"Being the Up And Down", Silke Eberhard's new CD with her trio with Jan Roder on bass and Kay Lubke on drums was recorded both in the studio as well as at a live concert at the A-Trane in Berlin. This was the result of her winning the prestigious Berlin Jazz Prize, which affords the winner the honor of playing a concert and getting some recording days by Radio Berlin Brandenburg. Thus on this disc you hear a seamless blend of studio and live performances. The artwork on the cover, as on her previous Intakt release The Being Inn, is by Roman Signer, one of the most prestigious Swiss artists of today.

The American jazz critic Lynn Rene Bayley writes in the liner notes: "Yet whether being sensual or being edgy and experimental, there is so much to like and so much to hear in Silke Eberhard's playing both solo and when interacting with this trio that one is held spellbound from first note to last. Small wonder that she has such a high reputation in the German jazz world!"-Intakt

"Risk is an elemental ingredient of improvised music. Effectual extemporaneous creation between musicians relies on active equilibrium in communication. Tilt too far in one direction or another for too long and the entire enterprise can be upended by unintended hubris or assertion of ego. COVID-19 brought another stratum of risk to such encounters, this time physical, with the sobering reality that playing together in proximity and for an audience could have serious health consequences to self and others. Being the Up and Down is documentary measure of both as it preserves music from a pair of gigs by Silke Eberhard's working trio at a Berlin Jazz Club in August of last year. After six-months of dealing with the pandemic as an escalating concern, Germany was in the midst of a spike in cases.

Eberhard and her colleagues sound unfazed by this reality on the recording. Bassist Jan Roder and drummer Kay Lübke lock in with her from the jump on "U11," the first of nine original compositions. Roder's early background was in rock music, but he and Eberhard have been playing together for over two decades. Their time-tested rapport is prominent and palpable. Lübke is similarly attuned, dropping in and out of the action as the rapidly calibrated interplay dictates. Sudden tempo shifts are persistent as on the swift and stuttering multiplication and division that powers the album median "Hymne." Taut and mercurial after stage-setting Roder solo, it's a terrific exegesis on the trio's tripartite precision. Gradual and gripped with gravitas, "Zeitlupenbossa" swirls in a pool of bowed strings and metal before aligning on a loping line.

Evocative yet still equivocal, Eberhard's tune titles balance ambiguity with revealing apertures into personality. "Strudel" juxtaposes torrential extended bursts with snatches of fleeting silence. "Von a Nach B" comes across like its slightly better-behaved sibling with more space and restraint between textured blasts. Eberhard's at her most jazz sounding on the "Laika's Descent," blowing wispy gusts and asides over tittering, oblique rhythms. Lübke's eddying cymbals and punctuating tom toms keep the whole enterprise from gathering even a modicum of moss. Hindsight makes the risks involved in this venture worth it. None of the players apparently contracted any illness from their interaction and the same can hopefully be assumed for those in the audience. Such is sadly the new "normal" for concert performance."-Derek Taylor, Dusted Magazine