Chimaera is the newest ensemble of pianist and composer Sylvie Courvoisier. The virtuoso band brings together key musical personalities from the New York jazz scene in Wadada Leo Smith, Nate Wooley, Drew Gress and Kenny Wollesen, and features Austrian artist Christian Fennesz, whose ambient textures can be considered Chimaera's wildcard. Inspired by the fantastic, enigmatic-hallucinatory paintings of symbolist Odilon Redons, the sextet creates an expansive and shimmering soundscape. "The lucid, dreamlike sounds of Courvoisier's Chimaera album are floating and elusive like shadows on the ocean; the melodic glitter of trumpet, piano and vibraphone on a rolling groove of rhythmic ambience, with Fennesz's magical guitar clouds enveloping the band," writes Bradley Bamberger of the music of this new sextet.

Sofia Jernberg and Alexander Hawkins are among the most multifaceted and expressive musical personalities with a surprising radius of action. Swedish singer Sofia Jernberg explores the boundaries of vocal technique in a variety of creative contexts, ranging from Sch�nberg's Pierrot Lunaire to Mats Gustafsson's Fire! Orchestra. Alexander Hawkins is often described as unrivaled in modern creative music and is considered one of it's most innovative and imaginative pianists and composers. In the duo, traditional songs from Ethiopia, Armenia, Sweden and elsewhere become the starting point for the development of an exciting and very personal sound world. David Toop writes in the liner notes: "Where is home, where is return for the scattered? Soft and crystalline, a music of edges, silence and tangential shoots, Musho dwells in these questions, invites the listener to consider displacement, migration, identity, responsibility, bloody history, the seepage of culture and community, but more than that, invites listening." Musho is predictably a fantastic work of contemporary music.

Erdmann-Rohrer with Courtois and Mobus draw on their abundant musical experience: rock, jazz, popular, free improvisation as well as classical composition for their new release.

Two exceptional musicians - Angelica Sanchez and Chad Taylor - present their first duo album with A Monster is Just an Animal You Haven't Met Yet. And it's high time, given their long musical friendship, which has solidified over the years in various formations. It is therefore no exaggeration to describe pianist Angelica Sanchez and drummer Chad Taylor as two of the most important musical personalities in contemporary jazz. Both are virtuoso improvisers and unmistakable stylists and they celebrate a music that releases energy - pulsating vividly while at the same time withdrawing into intimacy. The gratification that Sanchez and Taylor feel in playing together is heard in every note, designating them a classic duo. A celebration of successful interplay and a tribute to the moment. Playing the music of our time, these two personalities who show respect for each other and give each other space. "We are eavesdropping upon an intimate exposition of dimensional theses. A privileged impropriety granted by no one, vaguely wanton, and luridly inviting. And so, it is...", writes Brandon Ross in the liner notes.

THE ARRIVAL

Sunny Five with Tim Berne, David Torn, Marc Ducret, Devin Hoff and Ches Smith brings together five of the most prominent voices on the New York jazz scene. This group pursues a creative vision that explores the juxtaposition of pure acoustic sonic elements and the integration of electric/electronic sound-generation. "We hear Tim Berne's saxophone - rectilinear, concise, insistent - interacting/intoning with and through the deeply textural sound worlds of David Torn's electric/electronic guitar playing, coupled with or countered by guitarist Marc Ducret's incisive, essentialist virtuosity. There are tensions present that seem unresolvable and made more so by the fathoming sonorities of Devin Hoff's bass and the metric pliability of Ches Smith's approach to the drums and electronics... There are moments in the music where it may be impossible to tell who's doing what... and by what means" writes Brandon Ross in the liners, calling this record "Kinetic, mysterious, cinematic and heroic.

