Franck Tortiller & Alexandra Lehmler Aerial

The duo’s rather intimate and chamber-music-style instrumentation offers lots of leeway for any participating musicians.
The music is very honest, thrives on exchange with others, live music entertainment and improvisation by all parties involved.

In 2014, Franck Tortiller and Alexandra Lehmler met each other for the first time to perform together on stage. Since then, they have released two albums in a quartet formation, and another one is planned with their smaller formation.

​

‘Aerial’ represents the freedom to spontaneously develop new ideas on the basis of compositions created for the duo. You never know where the journey will take you, but you will definitely arrive somewhere.”

​

Alexandra Lehmler, born in 1979 in Bad Ems/Lahn, trained in Mannheim, Stuttgart and Paris, winner of „Jazz Award Baden-Württemberg 2014“ and ‚Neuer Deutscher Jazzpreis Award for Composing‘, with a grant from the Arts Foundation Baden- Württemberg, is really a model musician in Germany. A brilliant go-getter with the tendency to look for the extraordinary, aiming for a rather personal balance between passion and expressiveness, as well as a sensuousness of grooves and melody. She's known to have searched beyond the German border, among the French jazz scene with its stronger influences by regional traditional music as well as migrants from former colonies and globalisation in general. This is where Lehmler finds those musicians who share her boldly permeable way of access to music. Her signature sound with trailing tones from her soprano sax, flexible drives from her alto sax or the soft roar of her baritone sax benefits from her boldness. She naturally and confidently embeds elements from world music, firmly incorporates minimalist and electro soundscapes, dark and rock-style, dirty and rough. It is neither a question of musical styles, nor any specific style for that matter. It's simply her very own style!