Keep North • Best Of European Jazz

Keep North brings together three international musicians with impressive individual careers, who together form one of the most singular and powerful trios on today’s Nordic scene. With Lionel Beuvens on drums, Alexi Tuomarila on piano and Brice Soniano on double bass, the group explores a form of jazz that is at once demanding, vibrant and deeply inhabited, nourished equally by composition and improvisation.

The three have been playing together for more than twenty years across a range of projects, and that long-standing rapport gives their music a rare cohesion. Emerging from Lionel Beuvens’ MOTU project, Keep North has gradually forged a distinct identity of its own: that of a trio seeking to reveal the essence of improvisation, making this sometimes intimidating side of jazz more direct, more collective, more organic — and decidedly more groove-driven.

Driven by original compositions and a shared passion for jazz, the trio finds its fullest intensity in the shared moment itself: when listening, dialogue and risk-taking give rise to melodic, sensitive and fully collaborative improvisations.