Isabelle Bodenseh – Dignity

GLM

German flautist and composer Isabelle Bodenseh‘s latest album is her first since 2023’s Flowing Mind and is an important and ambitious work that is inspired by the life of her disabled daughter Juliette and expands upon the feelings engendered there. Along with Johnnes Maikranz on guitar, Thomas Bauser on Hammond and Lars Binder on drums, they construct a vibrant jazz-inflected suite with the flute overseeing with its warm, malleable tone.

Dignity opens with a five-part suite that delves into Isabelle’s feelings of dignity and how we can better live in that manner, with the other players lending a hushed setting which allows the flute to travel, snaking carefully and wavering gently as the Hammond holds out its hand and lends support. The guitar tone is sharper than the flute and provides an edge against which drums offer a crisp snap. The dizzying trills of the flute are of a delirious sweetness and the variance of sound between it and the organ is also lovely.

The four players all manage to find a unique position in the sound and with the sense of abstraction or contemplation that comes later, you realise that nothing melodic is really off limits. At points the flute is a lullaby with the guitar a fireside lament, but it evolves into something richer with all four adding to the discussion or thought process.

A Latin-like caper jaunts like a fairground ride livening things up, the flute piccolo is light in its tone and perhaps the garage-y organ is best suited to that fairground evocation. It is a realty positive way to end a selection that plumbs emotions and makes people think.

The balance of the album is taken up by Lars’s “Masha”, which is a slow melancholy waver, its gentle background abstraction allowing an intake of breath after the surge of the suite, while Isabelle’s “Fly High” is a folky romp with the flute and guitar in constant contact, one following other like a pair of butterflies, the shuffle of drums and the droney Hammond adding a sense of propulsion.

The final piece on the album, Isabelle and Johannes’s “Juliette”, is perhaps the most touching selection with captured voices of Isabelle and her family, including Juliette, woven through this more concrete piece. Isabelle’s flute is an emotional scrape, a sense of frustration hovering, trying to articulate something difficult. The guitar clouds meanwhile offer an arm around the shoulder and help structure the flute’s poignant wanderings. The voices, the wash of percussion and this uncertain direction present no clear answers but instead make us think and consider our own positions in this world and whether we too could proceed with a little more dignity.

-Mr Olivetti-