Amina Figarova - Edition 113: Persistence

After 20 years at the helm of her acclaimed acoustic sextet, taking her across the globe and onto such renowned stages as the Newport Jazz Festival and New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, pianist Amina Figarova embarks on a bold new chapter with the release of Persistence.

On the album, on her own AmFi Records imprint, the Azerbaijani-born pianist debuts her exploratory new ensemble Edition 113, an electric band grooving somewhere in the sweet spot between jazz fusion, classic R&B, inventive hip-hop and progressive funk. Figarova couldn't have assembled a better band to enliven this thrilling new sound: supplementing her own piano with an array of keyboards, she's joined by guitar great Rez Abbasi (Rudresh Mahanthappa, Kiran Ahluwalia), bassist Yasushi Nakamura (Christian Sands, Toshiko Akiyoshi), drummer Rudy Royston (Bill Frisell, JD Allen) and her partner in music and life, flutist Bart Platteau, who here also wields the EWI (Electronic Wind Instrument).

The album also features guest vocals by singer Paul Jost, rapper JSWISS, and poet/singer Skye's World. Persistence is in one sense a single word autobiography for Figarova. She has forged a fiercely independent path in the music business, from her early aspirations growing up in the former Soviet Union, to pursuing her studies from her native Azerbaijan to Rotterdam and finally to Boston's Berklee College of Music. Wanting the scale and palette of a big band with the flexibility of a small group, she formed her sextet in 1998 and proceeded to craft an utterly unique body of music for the ensemble, which toured extensively for two decades before celebrating it's 20th anniversary in 2018 with the release of Figarova's last album, Road to the Sun.