Tabea Kind – Fragments
(Loumi Records. Album review by Andrew Taylor-Dawson)

On Fragments, German double bassist and composer Tabea Kind (b.1999) serves up an intoxicating and immersive debut, rich in emotion and melody and imbued with a sense of wandering exploration.

Tabea Kind originally hails from Karlsruhe in Germany. Her teachers in Freiburg included the great Dieter Ilg, and her studies have also taken her to Bern and also Basel, where she will complete the Masters programme this summer. Kind has already played with multiple ensembles of German and Swiss musicians, including EDNA, Baptiste Stanek Trio and Blau Salvatge, and been a guest of Pablo Held at the Loft in Cologne. Since 2023, she has also been part of the Mainz-based Gutenberg Jazz Collective, “a hand-picked top ensemble of young jazz musicians given the opportunity to deepen their artistic skills over the course of a year”.

For Fragments, she has assembled a band with Catherine Tang on piano and Lucas Zibulski on drums. As the great leaders of jazz piano trios of the past have demonstrated, and as Tabea Kind shows expertly here – sometimes less is more.

Leading her trio from the bass, Kind has created an album that nods to trio records of the past, while firmly charting its own course. From the choppy and at times dissonant opener “Ostinato” to the aptly titled, beautiful and exploratory “Still Searching”, Kind’s compositions pull multiple emotional levers, with the three instrumentalists’ playing weaving in and out of each other expertly.

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Throughout the record, the bass work pops out of the mix periodically, particularly on cuts like “Haze” and “Drip Drop”, where it deftly switches from a compliment to Catherine Tang’s piano figures, to being more of a commanding presence.

As can often be the way with great trio records, the deceptive simplicity of the format creates space for each of the three musicians to really shine. Tang delivers beguiling piano work throughout, with the gently unfolding melodic progression of “Haze” being a standout example.

The dextrous and sympathetic drumming of Lucas Zibulski rounds out the trio excellently. From the staccato rhythms of “Ostinato”, to the tight grooves of album closer “Graureiher”, he shows himself to be the perfect rhythmic foil to the playing of Kind and Tang.

Fragments is composed of eight tracks and clocks in at a lean 33 minutes. My one minor criticism would be its brevity, as it feels like some pieces could have been explored and jammed out for longer. However the flip-side of this is that everything presented here is superb and finely crafted. It whets the appetite for the potential of a longer project to come.

With this being the first foray into leading bands for Tabea Kind, it’s an evocative, emotionally potent and captivating listen. The only question that lingers once the record is through, is where will this young composer take things next?

LINK: Loumi Records