The Button Jar, the solo release from pianist and composer Yvonne Rogers, presents a singular and compelling new voice on the instrument that reflects a wisdom beyond her years.

Yvonne Rogers
The Button Jar (Pyroclastic Records)
A review
I first heard pianist Yvonne Rogers on Adam O’Farrill’s excellent release Elephant and was impressed by her musical vocabulary and her significant contributions to the music’s impact, so when I learned that she had an upcoming solo effort, I had great anticipation. Rogers blew by my anticipation with an exceptionally original, imaginative, and wise effort.

Her music strongly reminded me of Erik Satie’s. It’s not that she sounds like Satie. Rather, she shares a similar frisky, playful mischief aswim on a deep pool of feeling. She can plumb the depths of feeling with the sparest line, and she can swamp your gunwales with harmonically dense and highly kinetic compositions while subverting rhythmic expectations and taking occasional short, explosive side trips—possibly with a dose of humor.

The opening track, “Luster,” opens with a simple, mesmeric repeating pattern on her left hand, with Rogers subtly altering the timing of the three notes. After a few repetitions, her right hand drops an entirely unexpected pattern out of the sky, a perfectly dissonant and spellbinding companion that splits open the heart of the composition and any active listener. The composition, a portrait of wonder, proceeds with subtle alterations, additions, and subtractions of the two patterns before winding down to the left hand’s opening three notes.

The spacious quietude of “Luster” is then swept off the soundstage by the title track, which opens with a robust and energetic tangle between the two hands, from which Rogers eventually summons a motif, much the way a magician summons a rabbit from a hat. She combines elements from a variety of genres, from classical to ragtime to jazz—see what you can find.

All but three of the tracks were developed from short explorations that Rogers posted to her Instagram page and which pianist and educator Kris Davis encouraged her to develop. (Davis invited Rogers to record the results on Davis’s record label. Thank you, Ms. Davis.) The other three are spontaneous compositions: “Avid Risks,” a dedication to (and anagram of) Kris Davis; “The Craft Room;” and album closer “Exhale,” a stark release captured at the end of the recording session.

From the hymnlike “Cloud Chorale” to the ongoing flow of dense right-hand puzzles in “Monkey’s Fist” to the humorous and not entirely successful attempt of the left and right hands to come to agreement in “Mismatch,” the 14 tracks on The Button Jar offer a wide range of artistic expression—from minimalism to gentle swing to Methenyesque americana—just as her mother’s real-life button jar in Rogers’ youth, which held a colorful variety of mismatched buttons. “It felt like a jar of possibilities,” Rogers says in the album’s press release. “You could use it for any number of projects, but you had to know how to properly sew the button on, so it became a balance of whimsical fun and meticulous craftsmanship.”

Rogers had this to say about her music in the press release: “I grew up in the woods in the middle of nowhere, so I had a very special relationship to nature. You sense that the world goes on without you, so the problems in your head don’t really matter in the grand scheme of things. I want my music to do that for other people—to create a space for them to experience this feeling of wonder so that they can get out of their head for a few minutes.”

Mission accomplished.

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© 2026 Mel Minter