With a distinguished career that has covered a lot of ground between jazz, improvisation and composition, Germany’s Ingrid Laubrock is part of a kind of symbiotic arrangement with the expansive work of musicians such as Anthony Braxton or Tyshwan Sorey – with whom she has collaborated, of course – in that, in addition to her marked virtues on the instrument, she has extended her language beyond it, courageously assuming composition as a natural and continuous act of expression. ‘Vogelfrei’, a magnanimous piece for orchestra, soloists and choir, included in 2018’s “Contemporary Chaos Practices” is a major affirmation of this same will, never seen as the crowning achievement of a body of work – not least because it is still and always under construction – but as another decisive step. A saxophonist with a particular fondness for the tenor, Laubrock has been recording regularly since the mid-1990s, both as a leader and in collaborative recordings, playing in various formations with artists such as Mary Halvorson, Peter Evans or Tom Rainey, leaving a luminous trail of his blowing, full of rigour but open to equally intuitive and beautiful solutions, in countless editions, particularly through Intakt, and appearances that always have a lot to say. BS