"First Encounter" captures the rare electricity of a brand-new ensemble discovering itself in real time. The album documents the meeting of trumpeter Amir ElSaffar’s longtime trio—Tomas Fujiwara on drums and Ole Mathisen on tenor saxophone—with Greek pianist Tania Giannouli, whose microtonal and prepared-piano brilliance has made her one of Europe’s most sought-after improvisers. Recorded live at Berlin’s Pierre Boulez Saal and shaped by the hall’s extraordinary acoustics, the music unfolds between near-silence and ecstatic release, driven by ElSaffar’s Chicago-rooted tone, his mastery of Arab Maqam microtonality, and the quartet’s shared intuition.
Across rehearsals, a live concert, and an all-day session, the ensemble explored material ElSaffar wrote only days before—twelve pages of music born from a night of jet-lagged inspiration after hours of improvising and listening with Giannouli at the piano. That immediacy is felt throughout the record. The live concert, performed for a sold-out room, carries the unmistakable magnetism of music being discovered as it’s played; gestures appear almost of their own volition, as if emerging from a shared subconscious. The studio day that followed offered cleaner alternate takes, but the essence—the risk, vulnerability, and shimmering connection—lives in the live performance.
The quartet’s configuration may look traditional at first glance, but its bass-less design opens a wide sonic field. Giannouli’s microtonal resonances, combined with ElSaffar and Mathisen’s blended front line, free the ensemble from fixed harmonic centers, allowing Fujiwara and Giannouli to cultivate intricate rhythmic cycles and polyrhythms. The result is a kind of jazz that feels spacious and ancient, rooted deeply in Maqam while carrying the exploratory charge of the contemporary avant-garde.
The album’s story is also one of persistence. It took three attempts—derailed first by Covid in 2022, then by a sudden pneumonia—for the project to reach the stage. Each postponement stretched the creative tension further until, in 2023, the music landed with a sense of inevitability. What began as a commission from the Pierre Boulez Saal also traces back to ElSaffar’s own history: his time as principal trumpeter under Pierre Boulez with the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, his work with Daniel Barenboim, and his connection to the Barenboim-Said initiatives that ultimately led him toward his Iraqi heritage and the world of Maqam.
“First Encounter” becomes more than a performance—it’s the sound of confluence, of musicians meeting at the crossroads of lived histories, shared listening, and the exquisite acoustics of a hall built for precision and possibility. It is a testament to ElSaffar’s ongoing work bridging jazz, classical rigor, and the ancient modal worlds of the Middle East, and to the deeply individual voices of Fujiwara, Mathisen, and Giannouli. What they discover together feels both newly born and centuries old.
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