Wistfully by Dave Rempis / Elisabeth Harnik / Michael Zerang

"The album, recorded live in Graz, Austria in 2013, features Rempis on alto and tenor sax, Harnik on piano, and Zerang on percussion, yet even this simple listing misrepresents the range of each performer’s contribution." -Lee Rice Epstein, Free Jazz Blog
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This live trio recording was made in the late fall of 2013, and features a first-time grouping of improvisers that had never performed as a unit before, despite their interweaving musical paths. Pianist Harnik first came into contact with her Chicago counterparts at the 2008 Umbrella Music Festival, when both audiences and musicians in the city became immediately enamored with her unique and wide-ranging approach to her instrument based on her Chicago Cultural Center performance. In the years after, she began ongoing collaborations with Rempis and Zerang, performing separately with them in both the U.S. and Europe.

In the fall of 2013, Rempis and Zerang had just finished a week in Krakow, Poland, working with Ken Vandermark’s Resonance Ensemble. They continued on to perform as a duo at concerts in Warsaw and Vienna, before meeting Harnik in her hometown of Graz, Austria to explore this first-time trio grouping at a well-known concert venue called WIST. Happily, Austrian National Radio (ORF) got wind of the occasion, and decided to make a recording for live broadcast, a document presented here.

While fans of the music might imagine that all three of these strong voices contribute equally to the proceedings, they wouldn’t be incorrect. However it’s Harnik’s jaw-dropping ability to reconfigure the entire sound of her piano from one piece to the next that shapes each of these six improvisations into individual alien landscapes all their own. Deploying an incredible range of timbres from full-throated, lush chords, to the clanging, metallic tones of an Indonesian gamelan, Harnik deftly manipulates her instrument to paint the backgrounds on which Rempis and Zerang then build.