While I Was Away is the first album by Julia Hülsmann's octet, a group the German pianist has brought together for occasional concerts for more than ten years. After three quartet records for ECM, Not Far From Here (2019), The Next Door (2022) and Under the Surface (2025), she returns to song. The octet joins a jazz piano trio to a classical one, with violin and cello, and adds three singers from three different countries.
The voices are Aline Frazão from Luanda, Angola, the Norwegian Live Maria Roggen and Michael Schiefel from Berlin. Héloïse Lefebvre plays violin, with cello, double bass and drums completing the ensemble. Hülsmann, who was born in Bonn and teaches at the Berlin University of the Arts, wrote all the arrangements. Several of her pieces set poems by Emily Dickinson, Margaret Atwood and E.E. Cummings, while Roggen and Schiefel contribute songs of their own. The album was recorded in September 2023 at Hansa Studio in Berlin, with Nanni Johansson as engineer.
It opens with Coisário De Imagens by the Brazilian duo Rosanna and Zélia, whose songs, Hülsmann says, "were very important to me in the 90s". Frazão sings it in Portuguese over brushed drums and strings. Ani DiFranco's Up, Up, Up, Up, Up, Up, from 1999, has Schiefel as lead singer, and Lefebvre's violin solo leads into a strong one from the piano. On TicToc, a setting of Cummings, the three singers join in a clockwork rhythm broken by spoken passages. Hülsmann also points to Walkside, her music to Roggen's words, which she feels bridges her quartet sound with that of the octet.
Reviewers heard a clear change of direction. In Jazz Journal (2026), Simon Adams wrote that where her music had often been "austere and refined, this new set is a riot of difference". Mike Gates of UK Vibe found an album that "can't be pigeon-holed into any specific genre", with elements of chamber jazz, folk and art pop. In Jazzthetik, Harry Schmidt caught a hint of Carla Bley's Escalator Over the Hill in Roggen's Felicia's Song. Martin Laurentius in Jazzthing recalled that settings of texts, played by her trio with guest singers, first made her known internationally some 25 years ago.
This is the CD edition, ECM 2869, released on 30 January 2026. The liner photograph is by Sally Lazic.
