"Webber is one of a handful of modern composer / performers who produces music with both great intellect and feel. Her music is serious yet evokes joy. Shimmer Wince makes for a solid album-of-the-year candidate. Very, very well done." --Avant Music News

Every new album by flutist, saxophonist, and composer Anna Webber feels like a revelation, and a huge step forward in a discography of the highest quality. Each of her records feature musicians at the forefront of the intersecting worlds of improvised music and contemporary classical composition. Shimmer Wince, due out on Intakt Records October 20, 2023, is that next huge step for Webber, and an album without immediate or easy comparison. Her new band Shimmer Wince features Webber (tenor saxophone/ flute/bass flute), Adam O’Farrill (trumpet), Mariel Roberts (cello), Elias Stemeseder (synthesizer), and Lesley Mok (drums), and was assembled to explore a new direction in her harmonic and rhythmic interests, into the world of Just Intonation (JI for short).

Anna Webber was not stagnant during the lockdowns of COVID 19, and instead used that time to take a deep dive into the study of JI. She was given a fellowship opportunity by the American Academy Berlin in the spring of 2021, and used that period of near complete isolation to study the history of this tuning system. She spent countless hours checking out a wide range of composers, both through listening and score study, who have utilized JI in their work. She quickly realized she wasn’t interested in writing “pure JI” music, nor was she interested in trying to fit neatly into a pre-existing school of thought around JI. Instead she wanted to find ways that JI could be practically applicable to her work, and incorporate it into the harmonic and rhythmic language heard most recently on her previous albums Idiom (2021) and Clockwise (2019). As she focused on this application of JI into her own compositions, a new set of challenges emerged. How could she notate JI for improvisers, especially those who hadn’t taken the deep dive into the alternate tuning system like she had? And most importantly, especially considering that there is a danger in this sort of study leading to overly academic and rigid music, how could she apply these ideas and still have her music feel loose and relaxed? As you listen, you will realize that she avoided the potential dangers. Shimmer Wince not only succeeds in applying JI in an accessible and joyous way, but Webber managed to make this album feel uniquely her own. This is more than just a new direction for Webber–Shimmer Wince presents a whole new world of sound previously unexplored in improvised music.  

Shimmer Wince would have been an impossible album to make with another band. It is one thing for Webber to use her own personal practice time to utilize JI in her composing and improvising. It is a more monumental task to have a full ensemble accurately and convincingly adopt the system. Adam O’Farrill, Mariel Roberts, Elias Stemeseder, and Lesley Mok proved to be up to the challenge. Not only did they volunteer many hours for full band rehearsals (a rarity for busy musicians in NYC), but spent an incredible amount of their personal practice time applying the concepts of JI to each of their instruments and improvised language. The results of their individual and collective dedication to these pieces is stunning, and created an album that fully exists in Webber’s signature style, previously dubbed “heady music [that] appeals to the rest of the body” by NPR in 2019. Shimmer Wince succeeds in ways that very few albums previously have in jazz and improvised music. It takes a complex and unfamiliar concept and presents it in a way that is playful and accessible, and without distilling the essence. While certainly a contender for album of the year in 2023, even more notable is that Shimmer Wince will be inspiring new directions in music for many years to come.

RIYL: Horse Lords, Ellen Arkbro, Steve Lehman, Henry Threadgill, Anthony Braxton, John Hollenbeck, Roscoe Mitchell, Matt Mitchell, Tomeka Reid, Wet Ink Ensemble.

Recommended Tracks: #6 Periodicity 2, #2 Wince, #1 Swell

Fall 2023 Shimmer Wince Performances: September 9 @ Duck Creek Arts, East Hampton NY // Album Release Concert: September 23 @ The Stone, New York NY // October 2 @ Ars Nova Workshop, Philadelphia PA // March 2024 North American Tour: March 15 @ La Sotterenea, Montreal QC// March 16 @ Creative Music Series, Boston MA// March 17 @ Pioneer Valley Jazz Shares, Turners Falls MA // March 18 @ Bop Shop, Rochester NY // March 19 @ Jazz Gallery, New York NY

Shimmer Wince is a new quintet led by saxophonist, flutist, and composer Anna Webber. Featuring Adam O’Farrill on trumpet, Mariel Roberts on cello, Elias Stemeseder on synthesizer, and Lesley Mok on drums, the music for this ensemble explores the applications of Just Intonation in a jazz/improvised context, including its intersections with rhythm and groove. Just Intonation, or JI, is an ancient tuning system based on the natural harmonics and resonances of notes. To Webber, her work using this non-equal tempered tuning system is a continuation of her research into using timbre and sound as organizing forces that are as important as harmony, melody, and rhythm.

Anna Webber - Shimmer Wince:
1. Swell (9:39)
2. Wince (8:46)
3. Fizz (11:33)
4. Periodicity 1 (7:56)
5. Squirmy (11:25)
6. Periodicity 2 (5:37)
7. Shimmer (7:28)

Anna Webber - tenor sax, flute, bass flute
Adam O’Farrill - trumpet
Mariel Roberts - cello
Elias Stemeseder - synthesizer
Lesley Mok - drums

Recorded on December 5 and 6, 2022 at Oktaven Audio, Mount Vernon, NY // Engineered by Ryan Streber // Edited by Anna Webber // Produced by Anna Webber // Mixed by Nathaniel Morgan at Buckminster Palace, Brooklyn, NY // Mastered by Brent Lambert, The Kitchen, Carrboro, NC

Press Inquiries + CD/DL Requests: Adam Hopkins | Scott Clark | farcrypublicity@gmail.com | farcrypublicity.com

Anna Webber Bio:

Anna Webber (b. 1984) is a flutist, saxophonist, and composer whose interests and work live in the aesthetic overlap between avant-garde jazz and new classical music. In May 2021 she released Idiom, a double album featuring both a trio and a large ensemble, and a follow-up to her critically-acclaimed release Clockwise. That album, which the Wall Street Journal called "visionary and captivating," was voted #6 Best Album of 2019 in the NPR Jazz Critics Poll, who described it as “heady music [that] appeals to the rest of the body.” Her 2020 release, Both Are True (Greenleaf Music), co-led with saxophonist/composer Angela Morris, was named a top ten best release of 2020 by The New York Times. She was recently named a 2021 Berlin Prize Fellow and was voted the top “Rising Star” flutist in the 2020 Downbeat Critic’s Poll. 

