Sylvie Courvoisier Trio

Running time: 75 minutes

Sylvie Courvoisier, piano, Drew Gress, double bass, Kenny Wollesen, drums 

With each concert and new album, the vision of this celebrated trio becomes clearer – Sylvie Courvoisier, Drew Gress and Kenny Wollesen play music that is both intricately detailed and ambiguously wide open. The compositions of the celebrated Swiss pianist, a naturalised New Yorker for over twenty years, are rigorously organised, calling for ensemble precision, but the music is also mysterious, dreamy, profound, poignant and spacious. They also do that good stuff that makes us love jazz – the laid-back swinging, the synched playing when they make complex material sing, and the flying apart when the players explore it on their own.  

Winner of Germany’s International Jazz Piano Prize in 2022, Courvoisier has earned renown for balancing two distinct worlds: the richly detailed European chamber music and the grooving, unpredictable and engaging exuberance of the avant-jazz scene in New York City. 
NPR writes “Some pianists approach the instrument like it’s a cathedral. Sylvie Courvoisier treats it like a playground.”

In addition to her long-running trio, she is currently touring jazz festivals around the world with her newest ensemble, Chimaera, a sextet that exudes the ethereal symbolist dreaminess and fantastical images in the paintings of artist Odilon Redon, which inspired Courvoisier in composing music for the project.

The trio released their last two studio albums on the Swiss label Intakt. Their new compositions will be recorded live this coming spring; on a European tour whose first stop is Ljubljana. 

A fresh start for an established trio of jazz greats.

The Cankarjevi torki concerts are available at a discounted price as part of the AD HOC subscription series.