Emotional reactions to the pandemic have had a big impact on artistic output in the last two years – but new music for 2022 is different. These albums were conceived and recorded in a time of relief and cautious optimism, as lockdowns lifted. And that delicate, hopeful spirit is at the heart of Release by Lisbeth Quartett.

The band is led by multi-award-winning saxophonist and composer Charlotte Greve. It features Manuel Schmiedel on piano, Marc Muellbauer on bass and Moritz Baumgärtner on drums. They started playing together in 2009 and Release is their fifth album.

“We did a streaming gig in lockdown and it was really special,” says Greve. “Everything felt so connected, even though we hadn’t performed together for a couple of years. I started thinking… let’s keep it going, let’s make another record. But what feels honest and genuine? What’s our strength?”

Swamps

One major strength of the compositions on Release is their meandering, exploratory character. On Bayou, a simple rhythm underpins a wormy melody. Baumgärtner’s percussive textures resist and wriggle. As the mood starts to settle, the song reinvents itself. The bass hums over balladic piano chords and a lounging, laidback attitude emerges. Greve adds violin-ish long tones. The band builds to a yearning and aspirational climax, before the song’s original pattern returns like a half-forgotten memory.

“I was thinking about the swamps in Louisiana, raw and rough,” Greve says. “But then there’s a cut, where we go into a totally different thing, like opening another door.”

Mountains

The title track is another highlight. It starts with foreboding shapes and sounds from each instrument. Slowly, the sun rises and darkness recedes. Even difficult things are possible. The musicians hurry in different directions, teetering on the edge of the harmonic frame. Then a final passage opens up, the sax out of breath from the climb but gazing wide-eyed from the mountain top.

Wildflowers

Release is an open-hearted album by an open-minded and open-eared group of musicians. Greve’s compositions conjure waves of sound, while her saxophone voice evokes birdsong at daybreak. Lisbeth Quartett have created a record that resonates with hard-won freedom, like wildflowers pressing upwards through the last winter frost. The nectar is fresh and pure.

“Some of these songs are wide open,” Greve says. “That’s what naturally comes out when I think about the beauty of playing music with very little info on the page, just connecting with the band to lift something bigger than the composition itself. We know how to lift it together, without talking. And that’s a unique feeling that only happens with a lot of musical trust.”

https://www.freejazzblog.org/2022/08/lisbeth-quartett-release-intakt-2022.html

Release marks the anticipated return of the German Lisbeth Quartett to the studio albums, 13 years after its debut, Grow (Double Moon Records, 2009), and ceasing a five-year hiatus since its latest release, There is Only Make (Traumton Records, 2017). This work, the first for the European Intakt label, generates more elegance than turbulence through eight impeccably written pieces - seven by saxophonist Charlotte Greve and one by bassist Marc Muellbauer - that gain an extraordinary poetic nature in the hands of four musical narrators.

“Full Circling” is an impassively quiet solo-less piece whose mantric roundness purposely eschews heaviness. The next two tracks demand close listening. “Bayou” is an old song, revisited with a drum recital upfront. Comfortable behind the kit, Moritz Baumgärtner keeps his thing going after pianist Manuel Schmiedel echoes a 12-beat-cycle piano figure with class and groove. Saxophonist and bassist function in parallel, but it all shifts in texture and tempo with astonishing candor. There’s solo piano introspection before Greve’s heartfelt statement announces the curtain-close of a journey that suddenly returns to a streamlined rhythm in the last 30 seconds. Then it's Muellbauer’s “Le Mistral” that arrives, almost touching on a medieval troubadourism and expanding with incisive chordal work, pulsing bass lines that feel as loose as gripping, and tight complex lines delivered in unison by piano and saxophone. A magnetic alto solo with significant discursive range is brought before the main theme.

The emaciated “Ellipsis” spreads both emotional honesty and intimacy, trailed by a beautiful melody that sails across the enchanting accompaniment with lightness. It includes elementary bass pedals, cymbal scintillation, and modal piano intersections characterized by harmonic nuance. With “Arrow”, the trio shows some rhythmic bite, pressurizing the atmosphere with a rock-hard collective commitment, fine solos, and an exciting finale.

Before the short, intangible “Outro” that concludes this strong body of work, there’s the title track, which has Baumgärtner weaving exquisite details and throwing syncopated responses against the serene instrumentation that surrounds him. The last third of the song welcomes an insistent bass pulsation that doesn’t spoil the appealing nature of the song.

This quartet synthesizes their influences in an original way, and the result is a strangely affecting album to be savored many times with a guarantee of newly discovered elements at each listening.

https://jazztrail.net/blog/lisbeth-quartett-release-album-review