The trio featured on Idiom is Webber’s “Simple Trio”, her working band of almost a decade which features drummer John Hollenbeck and pianist Matt Mitchell. A prolific bandleader, Webber also leads a quartet and a septet in addition to the above-mentioned large ensemble and co-led Webber/Morris Big Band. She has performed and/or recorded with projects led by artists such as Dan Weiss, Roscoe Mitchell, Ranja Swaminathan, Jen Shyu, Dave Douglas, Matt Mitchell, Ches Smith, John Hollenbeck, and Trevor Dunn, among others.

Webber is a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow. She has additionally been honored with the Margaret Whitton Award (administered by the Jazz Gallery); grants from the Copland Fund  (2021 & 2019), the Shifting Foundation (2015), the New York Foundation for the Arts (2017), the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, and the Canada Council for the Arts; and residencies from Exploring the Metropolis (2019), the MacDowell Colony (2017 & 2020), the Millay Colony for the Arts (2015), and the Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts (2014). Webber is originally from British Columbia.
Previous Albums as a Leader:

Idiom (2021, Pi Recordings)
Rectangles (2020, Out Of Your Head Records)
Clockwise (2019, Pi Recordings)
Binary (2016, Skirl Records)
Refraction (2015, Pirouet Records)
SIMPLE (2014, Skirl Records
Percussive Mechanics (2013, Pirouet Records)
Third Floor People (2010, Nowt Records)

Shimmer Wince Liner Notes:

The relationship between pitch and rhythm has been something I’ve been interested in since the beginning of my compositional journey - how can I make pitches cohere to rhythms, rather than arbitrarily (or even intuitively) connecting the two. I’ve addressed this in various ways in my work, creating little grammars for individual compositions in an attempt to have every detail make a sort of syntactical sense. A rabbit-hole within this broader world is the definitive relationship between polyrhythm and pitch. Polyrhythms, sped up, create certain intervals: just as any regular pulse sped up to the threshold of human hearing (i.e. ~20Hz, or 20 pulses per second) will create a pitch, two single pulses sped up will create two pitches, an interval. I worked with this concept to some extent on my album Idiom, measuring the frequencies in a set of saxophone multiphonics, isolating those which could be described as simple ratios (5:4, 6:5, etc), and using those ratios to create polyrhythmic variations on a melodic line. But this felt like a cursory glance at something much larger; I wanted to really understand these ratios and their connection to pitch.

Intervallic ratios using integers can be seen as coming from the overtone series, where the frequency of each pitch in the series is a multiple of the fundamental. Tuning using the overtone series is also known as Just Intonation (JI). This system of tuning is ancient, as it is based on the natural vibration of physical objects (strings, vocal cords), and the intervals derived from this have a special resonant quality. The subdivision of the octave into 12 equal parts (ie, Equal Temperament, or ET) is a compromise, designed to make it possible to play in all twelve keys on a keyboard instrument while still maintaining the maximal degree of consonance. Many JI intervals differ greatly from their ET counterparts, though some are closer than others - the ET octave is always “just”, and a perfect 5th is quite close. The just minor 7th though is ~30% flatter than an ET minor 7th, too low to feel like the same pitch.

In 2021, I had the opportunity to be a fellow at the American Academy Berlin. This was during deep Covid, and more specifically in the pre-vaccination world of the “3rd Wave” in Germany. The whole country was very locked down the entire time I was in Berlin: curfews, size limits on gatherings, no hotels, restaurants, or beer gardens, the whole nine yards. I took this period of enforced quiet to research JI - to check out the scholarship that exists around it, to study scores, and to listen, listen, listen. There’s a lot of modern compositional work that uses JI, and many schools of thought around it and other alternate tuning systems. While I was interested in seeing how various composers (ranging from Harry Partch to Ben Johnston to Marc Sabat to Cat Lamb to Horse Lords) had employed JI, I was primarily considering the ways that JI could be practically applicable to my work –  i.e., not to assimilate into a pre-existing school of thought, or to write “pure JI” music, but to see how I could use JI as a tool. How could I translate these specific harmonies to a timescale rapid enough to write the rhythmic music that I wanted to write, as well as to highlight their inherent relationship to rhythm? How could I notate these pitches for improvisors, who might not have had much experience hearing this sort of harmony, much less seeing it notated? And, most important to me, how could I create music with these ideas that felt loose, joyful, and relaxed?

The music on this album is the result of that research, listening, and thought. If this music feels different than some of my previous albums, that’s because it is. The material led me to write music that was much more harmonic, in some ways more “tonal”. It’s timbral in the sense that there is a continuum from timbre to intonation, but the music inhabits a different space than, say, Idiom. I wanted the music to feel playful and open, almost like a collection of incredibly bizarre standards. Endless love and gratitude to Adam, Mariel, Elias, and Lesley, who really went above and beyond in their dedication to making this music come to life.

Thank you for listening.

Anna Webber, July 2023