Sylvie Courvoisier has never been easy to pin down, which is exactly the point. The Lausanne-born pianist moved to New York City in 1998 and spent the next two-plus decades making herself indispensable to the downtown avant-garde, working alongside John Zorn, Evan Parker, Wadada Leo Smith, and Mark Feldman, among others. She received the Swiss Grand Prix Music and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Music Award in 2025, recognition that felt overdue rather than surprising. Her long-running piano trio with bassist Drew Gress and drummer Kenny Wollesen has been one of jazz’s most formidable units for years. Éclats: Live in Europe, recorded during a February 2025 tour, makes a strong case that the group has never sounded better.
Tag Archive: Intakt
Lisbon-based American bassist and composer Michael Formanek introduces a new septet, New Digs, featuring his trio partners from Thumbscrew — guitarist Mary Halvorson and drummer Tomas Fujiwara — alongside British organist Alexander Hawkins and a three-horn frontline of saxophonists John O’Gallagher and Chet Doxas, plus trumpeter João Almeida.
Driven by imaginative, free-flowing arrangements, the band opens with “New Old World”, a platform for resolute bass lines, psychedelic organ textures, slippery rhythmic shifts, and bursts of cacophony marked by stabbing saxophone and trumpet figures over counterintuitive guitar accompaniment. Solos by Halvorson, O’Gallagher, and Doxas stand out, with the latter channeling…
It’s hard to argue with the press release “a mesmerizing solo debut! A contagious exuberance of playing, energetic explosive improvisations, and an openness to jazz tradition and experimentation combine on this album to create an impressive musical statement. “Almost everything he plays affirms his history and culture as a first- generation American, the son of a Panamanian mother and a Dominican father.
Growing up in the Bronx and in Queens during hip hop’s first years – the first jazz he heard were samples – hearing salsa and merengue at home, attending Latino evangelical churches, and – yes – studying classical music at the Harlem School of the Arts shaped Marcelo’s identification as an African Latino with an inclusive sensibility.
German alto saxophonist, composer, and improviser Angelika Niescier emerges on Chicago Tapes with a refreshed, invigorating sound shaped by an expanded ensemble that gathers some of the Midwest’s most adventurous musicians. Long engaged in collaborations with American players — among them Tyshawn Sorey, Gerald Cleaver, Chris Tordini, and Tomeka Reid — Niescier brought her compositions and open-ended sketches to Chicago for an ambitious project that yielded nine fearless originals, each brimming with sharp turns and volatile energy.
The album’s kinetic opener, “Rejoice, Disrupt, Resist”, is a furious, defiant response to the anti-immigration stance of the Trump administration. Here, Niescier joins forces with…
Bassist Stephan Crump and drummer Eric McPherson, two of jazz’s most forward-thinking rhythmists, form the core of the Borderlands Trio alongside pianist Kris Davis. After three acclaimed albums with that group, the pair decided to continue their collaboration, this time summoning powerhouse alto saxophonist Darius Jones — a central figure in New York’s avant-garde scene known for fusing modern expressiveness with old-school improvisational spirit.
Together, they form Otherlands Trio, an improvisation-centered ensemble whose elliptical and sectional journeys yield revelatory musical discoveries. Star Mountain, their debut, features five tracks — two expansive (of approximately 15 minutes) and three concise explorations.
As a resourceful sound alchemist and idiosyncratic sound architect with multi-layered and often floating guitar sounds that can pile up into a wall of sound, Swiss guitarist Dave Gisler enlivens contemporary jazz. Since 2017, he has been working continuously with his congenial trio partners Raffaele Bossard and Lionel Friedli.
After collaborations with the Chicago trumpeter jaimie branch, who sadly passed away before her time, and the luminary of modern jazz David Murray, the trio decided to continue without guests and focus on the essence and energy of their distinctive trio sound. This live album is another milestone for this promising trio, which is guided by style-independent factors such as density, contrasts, and energy.
Wadada Leo Smith describes his music not as “jazz” but as “creative music.” He rejects the term “improvisation” in favor of “creation.” These specific word choices reflect his unique approach, which is deeply rooted in his early experiences with blues and R&B.
Smith uses the full range of his instrument and plays at his own pace, with a profound understanding of the power of silence and space. For him, space is as important as the notes themselves, allowing the resonance of each sound to linger. His phrasing and melodic ideas carry the emotional and spiritual weight of the blues, a testament to his musical heritage. His style is a synthesis of diverse influences, including African-American, Native American, and…
Cuban Cubism is central to Aruán Ortiz‘s musical identity — but in this album, his vision extends far beyond. While the 1930s Negritude movement was a literary endeavor, Ortiz seeks to embody that movement not through words but through music. His compositions channel their spirit with abstraction, tension, and a deep sense of diasporic reflection.
