Album: Artemis - Arboresque

Spare a thought – please – for Leipzig-born pianist Jutta Hipp (1925-2003). In 1956, she became the very first woman to record albums in her own name for the Blue Note label. Earlier this month was the centenary of her birth. It went by more or less unremarked.

Whereas in 2025 Artemis, the first ever all-star all-female jazz group on Blue Note, is made up of five highly respected musicians, each a bandleader in her own right, and has the benefit of global support from Blue Note/Universal, Jutta Hipp made just three albums in 1956 for the label, after which she never recorded again. Within three years, her confidence shot through, and with her early champion and mentor Leonard Feather having turned not just critical but vindictive, she stopped playing and took a steady job behind a sewing machine at a clothing company in the New York borough of Queen’s. For the remaining four-and-a-bit decades of her life, she would put her creative energies into visual art. (Listening tip: the gloriously spacious and lively “Horacio” inspired by Horace Silver from April 1956, in a trio live at the Hickory Club with Peter Ind and Ed Thigpen.)

Maybe that is what Artemis, already voted “Jazz Group of the Year” in the Downbeat readers’ poll two years running, is there to show: that the world has hopefully, thankfully, moved on by leaps and bounds since the days of Jutta Hipp. She was courageous and pioneering, but had no access to role models. Yes, there is still further to go, but Artemis, this band representing the best in jazz, can serve as a beacon for aspiring women musicians.

The group which later became Artemis played their very first concert in March 2016 at the invitation of the Philharmonie in Paris, appearing under the name “Ladies!”. From that very first septet, only two New York-based Canadians remain: pianist/musical director Renee Rosnes who formed the band, and who has composed or arranged four of the eight tracks on the album, and another natural leader, trumpeter Ingrid Jensen. 

Bassist Noriko Ueda and drummer Allison Miller have been with the band since 2018 when the name Artemis was adopted, and a high-profile appearance at the Newport Festival led to the Blue Note signing the band. Miller is always a perpetually lively presence at the drum-kit, and Noriko Ueda an impeccably good player – I heard them together in a Christine Jensen/Helen Sung quartet in Montreal in 2019 which stands out as one of the finest concerts I have been to in my life. The most recent recruit, saxophonist Nicole Glover has, to my mind, composed the strongest track on the album, the slow ballad “Petrichor”.

The quality of the playing both individually and collectively throughout Arboresque cannot be faulted, and this quintet line-up is clearly gelling well. I imagine that a student from Manhattan School of Music hearing the interplay of her/his teachers Ingrid Jensen and Nicole Glover would learn how high the level to aspire to is. And yet... maybe... there is something, a spark maybe, missing here.

I would say that three of the five players of Artemis have produced stronger albums than Arboresqe in the past year for minor labels. Listen to the sheer joy, energy and flow of “Frevo” which opens Renee Rosnes’s album Crossing Paths (Smoke Sessions). Capture the feel of freedom and exuberance of Nicole Glover’s Plays (Savant). Or, most surprisingly of all, jump into unbelievable echoing glory of Allison Miller with the North Texas students of the One O’Clock Lab Band on Big & Lovely (Royal Potato), and the extent to which this Blue Note album represents care and quality, but also safety, becomes clear. Will the impeccable professionalism and the strong, important, necessary message of Artemis be enough to feature at the 2026 Grammys? Probably. 

from www.theartsdesk.com