Umbra is the new album by pianist, composer, and electronic musician Elias Stemeseder and drummer, composer, and producer Christian Lillinger. As a core duo, they are planning a long-term series of releases, each with guest musicians playing a key role. "Their works explore the principles of time and space, growing from quiet melodies into broad statements. On Umbra, Stemeseder and Lillinger continue to expand their palette, bringing together an eclectic group of collaborators - New York based musicians Brandon Seabrook, DoYeon Kim, Peter Evans, and Russell Hall - to build off of their ideas, combining the textures of strings and percussion to weave together a visceral sonic tapestry", writes Vanessa Ague in the liner notes and adds: "Each piece on the album offers it's own careful examination of sound, peering into every fleeting moment to unearth some new texture or timbre that's hiding within each instrument."

David Virelles presents an eagerly awaited debut album with this superb trio on Intakt Records. Born in Santiago de Cuba, the pianist and composer has established himself on the international jazz scene with his Afro-Cuban influenced keyboard artistry and has made a name for himself with numerous collaborations with artists such as Henry Threadgill, Andrew Cyrille, Chris Potter, Wadada Leo Smith, Tom Harrell, Milford Graves and Ravi Coltrane, among others. Eight of the nine compositions on Carta are penned by Virelles and all open doors to free interpretation and development. Oscillating between composition and improvisation, this trio brings together three of the most influential voices in contemporary US jazz. Carta was recorded at the legendary Rudy van Gelder Studio, and in lieu of liner notes, poet Malik Crumpler has contributed a poem inspired by the music on the album and by his conversations with the musicians.

A supergroup is what the German music magazine Jazzthetik calls Punkt. Vrt. Plastik. Kaja Draksler, Petter Eldh and Christian Lillinger make up this trio - "Two musicians and one musician who are among the most exciting and active that the European avant-garde has to offer. " And Die Zeit writes: "They reinterpret an entire genre at once: the good old piano trio. " The trio convinces with a highly individual sound and a rarely heard clarity and precision, even where there is free improvisation and where rhythm, melody and metrics dissolve. Now, a year after their celebrated album Somit, they present an impressive live statement that takes up the material from their eponymous first album and Somit and impressively demonstrates the live realizations of studio ideas. "It is a stunning reminder that whatever else it can be, music is a fundamentally communicative enterprise. It is our great fortune that the microphones were up on this night so that Punkt. Vrt. Plastik can again tell us what they said", writes Alexander Hawkins in the liner notes.

David Murray is a giant of modern jazz. His saxophone fuses all the great things that black music has produced: Gospel sounds, free jazz, Afro-Caribbean, blues and soul as well as the beautiful standards of classic jazz. Murray's colorful tone, unsurpassed intonation, flair for swing, melancholy tones, and improvisational power and ingenuity make him one of the most important voices in music today. The newly formed Brave New World Trio congregates style-setting jazz greats with bassist Brad Jones and drummer Hamid Drake. Together they draw from the African-American tradition as well as from other cultures and with Seriana Promethea they present an impressive musical statement. "The result shows the intuitive level of understanding achieved. Having reached in his mid-60s a level of technical mastery where a musician 'can play every note that he hears,' Murray saw this pianoless trio as not just a way to keep the notes flowing, but a catalyst for total freedom: that rare configuration that allows him to deliver, through the saxophone, "my most free expression of myself", writes Derek Schilling in the liner notes.

With Release, the highly acclaimed Lisbeth Quartett presents a greatly anticipated album on Intakt Records. After twelve years and five albums, Charlotte Greve, who has just been awarded the German Jazz Prize for "Artist of the Year", has relied on her intuitive sensibilities to create the new music for Release. The result is an album marked by sensitive interplay - a collection of stunningly subtle and melodically pronounced songs that are both gentle and powerfully fluid. Even if the musicians are across the world in Berlin or New York City, all traveling and working on their respective projects, they seem to meld and blend with ease because of their history together and their knowledge of each other's instrumental styles. "They have all cultivated the ability to play their instruments gently and cleanly aligning with the style of even sounds and tone they have refined throughout their journeys together. Twelve years is a long time and the span of thousands of moments that they have shared having brought them to where they are today, working as a unit, creating new music in this post-modern era and continuing their legacy as a leading band in the international jazz landscape", writes Jordannah Elizabeth in the liner notes.