Ortiz, born in Santiago de Cuba — the island’s second-largest city — is shaped by its distinctive sonic culture. His influences stretch widely, encompassing American and European 20th-century composers such as Schoenberg, Ligeti, and Xenakis, as well as icons of funk and soul like James Brown and Sly Stone.
Now based in Brooklyn, Ortiz is a pianist,…
Highly influenced by alternative rock, avant-garde jazz, and electronic music, American drummer Jim Black has explored countless group configurations alongside a wide range of artists.
His twelfth recording of original songs, Better You Don’t, is his second with The Shrimps — a sharp, eruptive Berlin-based trio featuring Danish altoist Asger Nissen and German musicians Julius Gawlik on tenor saxophone and Felix Henkelhausen on bass.
The buoyant “The Sheila” captures Black’s subversive knack for rock-inflected textures, channeling raw energy and spontaneity. These qualities come alive through a motorik-like rhythm that heightens kineticism, a sturdy, funky bass groove, and loose, creative saxophone…
Irène’s Hot Four represents a significant post- humous release from the legendary Swiss jazz pianist Irène Schweizer, who passed away in 2024. This release captures a rare 1981 concert in Zurich featuring Schweizer alongside her companions Rudiger Carl, Johnny Dyani, and Han Bennink. It is a quartet that existed for only around a year and a half, playing just a handful of performances. The album fills an important gap in Schweizer’s discography, documenting this ephemeral but vital collaboration between four master improvisers. The release highlights the pianist’s bold free jazz style during a vibrant era of European improvised music.
…”The concert with the Irène Schweizer Quartet in Zurich 1981 demonstrates a theatrical performance that remains musically coherent…
Guitarist Gregg Belisle-Chi’s longtime attachment to the singularly modern jazz of saxophonist Tim Berne led him to make a record of all Berne songs. Koi: Performing the Music of Tim Berne (2021) kicked off a mini-wave of overdue Berne tribute albums and Belisle-Chi himself had ended up playing in Berne-led ensembles, mostly as a duo or trio. But that close collaboration with his musical hero hadn’t quenched his thirst to cover Berne songs apart from Berne in his own voice.
Thus, the Brooklyn based-guitarist is offering a whole new set of Berne covers. Performed again solely on acoustic guitar, Slow Crawl: Performing the Music of Tim Berne, can be regarded as a straight continuation of the stunning Koi collection, and also like that earlier album,…
British pianist and composer Alexander Hawkins is one of Europe’s most innovative pianists, working in a variety of creative contexts and always constructing a unique sound world.
As a style-defining and imaginative voice in contemporary jazz, Hawkins provides further testimony to the art of his solo playing, six years after his last solo album (Intakt #330).
Song Unconditional is as playful as it is intense – firmly rooted in tradition, yet endlessly searching and adventurous.
Each of the 13 short pieces explores one or more expressive possibilities of the piano and are, in the words of Adam Shatz in the liner notes, “…marvels of compressed exploration.
To listen to them in succession, as they’re meant…
It is rare to describe an audio recording as brave, but that is precisely what the latest release by the Silke Eberhard Trio is — bold, fearless, and unflinchingly original. Being-A-Ning, the group’s fifth album, borrows its title from Thelonious Monk’s “Rhythm-A-Ning,” nodding to the jazz giant while continuing the trio’s thematic naming convention. Previous albums — Being (2008) and What a Beauty Being (2011) on Jazzwerkstatt, followed by The Being Inn (2017) and Being the Up and Down (2021) on Intakt — have all explored the elusive nature of ‘being’ through fearless improvisation and sharp compositional ideas.
Eberhard, an alto saxophonist known for her expressive tone and adventurous spirit, pens nine of the album’s ten compositions.
James Brandon Lewis, a disorienting, self-possessed tenorist who has garnered a great deal of attention through his various projects and collaborations, returns with his fifth quartet album, Abstraction is Deliverance, featuring eight of his own compositions and a modal post-bop cover. Rejoining him are pianist Aruán Ortiz, bassist Brad Jones, and drummer Chad Taylor. Their rapport and musicianship are more compelling than ever, and their ability to transcend and marvel with spiritual consciousness, a mix of traditional and modernist idioms, and rich timbres is truly remarkable.
The album opens in a modal mode with “Ware”, a tribute to the much-missed saxophonist David S. Ware, radiating Coltranean overtones throughout. Resonant bowed bass, cymbal…