LDL (Leimgruber - Demierre - Lehn) - in the endless wind (Wide Ear, 2024)

By Eyal Hareuveni

The trio LDL - Swiss soprano sax player Urs Leimgruber and pianist Jacques Demierre and German EMS analog synth player and sound processing - emerged from the trio LDP - Leimgruber, Demierre and American double bass master Barre Philips - that worked for twenty years until its last concert in 2021 (Last Concert In Europe (At The Space Lucerne), Jazzwerkstatt, 2022). But the collaboration of Leimgruber, Demierre and Lehn has deeper roots, in the sextet SIX -later called 6ix, in the addition of Lehn to LDP (Willisau, Jazzwerkstatt, 2019), or the duos of Leimgruber with Lehn (Lausanne, For4Ears, 2009) and Demierre (It Forgets About The Snow, Creative Works, 2021).

in the endless wind is the debut album of the LDL trio, recorded at the Loft in Cologne in October 2023. The unique instrumentation - a juxtaposition of two keyboard instruments - the acoustic piano and the vintage analog synth, both technically coupled with each other for mutual sound processing - with the anchoring soprano sax of Urs Leimgruber at the center of the sound image leads to a poetic free improvisation based on deep listening, with trust and confidence, and enjoying the extensive experience of these idiosyncratic improvisations.

The four improvisations suggest highly imaginative and nuanced sound spaces - musical events of the individual and collective creative processes where every sound counts, and often LDL alternates between disrupting the space with chaotic and stormy dynamics or emptying the space into almost spiritual stillness, as it explores its way into enigmatic sonic transformations and spells. Or when LDL uses the space in which the creative act took place, including its acoustic qualities and the space-transforming presence of the audience. Leimgruber, Demierre and Lehn create austere and introspective, mysterious and highly immersive textures where the whispering sounds of the soprano sax resonate and sing with the otherworldly, vintage synth and with the touches on the piano keyboard. Often these individual universes gravitate into one magical sonic entity.

The motto of LDP was stop playing but don’t stop listening, a paraphrase of Henry Threadgill saying: stop playing but don’t stop the music. LDL expands this aesthetics. Listening is a statement, as the action of playing. Because LDL - like LDP - does not listen to something, it listens. Listening is the act and LDL produces listening. And what a masterful, poetic lesson in listening it is.