In 2017, the Bath festival commissioned the delicately experimental Anglo-Polish singer, violinist, and improviser/composer Alice Zawadzki to form a trio for a one-off gig – the only condition being that her new partners had to be musicians she had long wanted to play with. Her choices were music-theatre pianist/composer and Bach-reimagining improviser Fred Thomas and prize-winning jazz/classical double-bassist Misha Mullov-Abbado. The collaboration stuck: seven years on, this beautiful collection of songs, drawing on European, Latin American and Sephardic Jewish sources, is their official recorded debut.
Zawadzki’s intuitions about how fluidly they might fuse their very different cultural resources were confirmed as their new repertoire formed. In 2022, Thomas, already an ECM artist, pitched the songs for Za Górami (the title means Behind the Mountains) to label boss Manfred Eicher and the trio recorded these tracks in the ethereal-sounding Auditorio Stelio Molo in Lugano, Switzerland, each containing an absorbing story (all translated in the accompanying booklet).
