Masha Art & LRK Trio - Anesthesia

Sparkling modern jazz, from talented Russian quintet, on the always intriguing Losen Records label.

This is a joint album called "Anesthesia" that was recorded in Moscow by saxophonist Maria Artemenko, performing under the name Masha Art and LRK Trio; Yevgeny Lebedev - piano, Anton Revnyuk - bass and Ignat Kravtsov - drums. Harp player Maria Kulakova also took part in the recording of five of the seven tracks of the album.

The album continues the line of collaboration between the Moscow LRK Trio and the Norwegian label Losen Records, which has already released two albums by LRK Trio- If You Have A Dream (2017) and Urban Dreamer (2018). However, in creative terms, this new release makes an unexpected turn, because although the cover of the album shows "Masha Art and LRK Trio" in equal size, all the music is nevertheless written by Masha, and LRK Trio appears rather as interpretive, analytical power. This force is not opposed to the soloist, but co-creates with her. The trio playing gives new features to the sad, cold or at times frankly yearning musical images from the author of the music: rationalism, confidence, contemplation - and besides, they provide a rhythmic and timbre binding to modernity.

The LRK Trio as usual, does not chew on the usual rhythms and proven sounds of the irrevocable past, but plays the one hundred percent twenty-first century, with the end of it's second decade. This is the music of today's technocratic civilization, not created by machine algorithms, as is often the case now, but by live musicians. Even one might say, underlined alive. Moreover, they did not memorize the notes written by the arranger, but in a continuous stream improvise the living musical fabric in which the author of the music, the saxophonist, is brought to the fore when her saxophone is played. It is temporarily dissolved in the trio's sound landscapes when the LRK Trio play ensemble episodes, often dramaturgically contrasting to the thematic part of the pieces.