Acclaimed composer, arranger and bandleader Ayn Inserto presents an evening of her visionary large ensemble music with the world-renowned WDR Big Band Jagged Edges & Elegant Lines, out August 7, 2026 via Summit Records, featuring a career-spanning selection of compositions along with a newly written suite for guest trumpeter Sean Jones.
“In this extraordinary collaboration with the mighty WDR band, Ayn takes the helm, spinning a swath of imaginative tales, capturing and pushing the big band jazz composition legacy forward with her keen imagination….Ayn is at the top of her game as a composer in the contemporary jazz ensemble world.” – saxophonist/composer Christine Jensen
“…a fabulous tour de force, featuring Ayn’s intricate and elegant writing for an inspired WDR Big Band, all in a live concert setting. Her compositions and arrangements take full advantage of the ensemble, going from full-on lyricism to complex counterpoint, all while displaying her unique musical personality….The whole album is a joy to listen to.” – acclaimed saxophonist/composer Miguel Zenón
25 years ago, the Singapore-born, Boston-based composer Ayn Inserto founded her namesake Ayn Inserto Jazz Orchestra to breathe life into her vivacious and innovative charts. A landmark occasion, to be sure – but any celebration of the ensemble’s silver anniversary will have to wait a bit. It seems that evolving into one of the most creative voices in modern big band music means that commemorating your own milestones has to take a back seat.
In just the last few years, Inserto has served as musical director and conductor for the Frankfurt Radio Big Band for performances of compositions by the bassist Linda May Han Oh, featuring arrangements by Inserto and the late Jim McNeely; her work was included in the publication New Standards: 101 Lead Sheets by Women, a project spearheaded by Terri Lyne Carrington and the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice; DownBeat praised her intricate yet accessible writing, saying that it, “strikes the perfect balance between entertaining artistry and finely crafted arrangements that could be studied closely in the classroom.”
In the midst of all that, Inserto received a call from the world-renowned WDR Big Band to present an evening of her compositions, along with four newly commissioned pieces that resulted in a suite. The results can be enjoyed on the bandleader’s first new album in eight years, Jagged Edges & Elegant Lines: The Music of Ayn Inserto. The live recording features a radiant selection of compositions from Inserto’s songbook alongside a new suite written for the acclaimed trumpeter Sean Jones, the ensemble’s special guest soloist for the evening.
“I could never have imagined myself being in Cologne, presenting my own music with this amazing band that I’ve followed for years, that has performed music by so many of my mentors and influences,” Inserto says. “It was a treat and an honor.”
Out August 7, 2026 via Summit Records, Jagged Edges & Elegant Lines takes its name from the disparate qualities that Inserto feels best embody her music, which is described as, “unapologetic, rhythmically insistent, and built on a language she has refined over time” in the astute liner notes by bass trombonist and longtime collaborator Jennifer Wharton. “Her music lives in the tension between those two ideas. The edges are sharp, often angular, driven by horn stabs, bass line interruptions, and unexpected rhythmic resolutions. But the lines they form – across ensemble writing, across form, across time – are surprisingly continuous… Her compositional identity is built on controlled friction.”
It also comes from a place of deep personal connection and community, which is nowhere so evident as on “Suite for Sean Jones,” the four-movement piece that Inserto crafted for, and about, the trumpeter. Unlike anything she’s written before, the suite is a portrait in music of four key facets that she sees as making up the personality of a stellar musician whose artistry and friendship she’s valued for many years. She remembers meeting while he was chair of the brass department at Berklee, where she is Assistant Chair of Harmony and Jazz Composition – though it turns out that a young trumpeter had sat in with her college band during a tour of Italy in 2001, who she only discovered was Jones many years later. “I feel like our story keeps growing and growing.”
For the suite, Inserto explains, “I wanted to capture Sean. So I listened to his recordings as a leader for a few months straight, just trying to get into my subconscious and start to figure out who he is, what his sound is, where he is coming from. No matter how many pyrotechnics there are in his playing, there’s always so much soul, and he never ignores the blues.”
The piece that emerged is a masterful blend of dazzling complexity (“Sean told me to write him some hard stuff,” Inserto shrugs) and jaw-droppingly gorgeous emotion. Each movement focuses on one separate aspect, increasingly personal, that makes up Jones’ being: “The Artist,” “The Educator,” “The Husband and Father,” and, absorbing a gospel tinge, “The Human Soul.” By the end of the evening, Inserto witnessed a tear falling from Jones’ eye, and the feeling was contagious. “People in the audience were crying,” the composer recalls. “It was such an emotional and fun night, full of magic.”
The setlist throws up challenges from the outset, beginning with the rhythmically daunting “Eshel Sketch” from the AIJO’s 2009 album Muse, which also yielded the rich, wine-like hues of “Vinifera”. “La Danza Infinita” is a lush and gripping ballad originally recorded by the Colours Jazz Orchestra in 2015. “Down a Rabbit Hole,” the title track from the 2018 AIJO album that also featured Jones, is a maddening whirlpool of a tune that embodies the “curiouser and curiouser” inspiration of Wonderland.
Inserto wrote “Mr. Jones and Company” for NYO Jazz, the Carnegie Hall national youth ensemble led by Jones, while “BJ’s Tune” is her arrangement of a Jones composition dedicated to his nephew. Both add to the picture drawn by “Suite for Sean Jones,” an illustration of a tender, warm, eloquent and raucously funny spirit.
In its wide-focus entirety, Jagged Edges & Elegant Lines is also a brilliant portrait of Ayn Inserto: visionary in its abstract architectures, yet welcoming in its generosity of spirit; giving in its spotlighting of the myriad gifts of a band of virtuosic talents, yet communal in its blending of those voices into a unified and stunning whole. “For me, melody is queen,” Inserto states simply, though implying a profound depth of meaning. “I wrote a lot of difficult music for this concert, but if I can’t sing it, I don’t gravitate towards it. Music is just so powerful, and if a live performance can generate that kind of energy, it can change people’s perception of what it can be.”
Ayn Inserto is a groundbreaking composer who is emerging as one of the preeminent voices of her generation. Her big band, the Ayn Inserto Jazz Orchestra, has recorded three albums with special guests Bob Brookmeyer, John Fedchock, George Garzone and Sean Jones, garnering acclaim from DownBeat, The Boston Globe and the Jazz Journalists Association, among others. In 2022, she was the musical director of the Frankfurt Radio Big Band (HR Big Band) for performances featuring Linda May Han Oh, orchestrating and arranging Oh’s music along with the late Jim McNeely. Inserto has served as a panelist for the Jazz Improv Convention with Dr. Billy Taylor in New York, the International Society of Jazz Arrangers and Composers, Women Jazz Composers: Empowering Equal Voices in the Large Ensemble Landscape, as well as for the Tribute to Bob Brookmeyer at New England Conservatory. She is a mentor for the Women in Jazz Organization and a member of the Board of Directors for the Jazz Education Network, and her music has been published in New Standards: 101 Lead Sheets By Women, a publication spearheaded by Terri Lyne Carrington and the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice. Inserto currently resides in Boston where she is the Assistant Chair of Harmony and Jazz Composition at Berklee College of Music and is a Jazz Composers Present Artist.
WDR Big Band – Jagged Edges & Elegant Lines: The Music of Ayn Inserto
Summit Records – SMT-850 – Recorded May 31, 2024
Release date August 7, 2026
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