Jazz
Shuteen Erdenebaatar releases “Bright Folk” on 20 November through Motéma. It is her third album for the label and the first she has recorded with her new quartet: Nils Kugelmann on double bass, Simon Comté on tenor and soprano saxophones and Amir Bresler on drums, with Jakob Manz guesting on recorder and alto saxophone.
The label frames the record as writing about home, memory and the Gobi Desert. “In the end, Bright Folk carries the meaning of home, my life between cultures, and the invisible threads that connect us across time and space,” the pianist says. The first track is out: “Do You See the Stars I See?”.
Erdenebaatar was born in Mongolia and lives in Berlin. She was twenty-five when she released her debut “Rising Sun” (2023), which won the German Jazz Prize for ensemble of the year and which she conceived as the first part of a Sun–Stars–Moon trilogy. “Bright Folk” is not part of it: Motéma’s note places it between the second chapter and the third, and says the trilogy will close in 2027 with “Beyond the Moon”, recorded this year with her twenty-one-piece chamber jazz orchestra. In 2025 she took rising star in the DownBeat critics poll and put out “Under the Same Stars”, a duo record with Nils Kugelmann on bass clarinet and double bass.
Text by Aina Torrents