The saxophonist Sakina Abdou follows up her first solo album with this trio release, which has all the freshness of a very first encounter.The album is the fruit of an improvised, closed session of several days in her home, punctuated by two concerts, and offers an arc of 60 minutes that retraces a musical itinerary that is intimate and acoustic. We have previously heard Toma Gouband with Evan Parker and the pianist Marta Warelis with Dave Douglas and Andy Moor. Sakina Abdou first played with Gouband in Will Guthrie’s gamelan ensemble Nist-Nah, and Warelis in the frenetic Amsterdam improvisational collective Doek. 

With this archetypal line-up and a singular history, this wide variation already gives us a taste of the vast, mysterious and unimagined musical territory they will explore together, as well as the wide range of influences and possible references that can be generated at any moment in a space that pushes this many boundaries. Surrounded by the astral touch of the Polish pianist and the vegetal strokes of the French percussionist, the saxophonist released her first trio album in the fall of 2024 on the New York label Relative Pitch Records, who offered her a second “carte blanche.” The music is free and invented on the edge, breaking down improvised themes, exploring the idea of collective play as if caressing a torn canvas, celebrating the idea of a fabric woven from bits and pieces, shot through with ashes, echoes and ghosts, like a taut thread that binds, connects, stretches and contains multiple stories.

Within a highly acoustic sound and chamber music approach, the ear can discover strong roots and references to jazz but also to minimalism, classical and noise music, precious as relics. Toma Gouband, with his wide ranging drum palette, extended by stones and branches, plays at the heart of the trio in moments, to beat an organic pulse; in other moments, on the periphery to act as a constellation surrounding Sakina Abdou and Marta Warelis to illuminate their performances. The saxophonist and pianist merge marvelously in a rare complicity. We follow them through a tangle of counterpoints and long lines with as much pleasure as they find in their other moments as instrumentalists, soloists or accompanists in the different heritages from whence they come. 

The supple tectonics of these discourses are powerfully evocative. The porosity of all these canvases constantly puts the ear in perspective. It invokes the shared memories of three artists with rich, eclectic influences, and opens onto ever wider, ever larger spaces to create a total, poetic intoxication. The recording thus asserts a sense of accomplished writing and construction while cultivating a lively, spontaneous and organic sound. After a first solo album acclaimed by the international press (The Wire, The Quietus, The New York City Jazz Record, Freistil, We jazz magazine, etc.) Sakina Abdou