With this new creation So Dance (... and please let me listen to your song, Joachim Raffel marks a watershed in his writingprocess, creating at the same time an extraordinary synthesis of the different threads in his work over the past 25 years, aninnovative interrogation of language and techniques and an impressive step toward new territory. Concise minimalism, a verypersonal bop-rooted jazz language, free improvisation, piano solo, small chamber formations, big band and surprising large-scale spacey choral loops all these diverse elements fall into place so logically that the overriding impression is one ofcoherence, unity, economy, maturity and yes, quite simply mastery . Steve Gibbs