Flying Letters by SARAH BUECHI with Stefan Aeby, André Pousaz, Lionel Friedli

Intakt CD 229

Sarah Buechi's debut on Intakt Records has a clear, unique identity. The diverse musical contents 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 a very existential significance for the Swiss singer Sarah Buechi. For a year she studied at the renowned Karnataka College of Percussion in Bangalore. In Paris she took lessons with Médéric Collignon. At a workshop by the New York saxophonist Steve Coleman in Dublin, where she was now 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 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.