Enji isn’t your typical Mongolian jazz singer

Whenever people from disparate geographies come together to make new music, passive listeners tend to treat the results like mosaics or club sandwiches — assemblages made to dazzle and nourish us with the vague suggestion of a universal language that might eventually help our idiot species transcend its fractiousness. Enji’s music feels way deeper than that. No tiles, no tiers, no pseudo-kumbaya. She’s a Mongolian jazz singer recording bossa nova-hued ballads in Germany, but instead of coming together like global bric-a-brac, her songs mix like satin interior paint — vivid and smooth.

Her gorgeous third album, “Ulaan,” is extraordinary, a singular result of unique circumstances, but also modest, because isn’t everything that happens in this life a singular result of unique circumstances? Born E.Enkhjargal in the Mongolian capital of Ulaanbaatar, Enji spent her childhood living in a yurt, raised by working parents who loved to sing. Fascinated with traditional folk melodies, she grew up to become a music teacher, until a jazz outreach program organized by the Goethe-Institut suddenly bent her path toward a recording career in Munich. Enji’s 2017 debut, “Mongolian Song,” featured jazz arrangements of traditional Mongolian music (plus some extra splash from legendary drummer Billy Hart), while her 2021 album, “Ursgal,” found the singer penning her own interior ballads under the influence of jazz standards. Now, with “Ulaan,” Enji has expanded her band (guitarist Paul Brändle, bassist Munguntovch Tsolmonbayar) to include two Brazilian players (drummer Mariá Portugal, clarinetist Joana Queiroz), and together, they seem to have found a place for the singer’s voice that didn’t previously exist.

It barely exists, though. The instrumentation on “Ulaan” feels so delicate, it’s often on the precipice of vanishing. Keep your ears focused and you’ll hear arrangements as practical as Enji’s singing, which even at its lullaby-softest, remains stealthily rhythmic and deeply cooperative. On “Duulnaa,” when she floats into a sequence of curlicue vowels with Queiroz’s clarinet twirling nearby, it’s like two puffs of smoke floating through one another. In “Picture/Three Shadows,” Brändle’s guitar converges with Enji and Queiroz so gently, it’s hard to know whether the instruments are supporting the voice or the voice is supporting the instruments. Instead of obeying a formal hierarchy, their music becomes a sort of liquid interdependency.

Don’t worry about losing yourself in the swirl. Across a neat 36-minutes, “Ulaan” conjures a sense of wonderment without ponderousness, sentimentality or melodrama. These songs sound so inventive, so free, yet so grounded — and if they end up calming your mind, the aim wasn’t to numb it, but to open it. It’s generous work, and it’s selfless, too. No one here ever sounds like they’re trying to draw attention to themselves. That responsibility falls to us. Share this music with people you like and listen to it with the people you love. (source: Washington Post)