Dreamy instead of enraptured

Although Corinne Huber comes from a family of musicians, she originally wanted to work as a journalist and not as an artist. The daughter of pianist and composer Felix Huber and sister of saxophonist Christoph Huber therefore enrolled at the University of Basel to study history, literature and geography. But in 2011 she made a U-turn and enrolled at the Bern Jazz School, where she studied singing with Efrat Alony and Andreas Schaerer and composition with Bert Joris, Martin Streule, Frank Sikora and Django Bates.

The following year, the musician, who took her first guitar lessons at the age of seven and later also learned the cello, met her future bandmates during her training. The first band concerts followed in the fall of 2013 under the name Nojakîn. Now the sextet, which also includes Huber's brother Christoph, who lives in New York, is releasing its debut Silent Smile. The album, co-produced by SRF2 Kultur, comprises ten songs, most of them written by Corinne Huber.

The Nojakîn singer, who grew up in Rupperswil in the canton of Aargau, describes her vocals as "rather deep and loud", but this understates how virtuosically and elegantly her singing meanders along the words and notes. Her voice sticks in pieces like All That's Past or Ela to the piano or trumpet in order to merge, only to soon seek - and find - their own expression again. Although jazz is at the heart of Nojakîn's music, there is also room for influences from folk, pop and poetry. The sound is lyrical, dreamy, but never rapturous.

Nojakîn take the listener into a world of sound in which improvisation and virtuosity are writ large and the chords are increasingly interwoven. This results in playfully changing colors and layers of sound that sometimes meet in a lively, sometimes melancholy way. Despite the musical cornucopia that the band Silent Smile the record never seems overloaded, but rather fine, fresh and spun.