Saadet T�rk�z's influences spread far and wide. Born in 1961, the singer grew up on the Bosporus where Europe and Asia meet. Her ancestors were nomads who migrated from Semey in Kazakhstan to East Turkestan from where they fled via India and Pakistan to Istanbul. But Istanbul, international city, modern metropolis and history-laden cultural crucible, is not the only place to have influenced her. In her singing she originally drew on the folklore of her culture, carefully collecting it's traditional songs via oral history, but soon opened herself up to other styles. She was influenced by the musical traditions of India, the Arab world and Central Asia and later came to blues and ever freer jazz. However, new music became increasingly important to her and she began to feel at home and understood in Zurich's eclectic free music scene. T�rk�z recorded her album "Kumuska" with the American composer and multi-instrumentalist Elliott Sharp (b. 1951), the great artist of the world of electric, metallic, raw sounds as well as complex and groovy rhythms. By now they are trusted partners, having known each other since the 1990's and first recorded together on the album Marmara Sea. Jazz critic Manfred Papst writes in the liner notes: "Saadet T�rk�z is a charismatic shaman certainly, but not the pompous kind. She has a sense of humour, and even when her head is in the clouds, her feet are on the ground. The words and sounds illuminate daily life. "

Golden Valley is Now is a sensational supergroup a quarter century in the making. The band unites Reid Anderson (electric bass, electronics) and Dave King (acoustic and electronic drums) who make up 2/3 of the band The Bad Plus - one of the most popular contemporary acts in jazz in the past decade - with the highly acclaimed Craig Taborn (synthesizers, electric and acoustic piano). Reid Anderson, Dave King, Craig Taborn: the start of this intimate fellowship, also a narrative showing the invaluable role of friendship in music that dates back to the early 80's. At the forefront are songs based on a pop sensibility, played live without sequencers and delivered by gifted improvisers and instrumentalists, avoiding the muscular gestures of soloist free-styling and improvisatory fireworks and thus making wisdom audible: the whole is greater than the sum of it's parts. They all put themselves in the service of compact songs in which the overall sound itself becomes the event. The power and magic of this musical statement lies in the modus operandi of the soloists' restraint and a precise finger-tip feeling for the textures and dynamics of the songs. The fusion of acoustic and electronic elements, resonating melodies and a punchy production aesthetic characterize the band's sound. Whether calmly fluid or eruptive, Golden Valley Is Now's finely tuned music is beautifully direct and is a declaration of love to the song.

BEYOND

SENSATIONS OF TONE

A big anniversary is celebrated on this recording: Evan Parker and Paul Lytton got to know each other in 1969 and after months of rehearsals their first performance followed in 1970. It was the time of the jazz avant-garde, which renewed and expanded the traditional ways of playing and the Parker-Lytton Duo was an active part of this process. "Over the past fifty years, they have each minutely sorted through aesthetics, methods, and protocols, maintaining an ongoing dialogue. The years have yielded a rich diversity of music, complemented by the current recording, the first to feature only tenor saxophone and a jazz kit," writes the American jazz journalist Bill Shoemaker in the liner notes. Shoemaker, who supervised the recordings in Chicago, goes on to say: "The dynamic of free improvisation and a long personal history documented on this Chicago studio session bears out what Parker told Bailey forty years ago: 'In practice, the closest I would get to a laboratory situation is working with the people I know best... The people I've played with the longest actually offer me the freest situation to work in.' On the basis of this unprecedented music, that assessment has stood the test of time."

BEING INN

PLANKTONIC FINALES

Ohad Talmor came to New York in 1995 to study music and remained in the USA. Since then he has been one of the "movers and shakers" of the creative Brooklyn jazz scene. On the ground floor of his apartment block on Vanderbilt Avenue he runs the performance space "Seeds". Talmor, the cosmopolitan who today commutes between Geneva and New York, is an expressive improviser and outstanding stylist. He plays with Lee Konitz, Steve Swallow or Adam Nussbeim or Jason Moran. In recent years, he has attracted attention with his individually formed compositions and sophisticated arrangements, whether in his trio, sextet or orchestra. The core members of Newsreel Sextet are Talmor's long-term fellow travelers Jacob Sacks, Miles Okazaki (guitars) and Dan Weiss, whom he first met at the Manhattan School of Music where he studied Composition in 1995 - fresh off the boat. "The members of my band are friends, with whom I share the greatest artistic trust. That's the personal side, which is very important to me. Just as important is the musical side, however. Each member of my ensemble is a strong artistic personality. They have to be in a position to play my music convincingly - it's by no means easy and moves between various genres: jazz, North Indian traditional and contemporary or New music." Talmor compositions immediately develop a rousing verve, powerful passages merge into lyrical and poetic ones. Individual expressiveness and introspection are seamlessly integrated into different musical forms. A great adventure for listeners.

In the case of Jump!, the third release on the Intakt label by Swiss soprano saxophonist Jurg Wickihalder, the presence of Irene Schweizer, one of the most consistently provocative and imaginative pianists to emerge from the revolutionary period of the late '60s, says a great deal about his willingness to explore new avenues of improvisation, while maintaining a creative relationship with established jazz traditions. In so doing, he's taking advantage of the best of both worlds. 'Unintentionally, spontaneously, amusingly, most Monkish - these playful interjections are only a fragment of the true nature of Wickihalder's achievement; when he takes US to surprising new places, the past coexists with the present, nothing is lost, experience is rewarded, and the music lives' (Art Lange).

The Swiss born, London based jazz improvisational singer-composer Sarah Buechi in her second release with her quartet in a set of songs that combine the breadth of Buechi's stylistic influences which range from her early success in musical theatre to studying at the Karnataka College of Percussion in Bangalore and with the great Ghanese balafon master Bernard Woma to work shopping with New York saxophonist Steve Coleman.

SECRET KEEPER: SUPER EIGHT

NOW

SCHLIPPENBACH PLAYS MONK

Saxophonist and composer Ingrid Laubrock is at the center of today's Brooklyn avant-garde, and over the past decade has steadily expanded her reach as a composer, devising new ways to inspire, organize, and situate improvised music. Monochromes marks a new chapter in her oeuvre, as she has written and designed richly detailed fixed-media works as a starting point for improvisations. "In early 2020, just before the pandemic shut down, she began to record the sonic materials that would serve as the fixed media in the piece. Laubrock asked a handful of close collaborators to realize her scores, which mix conventional and graphic notation with text instructions. In each of the four sections of the uninterrupted work (or monochromes), seriously kinetic, shape-shifting tape pieces unfurl, giving a set of additional improvisers an often unpredictable sonic provocation". With Monochromes, Ingrid Laubrock presents an artistic statement that reflects the turbulence of an age gone off the rails.

HANS HASSLER