coming.”