Home » Jazz Articles » Album Review » Swantje Lampert: Now!

7

Swantje Lampert: Now!

By

Sign in to view read count
Swantje Lampert: Now!
The Austrian tenor saxophonist Swantje Lampert caught the jazz bug relatively late, while studying for a degree in law. She took up the saxophone and, some twenty years later, after graduating from the Vienna Conservatoire and the Berklee School of Music, has matured into an assured player and a characterful composer.

Lampert is an experienced sideperson on the Austrian scene, but Now! appears to be the first album released under her own name. It is a collection of fourteen short pieces performed with bassist Karol Hodas and drummer Christian Eberle. All but three of the tunes are Lampert's, the exception being Herbie Hancock's "Dolphin Dance," Ron Carter's "Little Waltz" and Steve Swallow's "Falling Grace." Most of Lampert's pieces, which are sinewy, skeletal and rhythmically sophisticated, were written for big bands—she has performed with and composed and arranged for the Alexander Ehrenreich Big Band and Vienna Big Band Unit—but they work well in these stripped-down incarnations. The average playing time of each track is around four minutes.

Lampert's sound is reminiscent of Sonny Rollins. It is robust, rough hewn, stays mostly in the low and middle registers and embraces the low-end honks and punctuation marks with which the older player splatters his performances. Lampert's improvising style is less thematic than that of Rollins, though not entirely dissimilar, and she interacts much more closely with her colleagues than he does. Her trio is a group of equals, each tuned into the other two. So interlocked are they that is often impossible to tell when a passage is pre-composed or collectively improvised.

A talented performer who commands attention throughout the album's nigh on sixty minutes, Lampert shows at least as great a gift as a composer. It would be interesting to hear her work on a larger canvas. Meanwhile, this trio album is a debut of which to take serious note.

Track Listing

Now (Flies The Blackbird); Crystal Symmetry; Violet; Hotch Potch; The Mushroom Hunter; Moin Moin; St Aulaye; Dolphin Dance; Looks Like Sand; Cloudburst; Little Waltz; Die 2 Parallelen; Falling Grace; Breathless.

Personnel

Swantje Lampert
saxophone, tenor
Karol Hodas
bass, acoustic

Album information

Title: Now! | Year Released: 2021 | Record Label: Alessa Records Jazz & Art

Comments

Tags


For the Love of Jazz
Get the Jazz Near You newsletter All About Jazz has been a pillar of jazz since 1995, championing it as an art form and, more importantly, supporting the musicians who create it. Our enduring commitment has made "AAJ" one of the most culturally important websites of its kind, read by hundreds of thousands of fans, musicians and industry figures every month.

You Can Help
To expand our coverage even further and develop new means to foster jazz discovery and connectivity we need your help. You can become a sustaining member for a modest $20 and in return, we'll immediately hide those pesky ads plus provide access to future articles for a full year. This winning combination will vastly improve your AAJ experience and allow us to vigorously build on the pioneering work we first started in 1995. So enjoy an ad-free AAJ experience and help us remain a positive beacon for jazz by making a donation today.

More

What Was Happening
Bobby Wellins Quartet
Laugh Ash
Ches Smith
A New Beat
Ulysses Owens, Jr. and Generation Y

Popular

Eagle's Point
Chris Potter
Light Streams
John Donegan - The Irish Sextet

Get more of a good thing!

Our weekly newsletter highlights our top stories, our special offers, and upcoming jazz events near you.