Sonambique - red planet flute

Born in Saarbrücken/Germany Rotraut Jäger has been living in Zürich/Switzerland since 2007.
She studied flute at Peter-Cornelius-Konservatorium der Stadt Mainz (State Examined Music Teacher 2000, performance, 2002), at Zürcher Hochschule der Künste (performance diploma 2006 with Philippe Racine, jazz studies 2003-2006 with Günter Wehinger and Christoph Grab) and at Manhattan School of Music (jazz studies 2006-2007 with Dick Oatts and Steve Wilson).
During her studies Rotraut Jäger participated in workshops and masterclasses i.a. with Peter Lukas Graf, Robert Dick, Michel Debost and Moshe Epstein. Furthermore, she took part in a workshop Música Popular Brasileira in Brasil and had private lessons with i.a. Ali Ryerson, Frank Wess and Dave Liebman in New York.
As a freelance musician she is active with her own projects as well as a sideman at home and abroad.
She has performed with i.a. Miles Griffith (voc, US), Earle Davis (tp, US), Roland Gebhard (g, DE), Vicente Cortes (g, CH/ES), Karime Amaya (Flamencotanz, ES) and The Skatalites (JAM).
She also works as a private flute teacher and is in charge of various ensembles and workshops.
In March 2020 she released the first album – Sonafari – with her bandproject Sonambique. In October 2023 was the release of her second album – Dynamite – in co-production with the Swiss radio SRF2 Kultur.

Rotraut Jäger SONAMBIQUE
Rotraut Jäger – flutes*, compositions
Andreas Ebenkofler – piano
Abdourakhmane Fall – electric bass
Omar Diadji Seydi – drums
*flutes: C-flute, altoflute, bassflute, piccolo, bansuri

DYNAMITE
recorded in co-production with Radio SRF 2 Kultur
released on 6 October 2023 by
Rotraut Jäger SONAMBIQUE
LC 100378 redplanet records

The German/Swiss Rotraut Jäger, who lives in Zurich, is a flutist with a passion. On her second album“Dynamite“, she manages the remarkable feat of calibrating herself completely to the flute and yet not recording a flute album. Because the focus of her music, which is refreshing in every respect, is without exception the respective song – the melody, the groove, the mood and the mental environment in which the song was created. With a relaxedness that is rarely heard in jazz, she simply plays.

Rotraut Jäger is a gifted storyteller. Just by playing different flutes, very different voices come into play, which act like the characters in a plot.

The record as a whole seems like a multi-stylistic hike, not only through manifold moods, but also through a whole series of regions of this planet, without ever getting a flat global village feeling.“For me, the central question is always, what music do I want to listen to myself? What interests me?“

Good thing. Because“Dynamite“ is nothing less than an explosive outburst of undisguised joie de vivre that depicts life in its interaction of banal ordinariness and complexity.