SYLVIE COURVOISIER TRIO
SYLVIE COURVOISIER piano
DREW GRESS bass
KENNY WOLLESEN drums
EUROPEAN TOUR, NOVEMBER 12–28, 2027
Latest album: Éclats – Live in Europe
Intakt Records · Released March 27, 2026
Recorded live in Essen, Paris, and Munich.
With every concert and every album this glorious trio's modus operandi becomes more clear – Sylvie Courvoisier, Drew Gress and Kenny Wollesen play morphing music by turns intricately detailed and ambiguously wide open. The music Courvoisier writes is rigorously organized and calls for ensemble precision, as a few thorny unisono heads demonstrate. But the music also harbors a misterioso, dreamlike quality that may surface at any time, induced by a wistful ostinato or moonlit piano arpeggio stubbornly repeated, or by a quiet episode that underscores the depth of the trio's sonic space.
They also do that good stuff we prize jazz for – the happy swing-ing, the coming together when they make complex material sing, and the flying apart when the players explore it on their own. - Kevin Whitehead
“One of the most creative pianists in the downtown scene, Sylvie combines a brilliant technique with a wild imagination that straddles classical, jazz, improvisation and more. Featuring the dynamic rhythm section of Kenny Wollesen and Drew Gress, the music combines the best of improvisation and composition in the classic piano trio format. Fifteen years in the making this is an essential project that highlights an exciting new musical world.” — John Zorn
photo @ogata_photo - 2026
SYLVIE COURVOISIER CHIMAERA
SYLVIE COURVOISIER piano
NATE WOOLEY trumpet
CHRISTIAN FENNESZ electronics
DREW GRESS bass
KENNY WOLLESEN drums
NASHEET WAITS drums
EURO TOUR MARCH 10–21, 2027
If you want to be stunned by a female masterpiece in dark times, listen to this music from a deeper space. It had to be made and will enrich you. Let its reverbs and echoes carry you — unfamiliar yet oddly familiar to the soul.
The opener, “The Red Poppy,” recalled Miles Davis’ “Bitches Brew,” and at times Jon Hassell or David Torn — not direct copies but “Anklänge,” brief resonances. Courvoisier’s lines are lighter, elusive, mystic, shifting between dark and light, mechanical and flowing, gliding shadows and wild bursts. Ambient moments turn surreal, occasionally nightmarish.
Christian Fennesz’s guitar washes and Kenny Wollesen’s vibraphone add to this magical light–sound mood. Composition and performance merge into a continuous whole. Inspired by Odilon Redon’s art — “they place us, as does music, in the ambiguous realness of the un-determined” — the work is bold and brilliant. Released as a double album (2 × 43 minutes), it surely deserves a vinyl edition. - Henning Bolte
Sylvie Courvoisier’s new album, Chimaera, contains the year’s most beautiful music. Inspired by Odilon Redon’s paintings and drawings, and echoing his words about art placing us “in the ambiguous realm of the undetermined,” Courvoisier creates dreamlike textures—swirling, mingling, floating and evaporating—that form their own pictures. —Richard Williams, October 31, 2023
photo Veronique Hoegger 2024
SYLVIE COURVOISIER AMALTHEA
SYLVIE COURVOISIER piano
PATRICIA BRENNAN vibraphone
THOMAS MORGAN acoustic bass
DAN WEISS drums
Debut album Amalthea
Pyroclastic Records, November 13, 2026
Brooklyn-based Swiss-American pianist and composer Sylvie Courvoisier leads Amalthea, her acclaimed quartet featuring vibraphonist Patricia Brennan, bassist Thomas Morgan, and drummer Dan Weiss. Formerly known as Poppy Seeds, the quartet brings together four singular voices from today’s creative music scene.Brennan’s vibraphone expands the group’s harmonic and textural palette, while Morgan and Weiss form a remarkably responsive rhythm section, moving fluidly between propulsive grooves, intricate rhythmic patterns, and open-ended improvisation. At the center, Courvoisier’s distinctive piano language combines explosive energy, unconventional timbres, and a powerful sense of form.Reviewing the group’s performance at JazzFest Berlin in 2024, All About Jazz praised the quartet for giving full rein to Courvoisier’s “propulsive drive” without sacrificing the complexity and risk-taking that make her music so compelling. The review highlighted Brennan’s sparkling, electronically inflected sounds, the rhythmic interplay between Morgan and Weiss, and Courvoisier’s ability to move from rubbed piano sighs and poltergeist knocks to flamboyant crashes and passages of remarkable emotional depth.While the piano, vibraphone, bass, and drums have a distinguished history in jazz, Amalthea explores the possibilities of this instrumentation with a fresh approach to texture, harmony, rhythm, and collective interplay. The group’s name refers to both Amalthea, the nurturing figure in Greek mythology associated with the infant Zeus and the cornucopia of abundance, and Amalthea, one of Jupiter’s moons, which radiates more heat than it receives from the Sun. These associations evoke the quartet’s abundant imagination, creative energy, and ever-evolving musical interplay.— Bradley Bambarger
photo @ogata_photo - 2026
SYLVIE COURVOISIER SOLO
Sylvie Courvoisier piano
Sylvie Courvoisier’s solo work spans a gamut of sonic expression both vast and personal. This is evidenced by the performance she gave in Bremen, Germany before she was presented with the 2022 German Jazz prize in the International piano category:
Sylvie’s musical language draws equally from her deep engagement with the 20th century modernism of composers like Messiaen and Ligeti and creative improvisors like Cecil Taylor and Thelonious Monk. Her fluency working inside the piano with non-invasive techniques and preparations is unmatched and forms an evocative counterpoint with her masterful touch on the keyboard. Of course these aspects are evident in her ensemble work with her long acclaimed trio and the recent piano duo collaboration - Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and her Spectre d’un songe with Cory Smythe. However, nowhere are they more in evidence that in her solo playing. She moves fluidly through her ever growing book of compositions, presented both complete and in fragments and adds sections of open improvisation where anything might occur. Stark, peaceful beauty and startling violence can occur in surprising proximity. At the same time she always seems to weave recurring elements through these forays tying varied sections together to feel ‘of a piece’.
photo @ogata_photo - 2026