Brooding, Vividly Lyrical Jazz Ballads From Kristiana Roemer

Kristiana Roemer’s pensive, philosophically-inspired compositions bridge the worlds of jazz and classical art-song. She sings bilingually, in clear, unacccented English and German. Her debut album House of Mirrors is streaming at Sunnyside Records.

In just about three terse minutes, she winds up the slow, swaying title track, an uneasy reconciliation with all the things that reflect our interior lives. Addison Frei’s sparse piano chords linger over the similarly minimalist groove of bassist Alex Claffy and drummer Adam Arruda, guitarist Gilad Hekselman taking the song out with a spare, enigmatic solo.

Frei starts in the stygian, stalking lows, shadowed by Arruda’s hardware in Beauty Is a Wound, which rises to a seductive, trip-hop tinged minimalism. Virgin Soil is a lingering breakup song, Claffy’s bass foreshadowing the determined tropical pulse Roemer leaps into, Dayna Stephens contributing a balmy tenor sax solo.

Deine Hande, a setting of a love poem by Felice Schragenheim, who was murdered by the Nazis in the Holocaust, has a persistent undercurrent of disquiet lowlit by Frei’s somberly modal piano. Dark Night of the Soul is the album’s most breathtaking and anthemic number, Frei’s intricate lines mingling with guitarist Ben Monders muted accents, up to a terse, suspenseful bustle.

In Manchmal, Roemer takes a cautionary nature-centric poem by Hermann Hesse and makes a slow, wary, resonant ballad out of it: Monder has never played as purposefully and spaciously as he does here. Arruda’s toms and percussionist Rogerio Boccato’s congas have the same kind of spaciousness in Lullaby for N, an allusively elegaic, Lynchian goodbye ballad.

Roemer remakes Stanley Turrentine’s Sugar as simmering, trickily rhythmic tropicalia and winds up the album with a nuanced, purist take of Mingus’ Duke Ellington’s Sound of Love. Roemer’s unselfconscious clarity on the mic, understatedly haunting lyricism and uncluttered arrangements make this one of the most captivating jazz debuts of the year.

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