Article Contributed by Champagne House Media
Published on 2026-03-24
Please Plant Flowers is the brand new album by New York-honed, Los Angeles-based guitarist Nicholas Mycio, recorded as a trio with bassist Kyle Colina and drummer Sam McCarthy.
The music took shape over an extended stretch of time, before any recording plans were in place, while war, displacement, illness, and death were ongoing realities in Mycio’s life and in the lives of people close to him. He did not set out to turn those events into a narrative or a concept. He simply kept writing as they unfolded. “Music lets you express things very directly because it’s abstract,” Mycio says. “You don’t have to litigate how you feel.”
Listen to Please Plant Flowers
Born in Brooklyn, Mycio began playing guitar at the age of four under the guidance of his father, guitarist and music theorist Wasil Mycio. He grew up immersed in jazz and developed his language early through straight-ahead study and performance. That foundation carried through his time at Berklee College of Music, where he attended on a full-tuition scholarship and studied with luminaries of the music Terri Lyne Carrington, Kris Davis, and Nir Felder.
By his early twenties, Mycio had begun to draw attention for the clarity of his technique and the scope of his interests. O’s Place Jazz wrote that “Guitarist Nicholas Mycio leads the charge with both mellow, and fused melodies,” while Jazz Guitar Today observed that his work “perfectly blends the virtuosity found in jazz improvisation and the hard-hitting grime of electronic production.” Writing in the Times Standard, Heather Shelton described his sound as combining “the foundational language of jazz with modern harmonic innovations brought about in the 21st century.”
Mycio’s recorded output has reflected that range. His debut album, Secrets from the Streetlights (2021), paired original compositions with standards drawn from the repertoire he was performing at the time. NONSTANDARD (2024) pushed further, placing familiar material alongside breakbeats and electronic textures. Ola Gränshagen of Melodic wrote that Mycio’s playing there “comes close to prime time Michael Landau.”
With Please Plant Flowers, Mycio narrows the aperture. The instrumentation is reduced to guitar, bass, and drums, and the trio recorded live, preserving what happened in the room.
The period during which Mycio wrote the album was relentless. His cousin Marcus was killed after being lured to a party and shot. Soon after, the war in Ukraine began. Mycio had lived in both Kyiv and Moscow and had family members in Ukraine and Russia; he and his wife watched relatives escape as places he had eaten, performed, and spent time in Kyiv were destroyed.
Meanwhile, sister Ava faced invasive brain surgery after her medication stopped working, with uncertain odds. His great-grandfather Norman Cohen died. His grandmother Gloria suffered a fall that shattered her hip, and doctors gave her a poor prognosis. “It felt like everything was happening one after the other,” Mycio says. “Nothing seemed like it could let up.”
Mycio chose the guitar trio because of the responsibility it demands. “There’s no protection. There’s no hiding,” he says. Without a piano, the guitar carries the harmonic weight, and Mycio avoids prearranging parts. He brings lead sheets into the session and lets the group determine shape and direction together. “We play improvised music,” he says. “We’re going to improvise.” McCarthy, a longtime collaborator dating back to Berklee, had already appeared on Mycio’s first record. “He’s a really excellent drummer,” Mycio says. “But on top of that, he’s a really, really good friend of mine.” Colina, a more established presence on the New York scene, brought a different kind of grounding. Mycio credits him with modeling professionalism and musical decision-making shaped by years of experience.
The album opens with “Siny,” an E-flat minor blues that nods to Kurt Rosenwinkel’s The Next Step. The title translates to “dark blue” in Russian, a word Mycio felt fit the tune. He considers it one of the least programmatic pieces on the record, rooted less in a specific event than in the language he has lived with. He shaped the tune to avoid a rigid cycle, giving the trio room to stretch rhythmically and harmonically.
The album opens with “Siny,” an E-flat minor blues that nods to Kurt Rosenwinkel’s The Next Step. The title translates to “dark blue” in Russian, a word Mycio felt fit the tune. He considers it one of the least programmatic pieces on the record, rooted less in a specific event than in the language he has lived with. He shaped the tune to avoid a rigid cycle, giving the trio room to stretch rhythmically and harmonically.
“Shadow Puppets” draws from experiences that stayed with Mycio after time spent in active war zones. He remembers walking home from a gig in New York with his wife when they heard a sound that resembled 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 reflects how those reactions persisted. “Those experiences are like a shadow on a wall,” he says. “It can’t harm you, but it’s there and it follows you.”
Mycio wrote “Elegy for Norman” shortly after the death of his great-grandfather, Norman Cohen. He resisted framing the piece as a lament. “He lived a long full life,” Mycio says. “I didn’t want the song to be sad.” At a time when much else felt unresolved, the tune became a way to acknowledge loss without dwelling in it.
“Signals in Black” grew out of a different difficulty. Mycio wrote the tune while struggling to recognize good moments during a hard period. “Sometimes when things are hard it can be difficult to recognize the good moments in our lives,” he says. He also connects the piece to time spent learning music by Thelonious Monk.
The title track, “Please Plant Flowers,” sits at the center of the record. Mycio wrote it after several years marked by war, death, and uncertainty. “I was very tired when I wrote this tune, and very scared,” he says. “This song is about how when I die I want things to be peaceful enough for someone to plant flowers at my grave.”
“Melancholia” reaches back to Mycio’s teenage years, when he was hospitalized for several months after a suicide attempt. The tune focuses on the feeling that followed. “It can be gentle in a weird way,” he says. “It can even feel inviting.”
“Dreams of Many” is one of the earliest compositions on the album. For years, Mycio found it difficult to play. He associates it with a period before events intensified, when he felt more optimistic about the future. The album closes with “When I’m Gone,” which completes the phrase introduced by the title track.
“This tune and ‘Please Plant Flowers’ make a full phrase,” Mycio explains. He connects the piece to a wish that the wars had never happened and that his family could return home. “This song,” he says—as with the rest of Please Plant Flowers—“is about that desire.”
