There’s a particular kind of courage in setting Gertrude Stein to music. Not the heroic, trumpet-blazing kind. More the quiet, slightly unhinged confidence of someone who looks at repetition, fragmentation, semantic loops and thinks: yes, this should sing.

Christoph Gallio has been circling the outer edges of jazz and composition for decades, often where structure begins to loosen but never quite dissolves. With "Stone Is A Rose Is A Stone Is A Stone / Yet Dish", he doesn’t just approach Stein’s text, he inhabits its peculiar logic. Or perhaps he lets it inhabit him, which sounds more accurate and slightly more concerning.

The ensemble - Sonia Loenne on voice, Gallio on soprano and alto sax, Vito Cadonau on double bass, and Flo Hufschmid on drums and percussion - operates with the kind of restraint that suggests everyone is acutely aware they are dealing with unstable material. Stein’s language doesn’t progress, it circles, accumulates, erodes meaning through insistence. The music mirrors this, but without becoming a mere illustration. That would be too easy, and also quite boring.

Instead, the six-part structure unfolds like a series of rooms where the same objects are rearranged with minor, disorienting differences. The voice doesn’t interpret Stein in any theatrical sense. Sonia Loenne treats the text almost as a physical substance, something to be weighed, stretched, tested for resonance. Words land, repeat, shift emphasis, lose their footing. Meaning becomes provisional, negotiated in real time.

Gallio’s saxophones rarely dominate. They hover, insinuate, sometimes cut through with a line that feels less like a melody and more like a question asked at the wrong moment. There’s a dryness to his tone that resists lyricism, as if he’s deliberately avoiding the temptation to beautify what is already structurally strange. It’s a smart move. Stein doesn’t need decoration; she needs space.

The rhythm section is where things get quietly subversive. Cadonau’s bass and Hufschmid’s percussion don’t anchor the music so much as unsettle it from below. They introduce pulses that almost cohere into grooves, then withdraw them before anything comfortable can form. It’s like watching someone build a staircase and then casually remove a few steps just to see what happens.

The subtitle might promise “unique and rare beauty”, which is a bold claim in a field where beauty is often treated with suspicion. What "Stone Is A Rose Is A Stone Is A Stone / Yet Dish" offers instead is something more elusive: a shifting surface where language and sound keep misaligning just enough to stay alive.