Marthe Lea maneuvers through the mysteries of music in an ingenious way. She has showed this in the recent years in such different contexts as Bugge Wessltoft’s New Conception of Jazz, in a trio with Ayumi Tanaka and Thomas Strønen (recently released on ECM) and with musicians such as Axel Dörner and Alasdair Roberts. She balances her sincerely and powerful expression, which contains both folk songs and howling, in a liberating way. Symptomatic of this open approach is that she throughout “Asura” performs with a long list of instruments. Her piano, guitar and flute playing is as natural as what she plays on her main instrument, the tenor saxophone.
