| Jazz moderne |
To describe this work merely as a jazz album would be to misread its intent and misunderstand its scope. It is, more accurately, a conceptual and poetic meditation that situates itself somewhere between the structural rigor of Béla Bartók and the spiritual architecture of Olivier Messiaen.
Here, the voice, far from a vehicle of expression in the conventional sense, becomes a questioning force, a sonic gesture aimed at unsettling rather than consoling. The notes, as they ascend into the air, seem less to entertain than to provoke thought, to disturb the inertia of intellectual comfort, to dissolve the boundaries that habitually separate genres, disciplines, and modes of perception. What emerges is a work grounded in an undeniable form, or perhaps more precisely, a form that carries the resonance of a foundation, one as poetically elusive and emotionally charged as Paul Auster’s “Lulu on the Bridge”.
There is, throughout this project, a distinct sense of urgency: the urgency to create, to risk, to surrender control to the unknown, and to float within it. It is a music of resistance to ease, a deliberate refusal of the ornamental and the familiar. To listen is to engage in an act of deep attention, an intellectual exercise that demands cultural literacy as much as emotional openness. This is not music for the casual listener; it requires a readiness to confront complexity and to inhabit ambiguity.
The album unfolds as a dialogue between original compositions by Sara Serpa and Matt Mitchell, and their settings of texts by writers and poets Sonia Sanchez, Sofia de Mello Breyner, Virginia Woolf, and Luce Irigaray. Added to this is a luminous reinterpretation of Messiaen’s “Les Bergers”, a piece whose sacred stillness finds new resonance in Serpa’s vocal transparency and Mitchell’s harmonic density. The result is an immersive sonic landscape, intricate, daring, and harmonically rich, where voice and piano engage in a constant negotiation between structure and dissolution.
The artistic rapport between Serpa and Mitchell did not arise by accident. Their creative partnership began in 2018, within the framework of Serpa’s *Intimate Strangers* project. From the outset, Serpa recalls, there was a rare sense of trust and alignment. “From the very beginning, I knew I could rely on Matt,” she says. “I never feared losing myself. He listens so deeply and understands the voice in a way that few musicians do.” That capacity for deep listening—a kind of radical attention—is central to their process.
In this music, listening is not a passive act but a compositional principle. It occurs between silences, in the invisible space where sound and intention meet. It involves a constant reading of gesture, an anticipatory awareness of the other’s impulse, and a precise sense of how to shape and inhabit sonic space.
This sensitivity recalls an older tradition of musical awareness, one that extends back to Purcell and Monteverdi, composers for whom silence, dissonance, and phrasing were integral to emotional truth. Such lineage underscores the historical depth of Serpa and Mitchell’s work. Their improvisations, though spontaneous, are informed by centuries of musical thought; they belong to a continuum in which form and freedom are never opposites but dialectical partners. “Every time we improvised together, something special happened,” Mitchell reflects. “It wasn’t just an intellectual challenge, it was a kind of sonic beauty, something that existed only in that moment.”
To work at this level of abstraction and emotional precision requires a rare courage: the courage to abandon mastery in favor of discovery. Artists like Serpa and Mitchell inhabit a creative ethos that resists repetition and refuses complacency. They confront the unknown not as a void but as a generative space, where inherited knowledge is not discarded but transformed, distilled into essence. “Some of these pieces had lived quietly in my archives,” Serpa admits. “They were exercises, sketches that never reached the stage. But with Matt, they finally found their meaning: that balance between form, freedom, and sonic exploration.”
The philosophical and aesthetic implications of such collaboration are profound. It suggests a model of creation that values permeability over certainty, and interdependence over individual expression. This approach dissolves the conventional hierarchies of composition and improvisation, performer and listener, intellect and emotion. In this respect, Serpa and Mitchell participate in a lineage that extends beyond jazz, to the experimental traditions of 20th-century modernism, to the introspective poetics of Virginia Woolf, and to the feminist philosophy of Luce Irigaray, whose writings interrogate the very nature of dialogue and otherness.
To engage with contemporary jazz at this level is to recognize that the term “jazz” itself becomes inadequate. The music operates in a field where all arts converge, cinema, theater, poetry, dance, philosophy, and the many musical traditions that have shaped the modern ear: classical, folk, rock, funk, and the avant-garde. To understand such a project is not simply to appreciate its technical or harmonic innovation but to perceive the web of influences that animate it. It is to see, as Messiaen once suggested, that sound itself can be a form of prayer, and that artistic creation is, at its most vital, an act of revelation.
Ultimately, this album demands an encounter rather than an opinion. It must be experienced—preferably live, where the music’s spatial and emotional dimensions can fully unfold. On stage, Serpa and Mitchell’s dialogue becomes something more than performance; it becomes a form of philosophical inquiry, a meditation on attention and the limits of communication. The listener who accepts this invitation, who consents to dwell in uncertainty and resonance, will discover not merely the beauty of sound, but the deeper beauty of listening itself, a beauty that, like the finest works of art, transforms the act of hearing into an act of understanding.
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, October 21st 2025
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In concert:
December 3 – Georgetown Day School, Washington, DC
December 4 – Solar Myth, Philadelphie, PA
December 5 – Firehouse 12, New Haven, CT
December 6 – Pioneer Valley Jazz Shares, Northampton, MA
December 8 – Close Up, NYC
Musicians :
Sara Serpa – voice
Matt Mitchell – piano
Track Listing :
News Cycle
Diction
Hyper Pathos
The Future
Trouvaille
Les Bergers
Gluey Clamor
Carry You Like a River
Fettleau
Elegiac Foldouts,
Ar e Vento,
Tooth Helmet
End of Something
Dead Spirits
Hypo Bathos
tracks 1, 4, 8, 11, 14 composed by Sara Serpa © © 2025 Serpa Music (SESAC)
tracks 2, 3, 5, 7, 9, 10, 12, 13, 15 composed by Matt Mitchell © © 2025 (BMI)
track 6 adapted from Les Bergers, movement 2 of La Nativité du Seigneur by Olivier Messiaen
THE FUTURE text: Virginia Woolf
CARRY YOU LIKE A RIVER text: Sonia Sanchez
AR E VENTO text: Sofia de Mello Breyner Andresen
DEAD SPIRITS text: Luce Irigaray
recorded December 5, 2023 at Oktaven Audio, Mt. Vernon, NY engineered, mixed, and mastered by Ryan Streber
art & design by Kate Gentile
thank you to Ryan Streber, Kate Gentile, Mariana Meraz, André Matos, Lourenzo, Babusha, Juanita, Ran Blake, Dominique Eade, Ann Braithwaite