| World Jazz |
A Dazzling Collision of Jazz, Classical and World Music, Fabia Mantwill’s “IN.SIGHT” Is a Visionary Leap Into the Future of Orchestral Sound.
A beguiling blend of jazz, world music, and classical tradition, IN.SIGHT is an album that entrances from its very first notes. What’s truly remarkable, though, is how this intricate musical architecture, featuring dazzling arrangements and an expansive palette of textures, remains deeply accessible to a wide audience. This is no small feat. But perhaps it should come as no surprise, considering the artistic force behind the project: Berlin-based composer, conductor, and saxophonist Fabia Mantwill, a young polymath whose talents appear boundless.
Germany has long been a fertile ground for prodigious musicians, and Mantwill continues that tradition with a voice that is entirely her own. Yet what stuns here is the maturity and assurance of her second album, a release that, by all accounts, should have been harder to bring into the world than her first. After all, the “sophomore slump” is a well-known artistic hazard. But Mantwill defies that trope with IN.SIGHT, an album so audacious, so vividly realized, it suggests an artist not only finding her footing but sprinting toward something grander.
The project brings together the 32-piece Fabia Mantwill Orchestra, featuring six extraordinary soloists and three acclaimed composers. With collaborators of this caliber, including artists like Vince Mendoza, Kurt Elling, and Becca Stevens, it might have been tempting to lean into formality or academic rigor. Instead, Mantwill chose surrender. “I quickly realized the only way to make this work was to let go, to trust the process and let the music lead me,” she explains. “Once I made that decision, everything fell into place.”
And it shows. The album moves with the cinematic sweep of a major film score, pulsing with drama and color. One could imagine a decadent 21st-century James Bond stepping through the lush orchestrations, rescuing heroines from nefarious villains in slow motion. Each track passes in a flash, yet leaves the impression of an epic. There is grandeur here, but also intimacy.
Amazingly, the six core compositions were written in just 72 hours, during an intense collaborative session with Michael League, founder of the Grammy-winning group Snarky Puppy, and Greek composer Magdalini Giannikou. That such a compressed timeline could produce work this refined seems implausible, and yet the result is breathtaking: intuitive in structure, emotionally candid, and rich with multidimensional nuance.
Mantwill’s orchestrations are both deeply modern and rooted in a rare tradition of narrative composition. Each piece is built around a featured soloist, whose voice becomes the emotional axis of the work. On Fairy Glen, the ethereal guitar of Kurt Rosenwinkel floats with effortless grace. On Whirl The Wheel, Roosevelt Collier‘s pedal steel glides with incandescent fervor, illuminating the track with streaks of sonic light. The clarinet of Anat Cohen brings a meditative warmth to Olhos, while Momi Maiga on kora, Goran Stevanovich on accordion, and Morris Kliphuis on French horn dissolve stylistic boundaries, drawing from disparate musical traditions to forge something entirely new.
This is orchestral music as dreamscape, lush, immersive, and alive with unexpected turns. It invites listeners into a parallel world, one seen through the wide eyes of a child, where surprise is the rule and beauty hides in every corner. Solos emerge as if conjured by magic, then slip seamlessly into a dense forest of instrumentation that never quite reveals its final destination.
The result is not just beautiful, it is elegant, visionary, and deeply moving. IN.SIGHT stands as a landmark in contemporary European creativity, a thrilling example of what happens when boundaries are discarded and imagination reigns. More than a collection of songs, this album is a journey. And it may well come to be remembered as a defining moment in the evolution of 21st-century orchestral music.
Thierry De Clemensat
Member at Jazz Journalists Association
USA correspondent for Paris-Move and ABS magazine
Editor in chief – Bayou Blue Radio, Bayou Blue News
PARIS-MOVE, June 5th 2025
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Musicians :
Fabia Mantwill – composition & arrangement & voice & saxophone
Jochen Neuffer – conductor
Violins: Anne-Sophie Bereuter,Luiza Labouriau, Marit Behnke, Annabelle Dugast, Julia Czerniawska, Almut Wolfart, Johanna Hempen, Valerie Leopold, Leonie Flaksman, Christina Döring, Çiğdem Tunçelli
Violas: Alexina Hawkins, Marc Kopitzki, Yağmur Atagür, Johann-Vincent Slawinsk
Cellos: Liron Yariv, Tabea Schrenk, Mireia Peñalver
Tilmann Dehnhard – flutes & alto sax
Matthew Halpin – tenor sax & flute & clarinet
Daniel Buch – baritone sax & bass clarinet
Jo Hermans – trumpet & flugel
Johannes Böhmer – trumpet& flugel
Jan Landowski – trombone
Tobias Herzog – bass trombone & tuba
Teresa Emilia Raff – harp
David Soyza – vibraphone & marimba
Charis Karantzas – guitar
Igor Spallati – bass
Marcio Doctor – percussion
Fabian Rösch – drums
Guest Soloists:
Kurt Rosenwinkel – guitar
Anat Cohen – clarinet
Roosevelt Collier – lap steel guitar
Momi Maiga – kora
Goran Stevanovich – accordion
Morris Kliphuis – french horn
Tracklist :
Satoyama
Whirl the Wheel
Circular
Sleeping Giant
Olhos
Fairy Glen