The SWR NEWJazz Meeting is a legendary sound laboratory for improvised music, which has been bringing musicians together since 1966 in order to evolve their creative ideas free from the
constraints of daily business. Over four days, this gathering creates a free space for experimentation, with the aim of developing a concert programme that is then presented on tour throughout the broadcasting area.
Micah Thomas is a visionary among the pianists on New York’s current improvisation scene. He became famous as the alert, energetic piano engine of the Immanuel Wilkins Quartet. As curator of the 2022 SWR NEWJazz Meeting, Thomas put together a band of outstanding New York improvisers. The sextet had never played together in this form before. When asked about a name for the SWR NewJazz Meeting project, Thomas replied: Forest. The musical fruits of this album in fact shimmer like a dew-covered forest landscape that extends much farther than a single glance could take in. And in this ‘forest’ something magical happens: it is dark, calm and quiet, before suddenly, for a moment, rare, shy animals appear out of the mist and fog. These tracks, selected subsequently by Thomas, offer such an experience. They are deliberately identified as fragments, highlights from long, spontaneous improvisatory passages.