For those unaware, April Records proudly presents the new album from Danish trombonist and composer Lis Wessberg. Her most personal album to date, In The Wake of Blue is a song-driven work exploring transience, love, and transformation. Expanding her writing while remaining rooted in her distinctive instrumental voice, Wessberg creates an intimate musical landscape where lyric, melody, and texture carry equal weight.

Wessberg has established herself as a leading voice on the European jazz scene through her band Yellow Map and a series of acclaimed releases on April Records. Her previous album, Twain Walking (2024), marked her first step into English-language songwriting and earned a Danish Music Award nomination in 2025 for the track Behind the Walls. In The Wake of Blue develops this direction further.

The album draws on images from nature - sea, tides, clouds, mist, and birds - used as emotional anchors rather than abstractions. These elements frame songs that move from uncertainty and loss toward openness, connection, and renewal. The title reflects this arc: blue as melancholy, depth, and memory, and what emerges in its wake.

Vocalist Veronika Rud is central to the album’s sound, bringing vulnerability and clarity to the songs. Rather than a traditional singer-led project, the music unfolds as a dialogue between voice and trombone, with Wessberg’s warm, airy tone mirroring and extending each song’s emotional core. At times the two move in close unison; elsewhere, they diverge and reconnect.

The core ensemble - Steen Rasmussen (piano and keys), Lennart Ginman (bass), and Jeppe Gram (drums) - provides a responsive, understated foundation, while string quartet Live Strings appear on two tracks, expanding the ensemble’s depth and resonance.

In The Wake of Blue offers a quietly assured statement from an artist continuing to refine a voice that speaks as clearly through brass as it does through words.

1. The Promise
2. Longing
3. In the Wake of Blue
4. Flux
5. Vapor
6. When Birds Flock
7. The Endless Thread
8. The Quiet Edge
9. Shadows in Bloom

On what is her most personal album to date, and on what is a song-driven work exploring transience, love, and transformation, Lis opens her new recording on the sumptuously mesmerizing The Promise and the affecting Longing and then we are gifted the decadently sculpted title track In the Wake of Blue, the atmospheric Flux and the veritable gossamer of Vapor.

Along next is the gently transportive When Birds Flock which is in turn backed seamlessly by the flourishing beauty of The Endless Thread, the new set rounding out on the sheer elegance of The Quiet Edge, coming to a close on the gracefully crafted Shadows in Bloom.

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