Terra - Hannah Weiss Group There are many ways to word a question. The most open, perhaps most beautiful questions can be heard on Terra, the debut album of jazz singer Hannah Weiss, who was born in 1992. The voice of the Munich native, who grew up in Switzerland, can not only be cool and warm, it also covers all temperature ranges. Weiss, winner of the BMW Welt Young Artist Jazz Award in 2019, skillfully balances on nuances and, with her typical timbre, always sounds new and surprisingly different - so that even without lyrics it is immediately clear what she singing is about. About fear, about flight and hunger and pain. And about love, longing and devotion. In the lyrics of her nine-part suite composition Terra, which also gives the album its name, Weiss describes what she sees and what occupies her mind, she sings about the paradoxically normal coexistence of the most diverse side by side of emotional states, without judging, and in the knowledge that that one does not make the other less relevant. On the one hand, Terra sounds playfully light: a well-composed, beautiful-sounding concept album that floats past you like a spring breeze. On the other hand, there is an unmistakable melancholic undertone, a tender anger. What drives Weiss is: wondering. She found inspiration on a trip through South Africa and Mozambique - back in Germany she worked on the texts, poems, thoughts on lyrics that had been created there, supplemented and polished melodies spun on the piano with her band in Munich, which had existed for many years: the Hannah Weiss Group. The quartet, which found each other while studying together at the Munich University of Music and Performing Arts and released their first EP in 2020, is the winner of the Sparda Jazz Award 2021 and tells stories on Terra, detached from compositional conventions and away from the typical song form of freedom and curiosity, also musically: This is jazz that frays at the edges, freeing itself from clichs. Between percussion-emphasized acoustic sounds and collaged electronics, Weiss leaves plenty of room on Terra for virtuoso and delicately intertwined solo passages by piano (Sam Hylton), drums (Flurin Mck), bass (Robin Jermer) and guest saxophonist (Moritz Stahl), and also a Chopin waltz emerges. If jazz elements form the foundation of this album, like a shell, then the facade, interior design, furnishings are an overwhelmingly well-functioning experiment in combining different musical influences. Thinking as openly as possible this claim is also reflected in the instrumentation: Weiss, who also works as a DJ and presents her latest musical discoveries from ambient to experimental as Trippie in the monthly radio show Trippie presents on Radio 80000 and also writes music for the theatre, complements her band on Terra with instruments such as synthesizers, Sanusula and Koshi Bell. The album stands airy in the tumult of this time, is clear without being rigid: the detail-obsessed combination of a voice