Julia Holter & Strings / Steve Lehman Octet / Eve Risser’s White Desert Orchestra

A singer-songwriter who approaches her music with the sensibility of a jazz musician, Julia Holter was born in Los Angeles in 1984 and attended a high school specialising in music before studying composition at the California Institute of Arts and singing with Pandit Pashupati Nath Mishra in Varanasi, India. She plays piano, organ, harpsichord and drums, and has released four albums, the first of which appeared in 2011 and the most recent, “Have You in My Wilderness”, in 2015, her audience increasing in size and enthusiasm with each step. There is a theatrical quality to her presentation, but it never obscures the intelligence of her songs or the flexibility of the musicianship behind the arrangements that support them. Exclusively for Jazzfest Berlin she will be adding several Berlin-based musicians to her regular quintet.
www.juliashammasholter.com

Born in New York City in 1978, the saxophonist and composer Steve Lehman can be heard in many formats, none of them more striking than the octet exploring the tonal theories to which he was exposed while studying the music of Olivier Messiaen in France. But the complexity of those theories, which lie behind the contemporary idiom known as “spectral music”, never obscures the emotional punch of Lehman’s absorbing compositions, providing inspiring settings not only for his own agile improvisations but for those of such fine soloists as Mark Shim and Jonathan Finlayson. “One of the transforming figures of early 21st century jazz,” according to the “Guardian”, Lehman was named No 1 jazz artist and No 1 alto saxophonist in the 2015 critics’ poll of “Down Beat” magazine, which also awarded five stars to the octet’s most recent album, “Mise en Abîme”.
www.stevelehman.com

A graduate of France’s Orchestra National du Jazz, with whom she recorded albums dedicated to the music of Robert Wyatt and Astor Piazzolla, the pianist and composer Eve Risser was born in Colmar in 1982. She studied classical flute and improvised music in Strasbourg before moving to Paris, where she formed the 11-piece White Desert Orchestra in 2015, recruiting friends from the Paris Conservatoire to play the music written for her final exams. Among her priorities, she told “London Jazz News” before the first public performance, was to achieve “a balance between masculine and feminine energies.” What she also achieves is a fascinating balance between composition and improvisation. About her own contribution, she said: “I throw myself in front of the public, completely exposed.”
www.everisser.com