The seventh day of the Intakt Records Festival continues with another inspiring double bill. Ingrid Laubrock’s Sleepthief begins, followed by Sarah Buechi’s Shadow Garden.
Ingrid Laubrock’s Sleepthief
In the past few years the saxophonist and composer Ingrid Laubrock has increasingly gained profile in the music scene, playing a kind of jazz that is modern and bold, but also continues the lines of the tradition. Laubrock is considered one of the most innovative saxophonists in New York. The band Sleepthief combines the London phase of her life – she lived there for almost a decade – with New York, where she now lives. The trio was formed while she was still living in London and playing music with pianist Liam Noble. Also in the trio is the American drummer Tom Rainey, who lives and works with Laubrock in the New York borough of Brooklyn. Sleepthief is a German-British-American band with which Ingrid Laubrock is becoming better and better known internationally. Sleepthief hs released two albums with Intakt and has played at the major international festivals.
The Munich music critic Harry Lachner describes well what they do: “In this trio, music comes into being from streams of sounds and ideas circulating freely around the group. As is often the case in improvised music, this is done with playfulness and with ease, and is based on an ideal vision in which individuals are fundamentally open-minded and receptive. And yet it is the kind of naturalness which can only exist as the result of a serious, determined and unwavering commitment.
Sarah Buechi’s Shadow Garden
Sarah Buechi is a virtuoso singer with a clear, unique identity. The diverse musical materials are drawn into various orbits by the gravitational pull of her strong personality, her distinctive voice, her particular approach to composition and the quality of her texts, often multilayered. Travelling, being on the move has been an important theme for Sarah Buechi. For a year she studied at the renowned Karnataka College of Percussion in Bangalore. At a workshop by the New York saxophonist Steve Coleman in Dublin, where she was working as head of vocal department at the Newpark Music Centre, she discovered a rhythmic concept based on the simultaneous use and overlaying of various different extended metres. Sarah Buechi then went to Ghana, where she studied for a month with the great balafon master Bernard Woma at the Dagara Music and Arts Center in the outskirts of Accra.
Sarah Buechi has distilled these influences and translated them into the language of jazz and pop. Her musicians, the pianist Stefan Aeby, bassist André Pousaz and drummer Lionel Friedli, all shining stars of the young, creative Swiss scene, play across and with these various stylistic idioms. Music indeed, which comes from somewhere or another, with a strong, unique and clear personality.