Anna Webber has a habit of handing her bands a problem before she hands them a tune. The Simple Trio, her long-running group with pianist Matt Mitchell and drummer John Hollenbeck, has spent more than a decade turning rhythmic puzzles into music that swings in spite of itself. Shimmer Wince, released on Intakt in October 2023, sets a stranger constraint: everyone plays in just intonation.
Just intonation is the old way of tuning, built on the whole-number ratios of the harmonic series rather than the twelve equal steps a piano gives you. Its thirds are sweeter and its sevenths lower, and once a band is in it, chords that would sound routine in equal temperament turn either glassy or slightly wrong. The title is the whole aesthetic in two words, and Webber has picked players who can supply both halves. Adam O'Farrill's trumpet and Mariel Roberts's cello can bend to any ratio she asks for; Elias Stemeseder's synthesizer can be set to those ratios exactly, a fixed point for the group to lean against; and Lesley Mok's drums keep the whole thing from drifting into pure sound study. Webber herself moves between tenor saxophone, flute and bass flute, often holding long tones that let the beating between pitches become the rhythm.
That is the trick of the record. Rather than treating tuning as a colour, Webber writes it into the pulse. The seven pieces, from Swell to the closing Shimmer, keep returning to grooves that feel almost danceable until the harmony tilts underneath them. Fizz and Squirmy, each past eleven minutes, are the clearest statements of the method, moving between tight ensemble figures and stretches where the five voices peel apart into overlapping pairs before the drums pull them back into line. The two Periodicity pieces work as hinges, shorter and more skeletal, the tuning system exposed like the frame of a building.
The album fits a pattern in Webber's career of choosing the difficult route and making it sound inevitable. Born in 1984 in British Columbia, she studied at McGill before moving to New York in 2008 and later adding a second master's degree at the Jazz Institute Berlin, a city she returned to as a Berlin Prize fellow in 2021. A Guggenheim Fellowship came in 2018, the Herb Alpert Award in 2024, and in 2023 she became co-chair of jazz studies at New England Conservatory alongside Ken Schaphorst. A new Simple Trio album followed in 2024 and a second record by the big band she co-leads with Angela Morris in 2025.
What sets Shimmer Wince apart from that output is how much it gives to the band. The scores are unmistakably Webber's, but the record lives in the gap between the ratios on the page and the way five people actually play them, and she is careful to let that gap stay open.
