Her music sounds as if it were embodying her biography rather than telling it. Enkhjargal Erkhembayar, who was born in Ulaanbaatar, grew up with Mongolian folk music and now lives in Munich, calls herself Enji. She completed her master’s degree in jazz singing in Munich and has been moving between cultures, identities and forms of expression ever since. This is reflected on her fourth album Sonor – and not only in the fabulously tender version of Willard Robison’s jazz standard “Old Folks”.
Sonor is jazz fueled by keyboard instruments – piano, Wurlitzer, Rhodes – combined with folk elements to create an airy interlude that uses tradition as a springboard into postmodernism. The album features a handful of European jazz musicians: Elias Stemeseder on piano, Robert Landfermann on bass, Julian Sartorius on drums and Paul Brändle, Fazer’s guitarist, who composed the songs together with Enji. The album shows that contemporary jazz manifests itself in a variety of sub- and micro-genres – and sometimes doesn’t want to be categorized at all.
Sonor
