Rebeka Rusjan Zajc - Prelude

2024

With her extraordinary debut album, Prelude, young Slovenian pianist Rebeka Rusjan Zajc (now residing in Amsterdam), announces herself as a precocious new talent, already forging her own distinctive art language, navigating the bountiful margins between non-idiomatic improvisation, jazz and classical music.
Across this disc’s sole extended piece, ‘Illusion’, she marshals a dynamic carnival of boundless extemporisation, full of instinctive runs and dramatically tumbling rubato, vivid constellations initiated in the imagination hyperdrive of her striking real-time composition. Passages of impish scherzo conjure fantastical images of surreal painted bestiaries, while converging notes rush like snaking rapids across the clashing rocks of atonalism. Evocative and oozing energy, this beguiling music clamours for allegory, voraciously fuelling fictional chimeras on its virtuosic feasts.
Prelude marks both an auspicious beginning and significant whistle-stop, a timely mustering of pooled practices, techniques and theories, its deftly weaved patterns and starry pointillism heralding an exciting new name in jazz. Rebeka Rusjan Zajc: dream weaver.