Stefan Aeby & Pilgrim - Crosswinds (CD)

Christoph Irniger, a prodigious stylist with a warm sound, presents the third album with his band Pilgrim on Intakt Records. With "Crosswinds" the saxophonist who relishes adventure and surprise delivers a cultivated studio album. Multi-layered, subtle and melodically entangled, the eight pieces radiate a wondrous, atmospheric tranquility. A highly nuanced music with a magical sound. Peter Margasak writes in the liner notes: "Crosswinds - this new, gorgeously considered, but luxuriantly open new recording by tenor saxophonist Christoph Irniger's Pilgrim - is palpably more relaxed on the surface than the quintet's previous albums, yet beneath that veneer of calm is intensely focused and rigorous interplay as well as a level of risk-taking. Irniger and his bandmates have developed a richly contemporary sound that melds ideas from some of the most harmonically advanced thinkers in the US with a distinctly European flavor heard most explicitly".