Gu�nter Baby Sommer is at the height of his musical career. The Dresden jazz innovator, who together with the pioneering generation of jazz has unbounded drumming and developed his own sound, presents a refreshing album with a cross-generational quartet with the Lucaciu brothers. "The other three members of the quartet are two generations younger. Gu�nter Baby Sommer's music and presence belong to the inventory of traditions they feel inspired by and to which they have therefore orientated themselves. Jazz for them is a historical project which they approach with much warmth. Thus between these four musicians there is an electricity feeding on their similarities and differences - not only in age - and not diffused by any concessions", writes Hans-Ju�rgen Linke in the liner notes.

After making the studio recording Camino Ciel Echo, New York drummer Tom Rainey's trio has now recorded a live album containing the distilled essence of numerous concerts including several European tours. Tom Rainey, born in 1957 in Santa Barbara, was known at an earlier stage of his career as an exceptional drummer. Since he moved to New York he has played with some of the heavy weights of the contemporary jazz scene including Mark Helias, Kris Davis, Tim Berne and Tony Malaby. For his own trio, he has chosen two strong female musicians. Ingrid Laubrock is a saxophonist who plays with an extraordinary sensitivity for structure and form, fusing intellect and poetry in her refined improvisations. Mary Halvorson is one of the most sought after jazz guitarist of her generation. One critic, praising this release, called it a concise lecture on the aesthetics of collective sound shaping.

It was only during Ken Vandermark's residency at the Jazz club The Stone in January 2016 that Vandermark found himself in the same vicinity as Nate Wooley, Sylvie Courvoisier and Tom Rainey. A year later they went into the studio with nine compositions - three each by Courvoisier, Vandermark and Wooley. These four musicians have well-documented, distinct personalities which, in this context, results in performances full of surprises, rich contrasts and shared responsibilities. The music sounds thoughtful, but never over-wrought. They play by intuition, yet retain a vivid complexity. Their composing is transparent and uncliched; their improvising provided with a remarkable coherence and openness. And perhaps it is exactly this - a fresh collective unity that keeps their respective personalities and idiosyncrasies intact - that brings them success in this bold and collaborative performance. Art needs to pique and renew your interest, take you on inspiring and surprising journeys and sometimes even confront your own biases. Creating, not reviving as a way to evolve and to keep going forward in all directions.

Andrew Cyrille's longtime companion Oliver Lake praises the master of African-American rhythms in his poem The Real Cyrille: "making the real magic... The real rhythms... The real sounds... expanding his African/Haitian roots... surfing the drums for masterful lyrical snippets... a master of color... painting coloring riffing always stretchin' searchin' lookin' for that next sound color sound!" Lake's words astutely describe the artistry of Andrew Cyrille and the music that he makes on this record. Unlike his solo albums from the 70's and 80's, he has broadened the approach on this remarkable solo statement. Cyrille asserts, "I wanted to have a variety percussion instruments in the compositions. So I was thinking of melodies that could be played with tambourines, bells, cymbals, crotales, gongs, and mallets."

She makes the music of the future, headlines Zurich jazz critic Manfred Papst in an extensive portrait of singer Sarah Buechi. The singer has studied a wide variety of music in America, Ireland, Ghana and India to further develop songwriting, world and jazz in a highly personal way, whereby the balance of composition and improvisation is central. With Moon Trail she presents her new trio. "A strong shared feeling and freedom in dealing with the musical material; these are the essences the trio draws from jazz and folk music, as well as other global musical traditions. Virtuosity is never showcased for it's own sake. Rather, it is the underlying pulsating energy that allows a freer play of links and references; a musical web characterised by lightness and variability. In this, the trio shows the potential to set a new standpoint in jazz music: a musical golden ratio", writes Luise Wolf in the liner notes.

The Trio Heinz Herbert's captivating aesthetic is thanks to a symbiotic intensity of expression. It contains traces of '70s free jazz psychedelics and particles of contemporary club culture and aspires to a broad fusion of free jazz and electronic music, energetically driven by a collective improvisation which outflanks solo gymnastics. After their celebrated 2016 recording, The Willisau Concert, with YES the trio have added fire to a highly original, unconventional musical art, swaggering again through electronic landscapes. "YES: welcome to transgressive zones of sound, multifaceted sonic structures, diverse aggregate states, moods and colliding rhythms. YES: enter the cabinet of mirrors, reflecting influences, material, colors and double (dance) floors. More closely intertwined, and loosely interlocked, the Trio Heinz Herbert sound comes apart in the sum of the threefold individuals and in an interplay based on blind trust, on YES they celebrate music which is always in motion, constantly building new forms, reminiscent of the shifting, morphing multiple body of a flock of birds," writes Florian Keller.

