SYLVIE COURVOISIER &
WADADA LEO SMITH
ANGEL FALLS
SYLVIE COURVOISIER piano
WADADA LEO SMITH trumpet
Pianist-composer Sylvie Courvoisier and trumpeter-composer Wadada Leo Smith reunite for Angel Falls, their first duo album released on Intakt Records, followed by a European tour in October 2025. Longtime collaborators, they bring years of shared musical history into an intimate and concentrated dialogue, creating music shaped by deep listening, restraint, and expressive precision.
Hailed by The New York Review of Books as one of America’s “most powerful storytellers,” Smith joins the Swiss-American Courvoisier—praised by The New York Times for her “audacity and poise”—for a milestone collaboration of rare poetic force.
Critics hail Angel Falls as a rare, magical duet. Courvoisier and Smith abandon convention and virtuosity, letting form emerge naturally to create a bold, poetic collaboration built on trust, risk, and decades of shared experience.
photo @ogata_photo - 2026
SYLVIE COURVOISIER/
MARY HALVORSON DUO
SYLVIE COURVOISIER piano
MARY HALVORSON guitar
EUROPEAN TOUR
SEPTEMBER 23 - OCT 3, 2027
Sylvie Courvoisier (piano) and Mary Halvorson (guitar) perform music from their latest release, Bone Bells (Pyroclastic Records, March 2025). Their third album as a duo and an eagerly awaited follow-up to 2021’s Searching for the Disappeared Hour, Bone Bells presents eight new intricate compositions: four by Sylvie and four by Mary. The duo’s telepathic interplay and ferocious intensity is on full display in this magical set of music.
photo Veronique Hoegger 2024
SYLVIE COURVOISIER & CORY SMYTHE DUO
SYLVIE COURVOISIER piano
CORY SMYTHE piano
HOW WE GOT HERE
Sylvie Courvoisier is often viewed as a Jazz pianist because her oeuvre is so fundamentally grounded in her profound skills as an improvisor. However, astute listeners realize quickly that she brings the touch and outlook of classical pianism to her work and indeed, the music of Messiaen, Bach, Ligeti and Stravinsky lie deep in her musical memory bank alongside Monk, Mengelberg, Bley and Taylor.
Sylvie spent 10 years creating and touring with the avant-flamenco dance master Israel Galván on an acclaimed work called La Curva. At one point in the piece Galván would strike a pose with arms raised overhead that reminded Sylvie of Vaslav Nijinsky, the star and choreographer of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. She began to respond as a ‘jazz’ musician might with little quotes from piece. This piqued the dancers’ interest - ‘I know this music, what is it?’. Sylvie revealed Stravinsky’s masterpiece and Galván immediately expressed a wish to do a full project dancing to this music. Courvoisier created a solo version of the first 3 movements of The Rite and they performed it together at the Opera Bastille in Paris and received a strong positive response from Le Monde. However, she was shortly informed that the Stravinsky family would allow no independent arrangements of his work - if a piano version of The Rite was to be performed it must be the master’s original version for piano duet and nothing else.
Rather than reacting with disappointment, this challenge was an exciting prospect for Courvoisier, and she realized that she would need a partner who was an accomplished classical pianist, who could help her with the proper rigor and detail of the piece. This person must also have serious improvisational skill because the plan was to group The Rite with an original work which she would create as a kind of response to it. She discussed the prospect with a close friend, saxophonist and composer Ingrid Laubrock, who immediately suggested Cory Smythe. Fortune smiled on this idea as Smythe had recently completed a run as Hilary Hahn’s accompanist, and was happy to have an additional creative opportunity to work as an improvisor. Sylvie wrote her musical response, Spectre d’un Songe, and was thrilled to find Smythe an equally strong partner in creating a new work as re-envisioning an old one.
