Shuteen Erdenebaatar Quartet "Bright Folk"

Sometimes, returning to a familiar place reveals just how much we have changed. A place that once felt like home can suddenly become a reflection of everything that happened in the meantime – the years spent elsewhere, the experiences gathered, the people met along the way, and ultimately the new person we have become.

*Bright Folk*, her third album on Motéma, is due for release on 20 November and continues the artistic journey that began in 2023 with her acclaimed debut album *Rising Sun* and continued in fine form in 2025 with her sumptuous duo project for piano and contralto clarinet, *Under the Same Stars*.

The release of *Rising Sun* marked a decisive turning point for Shuteen. Not only did the sun rise, but so did her artistic vision.

The album, the first part of a trilogy she conceived, introduced her distinctive musical language — a meeting point between a classical foundation and contemporary and post-bop jazz improvisation, between the Mongolian landscape and European city life, a language of deeply felt personal stories, told through lively rhythms, melodies, solos and ensemble playing that effortlessly transcends boundaries and touches upon our universal experiences.

At the age of 25, her album *Rising Sun*, released on Motéma, immediately opened doors internationally and led to sold-out performances at renowned festivals and packed concert halls across Europe and beyond.

The album also received the highest accolades – the German Jazz Prize for Ensemble of the Year, the Mungun Mod, Mongolia’s highest cultural honour, as well as unreserved praise from the German media and much of the leading jazz press in the USA and Europe.

Her Sun-Stars-Moon trilogy, which began as a quartet with *Rising Sun* and continued as a duo with *Under the Same Stars*, is set to conclude in 2027 with *Beyond the Moon* – recorded this year with her 21-piece chamber jazz orchestra, which has enabled her to expand her artistry into even more magnificent soundscapes.

Between the second and third chapters of the trilogy, *Bright Folk* was released as an important record of the artistic development of her increasingly popular quartet.

The album recaptures the energy and interplay of *Rising Sun* whilst simultaneously opening up new musical directions, shaped by years of touring, personal experiences and artistic growth.

The decisive impetus for *Bright Folk* came from an invitation from the Concerto-21 Foundation for Shuteen’s quartet to perform in Mongolia for the first time in October 2024.

Experiencing her homeland after so many years – not only through her own memories, but also through the perspectives of her bandmates – opened up a new dimension of connection between her past and present.

The journey became an exploration of returning, rediscovering and viewing one’s own roots with fresh eyes.

Among the places that left the deepest impression on her was her first trip to the Gobi Desert, her father’s birthplace. Its vast horizons, silence and

openness became a powerful source of inspiration for the compositions.

For Bright Folk, the Gobi became not merely a backdrop, but an emotional landscape

within the music – a place where origin, memory and belonging converge. Like the shifting light of the Gobi landscape, Bright Folk’s music moves between different states, embodying both the warmth of memory and the excitement of new beginnings.

At the heart of the album lies the idea that home is not always a physical place, but a feeling that we carry within us.

In ‘Home Is You’, Shuteen explores how home can be found in people, memories and objects.

Throughout the album, she reflects on the experience of living between worlds and finds beauty in the spaces between nostalgia and possibility, familiarity and change.

The track ‘Do You See The Stars I See?’ was inspired by her personal memories of long summer nights in Mongolia, when she used to look up at the stars with her father. ‘Now that I live thousands of kilometres away, I still look up and wonder: “Does he see the same stars?”’, she explains in her liner notes.

“The stars bridge all that distance – the same light reaches us, wherever we are.”

The title track, ‘Bright Folk’, pays tribute to people who brighten our lives through quiet strength, kindness, generosity, creativity, resilience and faith in others. She explains that the album also honours ‘the generations

before us’, ‘the dreamers who worked towards a more open world, so that someone like me, a woman from Mongolia, could imagine and eventually walk

paths that once seemed impossibly far away.”

The album is brought to life by the members of her international quartet

• her long-standing musical partner and life partner, the German bassist Nils Kugelmann
• the powerful young Belgian tenor and soprano saxophonist Simon Comté
• and the sensitive Israeli drummer Amir Bresler.

Together, they create a musical environment in which lyrical melodies, rhythmic energy and moments of openness and improvisation unfold intuitively and with a remarkably dynamic flow.

Saxophonist Jakob Manz – who accompanied the quartet for several years – also makes an elegant guest appearance on the recorder on the title track and on the alto saxophone on the enigmatic ‘Page #7671’, pieces that had already been performed live for several years before this recording was made.