Chris Speed's superb trio with bassist Chris Tordini and drummer Dave King continues to write it's band history with Despite Obstacles, their third album on Intakt Records. Releasing ten years after their debut album, Despite Obstacles is a testament to the band's continued vitality. Speed, a recent member of the newly arranged The Bad Plus where he is reunited with Dave King in another working band, explains the constitutive impetus for this trio: "The initial idea for this trio was to play more swing-based music, to stay in a jazz-trio world." and Kevin Whitehead adds in the liner notes: "Some saxophonists use trios to stretch way out. Chris Speed has other ideas. 'I gravitate to getting to the point - featuring the song. I love to explore and open things up but there needs to be a directness as well.' "

Two years after the acclaimed live album Zurich Concert, which featured trumpeter Jamie Branch, the Dave Gisler trio adds another guest for a studio album - the giant of modern jazz - David Murray. Just as the trio immediately hit it off with Branch, Murray is furiously integrated into the band's punchy music, with the presence of both the trumpeter and tenor saxophonist opening up the group's sound. The resulting body of sound, propelled by punkish energy and the driving force of rock, the free-form aesthetics of the sixties and the cadences of modern jazz, navigates into open musical realms. "But there's no doubt that as Branch's final note resounds, Gisler and his collaborators will soldier on driven by a need to make music together," writes Peter Margasak in the liner notes.

Every new album by saxophonist, flutist, and composer Anna Webber feels like a revelation, and a huge step forward in a discography of the highest quality. Anna Webber's simpletrio2000 which comes a decade after the release of the group's debut Simple, expresses their deep curiosity and tireless creativity. At the intersection of avant-garde jazz and new classical music, Webber's work has been hailed as "visionary and captivating". With her previous albums, she has regularly ranked at the top of the relevant charts. The Simple Trio is her longest-running band. Since it's formation in 2013, few bands in improvised music have displayed such an effervescent energy and adventurous spirit. The group, which also includes drummer John Hollenbeck and pianist Matt Mitchell - both accomplished composers and bandleaders - makes music that is anything but 'simple'. But the complexity of the music, which cannot be ignored, is accompanied by a stormy cheerfulness, and Peter Margasak raves about the "addictive energy and interplay occurring within the trio at all times."

Swiss-born pianist and composer Sylvie Courvoisier is one of the most internationally renowned jazz pianists, at home in both concert halls and jazz clubs. A formative figure on the contemporary jazz scene for 20 years, she is known for her ability to combine two different worlds - the detailed chamber music of her European roots and the experimental sounds of the jazz scene in New York, where she has been at home for all this time. She released her first and so far only solo album in 2007. And so it's high time for another testimony to the art of her solo playing, which is as playful as it is intense, and as rooted in tradition as it is searching and adventurous. "At the same time, in her solo music too, one can hear that Sylvie Courvoisier is an artist who never revolves only around herself. The immense spectrum of her pianistic expressive power and the broad width of her compositional imagination is shaped by her constant curiosity about perspectives other than her own. Thelonious Monk, Geri Allen, Olivier Messiaen and, most recently, Igor Stravinsky", writes Julia Neupert in the liner notes. She adds: "On this album, not only do we hear the multi-faceted self-portrait of one of the most remarkable pianists of our time. Sylvie Courvoisier also shares with us her conviction that playing alone does not mean being alone."

The captivating trio The Choir Invisible, comprised of Brooklyn's creative music scene notables Charlotte Greve, Vinnie Sperrazza and Chris Tordini, present a long-awaited second album. On Town of Two Faces, they continue to develop their organic language, which allows the interplay to be dense and freer without a harmony instrument, into a lively dialog. "The music seemed to appear so easily, with a lot of flexibility, wandering from something extremely tender, subtle and quiet to a collective big, intense outpouring of energy," says German-born Brooklyn-based Greve. Tordini adds: "I believe the real sweet spot of our band is a kind of quiet intensity." In addition, Fay Victor gives the trio's sound it's own character with her charismatic voice as a guest on one track. "With all three bandmembers bringing compositions to the table the emotional and structural content of their music is pleasingly broad, but one dominant aspect is a sense of measure, if not restraint" - Kevin Le Gendre

