Jazz at JAKI: Sara Decker "Expand"

Multi-layered songwriting in a finely woven jazz guise

For her third album "expand", Sara Decker invited long-time confidants into the studio to create a multi-faceted work. With her third work, the singer and composer is building on her earlier successes while also writing a new chapter in her career, which has already spanned several years, partly in New York and has attracted international attention. "Deckers' refreshingly new voice shines with clarity and glows with an inner light" praised NYC Glissando in 2017, the same year Decker was awarded second prize at the Shure Montreux Jazz Competition following a performance at the Montreux Jazz Festival. She had previously won the European Jazz Award at the Italian festival Tuscia in Jazz. And in 2021, the Austrian magazine Concerto noted: "Sara Decker's bright, clear voice is a feast for the ears, the finely spun accompaniment [...] a delight."

In "Expand", Decker reflects on personal experiences and thoughts. "With each production, I get closer to my own sound," says Decker. The album combines clear melodies and complex harmonies with rhythmically complex patterns.
Alongside Sara Decker's warmly timbred voice, which leaps light-footedly through octaves with melodious elegance, the musicians' subtle instrumental solos repeatedly set individual accents. Heidi Bayer's mostly velvety accompaniments and expressive improvisations underline once again why she is one of the most sought-after artists on trumpet and flugelhorn - especially in Accomplices, a duet with Decker. Yuhan Su, originally from Taiwan and at home in New York for many years, alternates with a fine sense between harmonically floating, rhythmic and more expansive vibraphone entries, exemplified in It's Safe Here. Finnish bassist Kaisa Mäensivu can provide a clever and songful foundation as well as agile solos, Mareike Wiening enriches the music with grooves and pointed breaks.

The album title Expand signals the expansion of the band into a transatlantic quintet and subliminally associates Decker's renewed sovereignty as a singer, songwriter and bandleader with an international profile. Between advanced pop and vocal jazz, her stylish and impressive new work offers various musical points of contact: enticing melodies and instrumental detail, rhythmic and harmonic finesse, unobtrusive lightness and depth.

Supported by Initiative Musik gemeinnützige Projektgesellschaft mbH with project funds from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.