Ingrid Laubrock - Purposing the Air (2025) [Hi-Res]

I grew up in a literary household with parents who paid close attention to the written word. My father was a Goethe scholar, and my mother often read to us, pointing out the beauty of the sound of words. I have always felt an affinity for poetry. I appreciate its emotional power to move us and to make us think less literally.

Miles Davis stressed the importance of knowing the lyrics to standards, and I’ve always believed that understanding the meaning of the words provides an added dimension when improvising over them.

In my formative years as a musician in London, my first band was Nóis 4, a collaboration that included Brazilian singer Mônica Vasconcelos. We played original songs as well as our arrangements of works by Brazilian masters. Mônica is a journalist and a great lyricist in her own right, and she only sang songs whose lyrics she loved. We often discussed the meaning of the words, and I learned Portuguese to delve deeper into the music.

I prefer playing original music by living composers and composing for musicians I know personally. When choosing the text for this project, I decided to follow the same approach. I met Erica Hunt at a party in 2019, and we had a fascinating conversation about her poetry. So her work immediately came to mind when I started looking for a text for this project. The poem, “Mood Librarian - a poem in koan’ in Erica’s collection Jump the Clock stood out to me. It’s a collection of sixty micro poetic fragments—cryptic, intuitively relatable, sometimes funny, and, true to the nature of koans, open-ended.

I began setting the words to music in February 2021 as part of a master’s degree in composition. The first duo I composed for was Duo Cortona: mezzo-soprano Rachel Calloway and violinist Ari Streisfeld. I initially found this instrumentation daunting, as I thought the limited low range and polyphonic possibilities would be a challenge. However, I discovered that the violin has nearly limitless orchestration potential, and working with musicians of Rachel’s and Ari’s caliber revealed rich possibilities. Once I had composed a handful of pieces for Duo Cortona, the seed for the rest of the album was planted.

Fay Victor - voice
Mariel Roberts - cello

Sara Serpa - voice
Matt Mitchell - piano

Theo Bleckmann -voice
Ben Monder - electric guitar

Duo Cortona:
Rachel Calloway - voice
Ari Streisfeld - violin