Spectre uses primarily idiomatic impressions of The Rite but also specific reharmonization of previous Courvoisier creations in a Stravinsky-like mode of bitonality. In performing and recording these 2 works contiguously an additional subliminal conversation is created between them that manifests itself in dynamic interaction between the performers. In this way the reverberation of a classic masterwork is realized concretely in a present day creation. - Ned Rothenberg
SHORTCUTS
COURVOISIER / ROTHENBERG / WAITS
SYLVIE COURVOISIER piano
NED ROTHENBERG alto saxophone, clarinet
NASHEET WAITS drums
2026 EURO TOUR
OCTOBER 16 - NOVEMBER 1
photo @ogata_photo - 2026
Waits, long one of the most in-demand, pace-setting drummers on the New York scene, is renowned for his rhythmic propulsion and imaginative nuance whether the idiom leans left-of-center or full-on avant-garde. He has collaborated with Jason Moran, Dave Holland and Christian McBride, among myriad others, along with starring in the long-running cooperative trio Tarbaby with pianist Orrin Evans and bassist Eric Revis. Moran, in particular, has commended the fire and flair of Waits at the drumkit, particularly his ability to energize and elevate whatever music he plays, while Jazzwise magazine has highlighted the way his creative dynamism ranges from “whispers to frenzy.” Short Cuts — which has so far ranged from Austria’s Saalfelden Festival to the University of Mexico City (and a broadcast on Mexico’s national TV) — is recording its first album in spring 2025, with tours to follow across South America in November 2025 and Europe in October 2026. Characterizing the group’s appeal, Rothenberg says: “Some bands work off unity of sound, but this band operates with three distinct sound worlds, stylistically and sonically, that interact. Sylvie has a classical sensibility, and I have more of a world-music sensibility, so it’s fun for Nasheet — he can venture into a different vocabulary than with a more typical free-jazz improvising trio. And for the audience, they are sort of eavesdropping on what we hope is an interesting, intimate conversation among three sympathetic artists.” — Bradley Bambarger
Saxophonist/clarinetist Ned Rothenberg, pianist Sylvie Courvoisier and drummer Nasheet Waits — three of New York City’s top improvisers for the past three decades — have convened to form Short Cuts, a collectively led trio informed by the progressive jazz tradition from Ornette to Zorn (not to mention modernist chamber music and cross-cultural approaches). With Short Cuts, abstraction is tempered by earthiness, in the time-honored New York way. Experimental textures meet rhythmic depth, harmonic sophistication abets free-flying lyricism; this all-improvised music grooves and it sings, swerving to avoid cliché all the while. “It feels so natural to improvise with Ned and Nasheet,” Courvoisier says. “They are such beautiful players, and they both love grooves, even in a freely improvised setting. Winds, piano, drums also make for a relatively uncommon trio, but not having a bass player gives Ned and I more room to play in the lower register, just as it gives Nasheet more freedom with his bass drum. And these guys love to take risks, like I do.”
Courvoisier, born and raised in Switzerland but a longtime New Yorker, leads multiple groups, including her trio with bassist Drew Gress and drummer Kenny Wollesen and her electric, atmospheric Chimaera ensemble with guitarist Christian Fennesz, as well as a new quartet, Almathea, featuring vibraphonist Patricia Brennan. Courvoisier also has a long-running duo with guitarist Mary Halvorson, and the pianist’s free-minded duo with trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith will release its debut recording later in 2025. NPR’s Kevin Whitehead has encapsulated Courvoisier’s method in an evocative way: “Some pianists approach the instrument like it’s a cathedral. Sylvie Courvoisier treats it like a playground.” Rothenberg — a virtuoso on clarinet, alto saxophone and shakuhachi flute — has been hailed as a sonic innovator by DownBeat, L.A. Weekly and Boston Globe. Along with being praised by The New York Times for the “near religious focus” in his solo performances, he has collaborated with such artists as Evan Parker, John Zorn, Sainkho Namchylak and Katsuya Yokoyama. Of Rothenberg’s work, Manfred Pabst of the Neue Züricher Zeitung has said: “Other kinds of music might entertain you, cheer you up or pump the blood, but his clarifies the mind and throws your soul wide open.”