Tim Berne, pioneer of New York's legendary "downtown scene", and his long-time duo partner Matt Mitchell on piano release the album One More, Please - an impressive and refreshing example of the art of improvisation. The two virtuoso instrumentalists have worked together for more than ten years - including in Berne's acclaimed band Snakeoil - and over this time have developed a distinctive language and musical depth in a dynamic musical relationship. Six of the seven tracks on One More, Please are written by Berne, with all of them opening doors to endless interpretation and development. "With this duo, there's always a further possibility and always the courage to take it on and see it through," writes Django Bates in the liner notes, and adds: "The deconstructions, reconstructions, explorations and extrapolations of great improvisors reconfigure our brains and fine-tune our ears, as you will discover here with One More, Please."

In August 2023, guitarist Elliott Sharp met with fellow guitarists Sally Gates and Tashi Dorji in his Manhattan recording studio. Ere Guitar celebrates the great art of the guitar, played by musicians who seek new paths and create the current sound of the day. "The line-up of the album Ere Guitar initially ties in with it's predecessor Err Guitar with Mary Halvorson and Marc Ribot (Intakt CD 281). Here, too, we meet a trio chosen by Elliott Sharp, whose focus is on spontaneous improvisation. Although the compositional element was greater on Err Guitar and reduced to a minimum on Ere Guitar, these two albums are in no way complementary. Together they recount the search for the unexpected, the unheard, for a formal and tonal complexity that develops from the encounter of three creative musicians", writes Harry Lachner in the liner notes.

Intakt Records is delighted to release their first collaboration with New York saxophonist and visionary instrumentalist, composer and activist Caroline Davis. Portals, Volume 2: Returning is a dedication to Caroline Davis' grandmother, Joan "Lady" Anson Weber, a British poet (1927-2010) who is a direct inspiration for Davis's artistic life. The pieces on "Portals, Volume 2" were written by Davis for her current quintet, which consists of some of the leading voices in American jazz - Marquis Hill, Julian Shore, Chris Tordini and Allan Mednard. They are joined by several guests, including flutist Nicole Mitchell, as well as vocal instrumentalists Jen Shyu, Nappy Nina, Julia Easterlin and Alexa Barchini to honor Lady's poetry with their voices (using spoken word and song). "Portals Volume 2: Returning, is an extremely special record. It is incredibly personal, but the spirit of the music is so generous and so vulnerable that the specificities of it's subject become invitations for the listener to experience the perspectival shifts of grief as an ecstatic pathway towards greater empathy", writes Wendy Eisenberg in the liner notes.

50 years OM! The band wrote history from 1972 to 1982 combining the energy of rock music with the power of free improvisation. With enormous vitality they bring together the experiences of a young generation electrified by Jimi Hendrix, fascinated by John Coltrane and inspired by free jazz. OM brought rock music into spontaneous musical processes with uncertain endings. After a long break from touring, the band returned in 2008 with a brilliant concert at the Willisau Jazz Festival. After another break, they presented the 2020 album "It's About Time". Now OM reinvents itself again and presents a brilliant musical statement for their 50th anniversary. "There are moments all over their records when I find myself in an incredible polyrhythmic thicket or deep cosmic space, and I pause, thinking, "Wait, how did we get here?" That's OM to me. With decades of growth and exploration, together and separately, OM are making their best music right now," writes Jason Bivins in the liner notes.

The first album Moon Trail by Buechi - Hellm�ller - Jerjen was celebrated by Swiss National Radio as the surprise of the year 2022. Now the trio is releasing a long-awaited second album, Pink Mountain Sagas, featuring guests Kristina Brunner on the Schwyzer�rgeli and Andreas Gabriel on the violin. They are both key elements of a young, experimental and lively Swiss folk music. Pink Mountain Sagas bears witness to the fact that Sarah Buechi has traveled far and wide, spending over seven years on the road in Bangalore, Dublin, London, Copenhagen, Accra, Paris and New York. She has heard the world. At the same time, Pink Mountain Sagas is also a homecoming to the alpine Glarus region. An immersion in the world of legends, with their dramas and demons - that is the material this album draws on. "Initially, some things only come through as hints. But on repeated listenings, the musical structure becomes clearer, just like the sky opening up when you are travelling high up in the mountains. The expressive music literally carries the attentive mind into the rugged, alpine Glarnerland", writes Johannes R�hl in the liner notes.