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Press / Liberated Gesture Album

The album is most notable for the vibraphonist’s unpredictable compositions, the originality of her playing and the consistently stimulating interplay - Downbeat ★★★★

 

The lucid economy of Yuhan Su’s solos is the best thing about her music - Wire Magazine 

 

Vivid imagination and terrific control of sound - Jazzwise 

 

By the time fourth track ‘Didion’ comes along, you start to get a sense of where the winding paths have taken you. It’s a transformative moment. Stunning actually. - Bandcamp, Best Jazz of the Month.

Sublime balance between the emotional and the cerebral endows the work with its enchanting impressionism. This recording is definitely a high point in her uniformly superb career. - All About Jazz ★★★★

 

Straddling the worlds of both avant-garde and straight-ahead jazz. Yuhan is pursuing a greater synesthetic and narrative vision in her music - Hot House 

 

Consistent gifts for composing and playing, and offers an accomplished example of contemporary small-group jazz - New York City Jazz Record 

 

Su commands this quintet with brilliancy, interspersing unflinching composed parts and free-spirited interplay in a bold yet accessible session that deserves recognition. - Jazz Trail ★★★★

 

Yuhan Su and her music are well worth to spend quality time with - Nettavisen 

Relevation! - Jazz Magazine, France

 

Su takes her rightful place amongst the other jazz vibraphonists currently making waves. Her high-energy acrobatics maximize the exhilarating effect of the performances - Textura

 

This is an ambitious work that will be the next starting point for Yuhan Su, who has broken new ground with her composing during the pandemic. - Jazz Life (Japan)

Fearless, fluid, liberating and beautiful. Magical even. - La Soir (France)

Remarkable not only as a player but also as a composer - Taiwan Beats

Vijay Iyer & Friends: Celebrate the music of Andrew Hill 

A true honor and fabulous time performed with pianist and composer Vijay Iyer, drummer Nasheet Waits, the living legend Reggie Workman, flutist Nicole Mitchell, trumpet player Milena Casado, saxophonist Mark Shim, and bassists Devon Gates,at Harlem Stage. 

Ucross Residency

In February 2024, Yuhan spent one month in Ucross foundation in Wyoming, USA to work on her new project Two Moons, a set of Octet music reflected on her double consciousness and overlapping cultural experiences and memories between countries and languages. 

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Downbeat Magazine Feature 

Thank you Alexa Peters for a great interview published in February 2024 , Downbeat.

 

'According to Su, this language felt more conducive to the overarching concept she was going for on Liberated Gesture: “I wanted to find the freedom within the given limitations. For example, there are different mixed meters, there are some atonal harmonies, and then different elements in the compositions. So, then, how you [create with] maximum freedom [and] fly through?” '

Read more: https://downbeat.com/news/detail/yuhan-sus-liberation-suite1

New Album Liberated Gesture
November 10th 2023 Sunnyside Records

Featuring

Yuhan Su on vibraphone

Caroline Davis on saxophone 

Matt Mitchell on piano

Marty Kenney on bass

Dan Weiss on drums

Recorded at Big Orange Sheep, Brooklyn, NY (2022.May.17th)

Recorded by: Michael Perez-Cisneros

Recording Assistants: Kevin Thomas, Alon Benjamini

Mixing. Mastering: David Torn

Editing: Brian Montgomery

Producer: Yuhan Su

Liner Notes to Yuhan Su’s Liberated Gesture

by Kevin Sun

 

“The first and most important thing is to remain free, free in each line you undertake, in your ideas and in your political action, in your moral conduct. The artist especially must remain free from all outer constraint. Everything we feel deeply must be expressed.” – Hans Hartung, in a 1974 interview with German art critic Heidi Bürklin for Cimaise magazine 

 

* * *

 

Freedom, constraint, expression, intuition. 

 

These concepts are foundational not only to music, but also to the arts and civil society at large. On this fourth and latest album, Yuhan Su lights her own path toward a deeper conception of these formidable higher order concerns while always enfolding the human touch in her music. 

 

As the collected songs on Liberated Gesture demonstrate, Su draws from the spectra of her experience, from the quotidian to the idiosyncratic, in this tenaciously designed program of music: the dismaying reality of consumer electronics, perceptions of literature and visual art, cherished memories of singular evenings.

 

Su, an improvising vibraphonist who wields her classically-trained facility with subtlety and purposefulness, convenes an enviable band of musical thinkers for this recording: alto saxophonist Caroline Davis, pianist Matt Mitchell, bassist Marty Kenney, and drummer Dan Weiss. A good bandleader makes sure that their sidepersons are heard to best advantage, and Su shares the spotlight with her bandmates without ever compromising her own musical vision.

 

In a recent interview with The Jazz Gallery’s Jazz Speaks blog, Su mentions being particularly impressed while studying the powerful color and energy of Hans Hartung’s painted line and admiring his embrace of intuition and the moment. These are valuable qualities not only for an abstract painter, but also for anybody who values graceful navigation of the everyday, and this music bears the unmistakable traces of an artist animated by these same principles.

