Jazz
Saxophonist, flautist and composer Anna Webber released “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world…” on 30 October, the first album by her nonet. It’s out on Intakt Records on CD and digitally: six of her compositions, seventy-seven minutes in all.
Nine voices: Webber (tenor and soprano saxophones, flute), Ingrid Laubrock (tenor and soprano saxophones), Yuma Uesaka (clarinet, contrabass clarinet and soprano saxophone), Ryan Easter (trumpet), Mary Halvorson (guitar), David Virelles (piano), Chris Tordini (bass), Ches Smith (drums and chimes) and DoYeon Kim on 25-string gayageum, a Korean zither. Intakt says Webber gives each player a tailor-made vessel for their own voice, moving seamlessly between composed and improvised material. The band presented the music on 23 and 24 January at The Jazz Gallery in New York and recorded it over the next two days at The Bunker Studio in Brooklyn, engineered by Aaron Nevezie.
According to the label, the album draws on writers and thinkers addressing late-stage capitalism and its effects, and that reading led Webber and the nonet to hold up the collective as an ideal over individualism; Intakt says it shows in her unselfish approach to bandleading. The title is the start of the line that heads the first chapter of Mark Fisher’s “Capitalist Realism” (2009): it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. One track is called “Corporate Tax as a Percentage of Total Federal Revenue in the US, 1952, 1975, and 1998”, and the album closes with “Reservoirs of Hope and Optimism”.
Webber’s two previous albums under her own name were also on Intakt: “Shimmer Wince” (2023), with a quintet, and “simpletrio2000” (2024), with Matt Mitchell and John Hollenbeck. Intakt notes that she was named Rising Star Composer in the 2026 DownBeat Critics Poll. She brings that trio to Europe at the end of the month: 25 November at De Singer in Rijkevorsel, Belgium, then Avignon, Tours, Geneva and Winterthur through the 29th.
Text by Aina Torrents