Clara Haberkamp (*1989) has been making a strong impression on the German jazz scene ever since her early days with BuJazzO, now well over a decade ago. She is now on the management roster of one of Germany’s most prominent agencies, Agentur Wolkenstein in Regensburg.

Leading a piano trio has been a constant throughout Clara Haberkamp’s professional career; she formed her first trio in 2010. Jarle Vespestad joined the group as its regular drummer in 2022, and “Plateaux” the first recording to feature him 

What comes across most strongly in „Plateaux“ is the trio’s command of an astonishing spectrum of styles and moods. As she says of the trio: “We play on an equal footing and are ready to go in new directions at any moment. This requires a great willingness to take risks. I can sometimes hand over responsibility and let myself go.“

Both of her co-conspirators are infinitely subtle, top-flight players from a slightly older generation: bassist Oliver Potratz is one of the most in-demand players of the instrument in Germany; Jarle Vespestad’s vast experience includes several years with both Farmers Market and Tord Gustavsen’s trio. Each of them has made the best part of 100 albums.

And yet it is the phenomenally adept pianist who is clearly the one in charge, shaping the music in its many forms, throwing out the rhythmic and harmonic challenges to her skilful and wise colleagues.

The album title “Plateaux” comes from a 1980 book whose authors found every way they could to observe and encourage the dismantling of traditional power structures and hierarchies: “Mille Plateaux” by philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, both of whom died in the 1990s. The world has moved on since those days, and to witness Haberkamp at the helm of her trio is to understand that there are many better ways to invent and to communicate.

The music of “Plateaux” has everything from the knottiest of counterpoint (“Collage”), achingly intense lyricism (“Enfold me like a poem”), the quiet and reflective (“On a Park Bench”), idealised dreamscape (“Fantasmes”) to moments when she brings the music back to simple, heartfelt forms of expression which cannot fail to reach every heart (“If you could read my mind”). And there can be very few singer/pianists since Shirley Horn who have reached the degree of interdependence of piano and voice that Haberkamp brings to her hauntingly reharmonized “Danny Boy”, a welcome return to singing for just one track on the album.

“I have changed,” says Clara Haberkamp My role models these days are women, in music and elsewhere, who combine strength and self-determination with compassion and receptiveness.” These reflections don’t just feed into her own continuing development and her rising profile on the European music scene, they are also a defining part of the way she plays and leads her trio: naturally, totally at ease with herself at the piano and in her role as leader. It allows her to stand out in the crowded field of piano trios as very special, or “souverän” as the Germans say.