OORT-ENTROPY

RAW MEET

ODYSSEY

ZENTRAL QRTT

With his extensive artistic biography, Tim Berne is one of the most outstanding figures in American jazz. Rising star Gregg Belisle Chi, a connoisseur of Berne's music, has this year released the acclaimed album Koi, featuring interpretations of Tim Berne's compositions on solo acoustic guitar. With his extensive skills and immense sonic potential, he is earning a central place in the landscape of contemporary acoustic guitar. With Mars, these two exceptional musicians present their first duo album. All songs are penned by Tim Berne and enchant the listener with an intense interplay that is playful, poetic and sonically stunning. David Torn, who is responsible for the grandiose sound, writes in the liner notes: "Space Music? no, nope: Earth Music? well, yeah. Folk Music? well... i dunno, could be, but these songs on Mars are written by Tim & reimagined in-real-time by he & Gregg: them 2 being edified by, appreciative & respectful of those who've come before, & especially those ones who stayed lit and busted their own asses & spirits in order to continue initiating the kinds of flames that push us all to strive to express & to feel things of life & lives that may otherwise be functionally inexplicable, and may even be ineffable, somehow."

The New York-based pianist and composer Marta Sanchez is on her way to the top of the international jazz world. With Perpetual Void, she presents her first trio album on Intakt Records. Sanchez, currently a member of the David Murray Quartet, pens captivating compositions for this impressive trio, where all three personalities shine. Savannah Harris and Chris Tordini are in top form, both as eloquent soloists and as ensemble partners, as they negotiate the polyphonic and cross-rhythmic currents and dynamic contrasts that inform Sanchez's writing. As Lauren du Graf writes in the liner notes, the trio setting allows "Sanchez's voice to cut through with cinematic clarity, with ample room for her to interact with her rhythm section, which she does with both freedom and sensitivity." And she adds: "Perpetual Void is a testament to Sanchez's singular greatness, establishing her pianistic voice more vividly than ever." This album is sure to stand as one of the most compelling piano trio recordings of this year.

PASSAGGIO

After the album "Togetherness Music", British pianist and composer Alexander Hawkins presents another musical panorama: An ensemble in which his trio with bassist Neil Charles and drummer Stephen Davis meets saxophonist and clarinetist Shabaka Hutchings, guitarist Otto Fischer, and drummer Richard Ol�t�nd� Baker. For anybody who has followed Hawkins's work since his emergence on the British improvised music scene in the mid 2000's this is a fresh band full of familiar musicians with whom Hawkins has played in a wide variety of formations. The new pieces "Break a Vase" presents emerge from Hawkins' own imagination, but they also capture the thrust of energy in collaborating with these outstanding musicians. "Hawkins gives one of his most complete performances to date," writes Kevin Le Gendre in the liner notes. "Nothing is perhaps more majestic than the title track, which comes from Derek Walcott's acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize. 'Break a Vase, and the love that re - assembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took it's symmetry for granted when it was whole.' Enjoy then all these wily bits and pieces that come together in the kind of daring, courageous construction that is made to last."

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.

The Schlippenbach Trio has worked together as a unit for around forty-five (!) years. Their magic chemistry is founded on intuitive listening and interaction - the ability to respond in an instant - and on the match between their characters, each adding to the whole as well as challenging each other - a stroke of fortune. The spectrum of performances on "Features" covers a range from furor to elegy. It extends from energetic, forward-thrusting pieces via cool, calm, ambling passages and ballad moods to submersion in sound, in silence. (Excerpt from Bert Noglik's liner notes)

WILLISAU & BERLIN

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.

The concert of the Stefan Aeby Trio at the Intakt Festival at Vortex Jazz Club in London 2017 was a highlight of live music in the capital that year. It made an emphatic statement on how improvisation transcends borders and underlined the strength of a new generation of players. London journalist Kevin Le Genre writes: "Aeby drummer Michi Stulz and double bassist Andr� Pousaz make for an inherently contemporary proposition insofar as they are by no means restricted to the standard tropes of the piano trio. This is a group comprising three instruments and three open minds. Hence the performance sees the players organically shift the ensemble towards many stylistic areas, whether it is a suggestion of wistful ambient soundscapes, breezy, percussive African folk, or modern pop that retains the blues to varying degrees. The music is multi-faceted. Throughout the concert there is a palpable sense of breathing space as well as controlled intensity. A quiet fire. The lasting impression of this concert is precisely the cohesion and dynamics of the trio, with it's skillful straddling of natural and digital tones, and it's deft negotiation of sounds past, present and future."

The project 'Hotel Zauberberg' arose out of Aki Takase's and Yumi Paul's shared admiration for the writer Thomas Mann. It mostly consists of notated compositions, with some improvised parts as well. Eleven of the eighteen pieces were penned by Aki Takase, another five are collaborations with Ayumi Paul. Additionally, there are adaptations of a Mozart Minuet and a Bach Partita. Aki Takase reacts to the polyphony of the novel with a variety of stylistic elements. She has never been a purist anyway; she's never been shy of contact. She is an avant-gardist drawing on tradition. She's got both claws and finesse. And, most of all, she's got a sense of humor. Aki Takase and Ayumi Paul's first collaboration stands out through it's light-footed intelligence as well as a sense of the abysses of the 'Magic Mountain', which turns into a world-theatre of love, illness and death. Thomas Mann, whose work includes music as a subject in itself as well as a language, would have enjoyed it.

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.'"

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.

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.

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.

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.