Jo�lle L�andre is a living legend. It is almost impossible to list all the international greats of free music with whom L�andre has played in her decades-long career. With Zurich Concert, the magician and rebel on the double bass presents an impressive solo statement. "It is no coincidence that she once described the bass as her bedrock, her spinal column and the place where she stores her memories. Jo�lle L�andre does not play music, she lives it... (she) spins a continuous thread of sound which never snaps. On the contrary, she keeps spinning it onwards. We hear both high energy and quiet tenderness, but the transitions are always seamless and organic. In her bass playing and with her voice. No stopping, no pause within the individual improvisations. Onwards, ever onwards. A true magician of sound," writes Nina Polaschegg in the liner notes.

Fresh Juice is the third CD of Gabriela Friedli's Objets Trouves band. Friedli is the top-class pianist who penned all these compositions. Her playing shows a mastery of ingenious twists and turns, journeying from delicate, dreamy elegies to powerful rolling thunder.

This magnificent concert took place at the Berlin Jazzfest 2017, where Angelika Niescier was awarded the Albert Mangelsdorff Prize (German Jazz Prize). This concert by the Angelika Niescier NYC Trio with Chris Tordini on bass and Tyshawn Sorey on drums - who was Jazzfest Berlin's 2017 Artist in Residence, and gave several performances in Berlin - proved to be a remarkable stroke of luck for the festival, since Niescier had already worked regularly with both for ten years. Christian Broecking writes in the liner notes: "This Berlin Concert of the Angelika Niescier Trio makes it clear in a unique way how something organically complete can emerge from all this unceasing curiosity, questioning and research, from pulse, attentiveness and from an acute sense of judgment and knowledge of what is going to work. When Tordini heard the recording of this very special concert, he noticed both the collective attention and the freedom, a combination which only rarely succeeds in such intense conditions. And Tyshawn Sorey agrees: 'None of us either hung around for the others or hurried ahead of them.'"

STORMING WINTER PALACE

Alchemia Garden: the album's wonderful title, creates an enchanting, ambiguous effect. Lucas Niggli relates the organic, biological and growing, which develops on it's own and is cultivated and maintained in the form of the garden, to the metamorphosis of material, the scientific search for something unknown which historically has been seen to generate something new. During his thirty years of playing live Lucas Niggli recorded with many musicians like Aly Kei�ta, Barry Guy, Sylvie Courvoisier, Luciano Biondini, Michel Godard, Andreas Schaerer, Nils Wogram, Elliott Sharp, Steamboat Switzerland, Erika Stucky. He has occasionally given solo concerts, for example a performance at the big John Cage Festival in Switzerland in the late 1980s at which Cage himself witnessed Niggli's performance of 27' 10.554" for a Percussionist. It is time, in the best sense, for Lucas Niggli to release a solo album. What a great way to celebrate one's own 50th birthday - with this gift to himself and the listener. New York critic Laurence Donohue-Greene writes in the liner notes: "as a drummer blessed with a percussionist's intuitive sense and virtuosic capability and range, Niggli's memorable solo performances here unquestionably add to the tradition of the great solo drummers who preceded him while keeping an eye on the horizon."

The album 'To Roy' dedicated to trumpeter Roy Campbell, who died in 2014, is the first collaboration between saxophonist Oliver Lake and double bass player William Parker - two important pioneers of contemporary jazz, two great musicians of the USA and two masters of composition and improvisation. After playing a concert in "The Stone" in New York, part of Intakt's festival in January 2012, Lake and Parker took up the label's invitation to record their first album together in Pater Karl's studio in Brooklyn. Both musicians contributed compositions of rare beauty. Shaped by their long experience, their intimacy created spaces for interaction and exciting improvisations. The instruments of these two mature players mingled to create a single unique sound.

YOU ARE HERE

STARTED

What cements the relationship of Swiss saxophonist Co Streiff and American trumpeter Russ Johnson, is a shared belief that being progressive doesn't automatically require abandoning melody or groove. Their experience is the best in cross-cultural exchange. Streiff and Johnson coalesce for a wonderful sound, almost Vintage Blue Note before jumping decades to sound as modern as anything else out there. Most groups are either rife with nostalgia or, conversely, exchange method for memorability. The best do both, and Streiff and Johnson have accomplished that with their first effort.