 

Words on the Music

 

Inspired by the premature death of an iPhone, “Hi Tech Pros and Cons” drops us immediately into a propulsive backbeat groove with surprising shifts of accents. The upbeat mood also evokes an absurdly protracted staring contest: who will flinch first? Davis’s lyrical alto counterpoises the jagged rhythmic architecture, with a searching improvisation that confidently unfolds from the fabric of the composition. The fearsome counterpoint of the rhythm section takes on a different, more transparent cast when Su steps into the foreground.

 

“Character” is anthemic of Brooklyn modern jazz with a post-M-Base feel: atonal and angular, with a driving pulse and complex meter. Su solos first in highly chromatic fashion. Mitchell reflects and echoes Su’s upper register reports, entering in characteristically slippery and imperturbable fashion. He digs in, fragments, and unspools, pixelating his own ideas with varying degrees of rhythmic dissonance and resolution. The pace relaxes with “Naked Swimmer,” which harkens to a quiet midnight dip into a cold lake in east Taiwan. This opens with stark solo piano and dramatic chiaroscuro simultaneities of high and low, backlit with glassy shadings of vibraphone. Kenney comes to the forefront with a warm, plaintive expression over a minor mode before a building romantic episode for the whole ensemble. Su displays her orchestrational prowess here with a melody distributed across octaves and enveloping clouds of pitches that astonish through their artful diffusion. 

 

“Didion” pays homage to the great writer and her iconic work on grieving, The Year of Magical Thinking. Weiss delivers a bracingly immediate septuplet groove that surges alongside the melody stated by saxophone and vibraphone. Mitchell improvises a quicksilver exposition on the song’s harmonic frame, his a fluent, percolating solo completed by Weiss’s flowing time and Kenney’s bedrock playing. Davis’s centered alto emerges over a reef of crystalline chords, lending an impressionistic melodic contrast to the propulsive rhythm section. The final episode deserves special attention and ends in rapid dissolution.

 

On “She goes to a silent war,” Davis intones a haunting, continually relevant poem by Su over suspended vibraphone chords. When the full quintet enters, the mood recalls the best of ’70s jazz like Clifford Jordan’s epochal Glass Bead Games: wistful but not melodramatic, painted with waves of color and soul. In an alarming shift of mood, “Siren Days” transposes unending ambulance sirens from the early days of the pandemic lockdown into its opening piano call. This is a study in unremitting tension, with a balletic opening improvisation by Su followed by a dovetailing saxophone and piano. Weiss steps forward briefly for a cross stick-forward solo, with variations on an idea developed around the kit recalling while reaching beyond the titular siren. 

 

The album’s eponymous centerpiece, movements II–IV of the “Liberated Gesture” suite, begins with solo piano on “The Arc,” with complex, taxonomically-resistant chords that bear a discernible motivic shape and trajectory. A slow ensemble chorale follows before a transition into a softly swinging jazz waltz featuring Su. “Tightrope Walk” begins with a solo drum meditation on overtones and resonance, followed by a devilishly complex dance whose thorny rhythms bring out the best in Mitchell. “Hartung’s Light” closes the suite, with a melody and atmosphere conveying the airy, vaulted space and light of a modernist cathedral. Kenney’s grounded playing counterbalances the rarefied harmony before a jauntily swinging-ish improvisation by Mitchell.

 

In a nod to the album’s beginning, Su lets us off gently with the groovy rock beat and electric bass line of “Hassan’s Fashion Magazine.” We witness pianistic ripples at warp speed through this tonally abstract but funky romp, a play of variations on density. Fade to close.

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October 27th at The Jazz Gallery

Yuhan Su  Liberated Gesture 

The Jazz Gallery

1158 Broadway 5th floor, New York

7:30 pm / 9:30 pm 

https://www.jazzgallery.org/

Yuhan Su on vibraphone

 Alex LoRe on saxophone 

Matt Mitchell on piano

Marty Kenney on bass

Dan Weiss on drums.

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New album in making

In May 2022, Yuhan recorded her 4th album Liberated Gesture with a stellar band featuring Matt Mitchell on piano, Caroline Davis on saxophone, Marty Kenney on bass and Dan Weiss on drums. The session took place at Big Orange Sheep in Brooklyn, NY. The project is being mixing and mastering by David Torn. 

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ZB•YU•RA Trio

Am experimental/electric trio featuring Yuhan Su on Vibraphone and Synth, Zbigniew Chojnacki on Accordion and live-electronics, and Ramon Prats on Drums.

 

Next concert will be on November 16th at Jazzycolor Festival in Paris, France.  

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Yuhan Su European Tour 2022 Fall

Sep 8 Firenze Jazz Festival (Italy) 

Sep 14 Banyoles (Spain) 

Sep 15 Perpignan (France) 

Sep 16 Mercat de Musica Viva Festival  (Spain) 

Sep 17 Jamboree Jazz Club (Spain) 

Sep 18 Girona Auditorium (Spain) 

Sep 19 Robadors 23 (Spain) 

Sep 21 Jimmy Glass Jazz Club (Spain) 

Sep 22 Milano Jazz Club (Spain) 

Sep 24 Stadtgarten (Germany) 

Sep 25 Lokalharmonie (Germany) 

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