With Kris Davis, Stephan Crump and Eric McPherson, the Borderlands Trio unites three luminaries who have grown together to form a trio full of the magic of their own distinct sound and fine grooves. Brooklyn bassist Stephan Crump initiated the band and has kept it together for seven years. The band's two previous releases were lauded by jazz critics. This band knows no rush. Developments build up cautiously, moods change slowly and intensify. The music takes it's time to explore the subtle nuances of a patient and generous musical dialog. Rewilder, this new double album, is further proof that the classical piano trio in the hands of Stephan Crump, Kris Davis and Eric McPherson holds a world of vast possibilities, revealing the adventures of improvisation and the bliss of free play.

The Chicago Reader describes the Jim Black Trio with Thomas Morgan and Elias Stemeseder "one of the best bands in Jim Black's busy career". In the HardStudios Winterthur the trio recorded this new album over two days. It is their fourth album as a trio and their second release on Intakt Records. Drummer Jim Black has one of the most immediately recognizable styles in Jazz - his wonderful unhinged playing bears the mark of the rock backbeat, but he adds a clanking disruptive quality that forces his collaborators to sharpen their reflexes. "They find their own space", writes Kevin Whitehead in the liner notes. "Stemeseder is an original. It's not that he never backstops a right-hand melody with left-hand chords - he just does it less than most jazz pianists. He can feather the pedals or get stabby percussive, but never over-plays. The space he leaves around the piano's sound is an invitation: he creates room. Like Stemeseder, Thomas Morgan has the confidence to do nothing where another accompanist might fill all the holes. His bass tone is ringing and clear, his attack has propulsive bite, and his lines sing. He provides a through-line when the other guys fracture."

SO LONG ERIC-HOMAGE TO ERIC DOLPHY

DAS DONNERNDE LEBEN

SPRING

EDGE OF THE LIGHT

ZATTER

It is impressive how, over the last three years, the Austrian keyboard instrumentalist Elias Stemeseder and the German percussionist Christian Lillinger have developed a remarkable artistic partnership, which has already found expression in a series of different recordings. Expanding into a quartet with Peter Evans and Russell Hall, they reveal further facets of their collaboration on Umbra II. Unlike it's production-heavy predecessor Umbra, the music on Umbra II is entirely acoustic and the band's sound has a classical feel. This album, which has the strongest and most direct connection to the jazz tradition to date, was recorded at the venerable Van Gelder Studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. "The duo are always looking ahead, whether that means bringing in new collaborators, embracing novel techniques, or adding new tools to it's instrumental arsenal. Umbra ll represents one leg of an ongoing journey. Here's hoping the destination always remains elusive", writes Peter Margasak in the liner notes.

Saxophonist Ohad Talmor, an expressive improviser and superb stylist, is a worldly cosmopolitan with nationalities in France, Switzerland, Israel and the United States. Born in Lyon and raised in Geneva, he came to New York in 1995 to study music. Since then, he has been a "mover and shaker" in the creative Brooklyn jazz scene. This project focuses on previously unreleased compositions by Ornette Coleman. Ohad Talmor reports that as a companion, friend and heir to the artistic legacy, he found three tapes from an Ornette Coleman and Lee Konitz rehearsal recording in the apartment of Lee Konitz, who died in 2020. Talmor transcribed the compositions. The result is Back to the Land, a double album Talmor recorded with his core trio of bassist Chris Tordini and drummer Eric McPherson, as well as various high-profile guest musicians. Newly discovered compositions by a jazz great, transformed into another artist's personal story - it's hard to capture the essence of jazz any better.

With his extensive artistic biography, Michael Formanek is one of the most outstanding figures in American jazz, as a composer, as a bassist in ensembles, and as a soloist. The fact that the bassist has been an integral part of the creative music scene for several decades speaks for his creativity and versatility. Now Michael Formanek presents the long-awaited second album with his groundbreaking Elusion Quartet, which brings together four highly acclaimed musicians from the New York jazz scene - pianist Kris Davis, saxophonist Tony Malaby and drummer Ches Smith. "As Things Do is yet another testament to Formanek's encyclopedic conception.[...] Michael Formanek is that rare musician who, all the while retaining absolute integrity and focus, can let the music range where it will: in his own words, letting things go where they're going to go, As Things Do" writes Alexander Hawkins in the liner notes.

SO VIEL SCHON HIN & 15 HERBSTLIEDER

The instrumentalists of The Mayfield have together created the music to the large scale performance Everything that happened and would happen by Heiner Goebbels - a music theatre piece on Europe as a historical and contemporary 'construction site'. The band is named after the Mayfield Depot, a vast disused railway station in Manchester, in which they rehearsed and created the work. It inspired the aesthetics of the music. The instrumentation is dedicated to a coexistence of acoustic and electronic sources, ranging from percussion, as the earliest and universal source of musical expression, to birdcalls, saxophones and prepared grand piano and to Ondes Martenot, one of the first electronic instruments. An invented electric guitar added with digital sensors bridges the gap between these different sonic universes. The Mayfield music results in soundscapes between controlled noise and 'musique concr�te instrumentale'. At La Muse en Circuit - the Parisian recording studio designed specifically for electro-acoustic music that Luc Ferrari established in 1982 - the musicians recorded 95 improvised pieces. Willi Bopp, who has worked closely with Goebbels for 35 years, subsequently created a collage of those selections, which were further winnowed and sequenced into the seamless 16-track selection featured on this remarkable album. "The collective's brand of free improvisation is stunning, a liquid form of electro-acoustic music of uncommon physicality, depth, and dynamics that sounds like little else in the realm of contemporary experimental music", writes Peter Margasak in the liner notes.

Aki Takase, the Berlin-based pianist, is one of the great personalities of modern jazz. Moments of freedom, form and humour characterize this stylistically versatile avant-gardist, the stubborn virtuoso who toys with jazz traditions. In the year of her 70th birthday, Aki Takase was honoured with The Berlin Jazz Prize. Recorded over two days at the Sendesaal Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg, the album includes some pieces captured live during the award ceremony, and some recorded in a studio setting in the same historic room. The piece Bach Factory features Alexander von Schlippenbach as a guest and the Japanese author Yoko Tawada appears on Hokahoka Hokosai. Aki Takase is inspired by the Japanese painter Katsushika Hokusai. For Aki Takase, Hokusai was a hugely passionate and brilliant artist with an experimental mind who lived only with and for his paintings. "Hokusai showed so many directions in painting, which is why I wanted to convey various colours in improvisation. Music is like a colour. For me, red and light-blue are gentle colours. These were the colours that I felt. That's my internal landscape. I feel a strong connection to Hokusai. "

OCTOPUS

BIRDIES OF LULU