The album "Moon Trail" by Sarah Buechi, Franz Hellmüller and Rafael Jerjen was celebrated by SRF as "The surprise of the year" and the Zurich jazz critic Manfred Papst headlined an extensive portrait of the singer Sarah Buechi: "She creates music for the future."

The trio's music shows that Sarah Buechi has traveled far and wide. For over seven years in total, she was on the road in Bangalore, Dublin, London, Copenhagen, Accra, Paris and New York. She has listened to the world and studied all kinds of music in order to develop songwriting, world and jazz in a highly personal way, whereby the balance between composition and improvisation is central.

Journalist Luise Wolf describes the trio perfectly: "A strong common feeling and freedom in dealing with the material are the essences that the trio draws from jazz and folk music as well as other global musical traditions. Virtuosity is never presented for its own sake. Rather, it is the underlying, pulsating energy that enables a freer interplay of references."

Monk's Casino, the quintet around pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach, with Axel Dörner on trumpet, Jan Roder on bass, Rudi Mahall on clarinet and Kasper Tom on drums, was formed in its original line-up in the mid-1990s and set itself the remarkable task of recording Monk's complete works in 2004. In 2005, a triple CD was released by Intakt, which had been recorded live in Berlin's A-Trane the year before.

Monk's themes are concise, usually quite short and extremely catchy. Just the right playing material for the musicians of Monk's Casino: they hijack the Monk titles and don't linger long with the traditional sequence of introducing the theme and extensive solo escapades. They take a much faster and more collective approach, using the original angularity of the compositions to interweave them within the pieces.

Monk's Casino is often fast and sometimes quite turbulent. Nevertheless, everything is well organized and, at least in this respect, under control. So here we go!