Album Title: The Boiling Stories of A Smoking Kettle

Release Date:  3 April 2020

Label:  Naim Records

The Obradović-Tixier Duo is the intriguing partnership of Lada Obradović, a Croatian jazz drummer and David Tixier a French pianist.   Together, they swept the board with a host of ‘first prize’ and ‘best band’ awards at last year’s summer festivals, including the RéZZo Focal prize at Jazz à Vienne and a soloist prize for Lada at the 2019 La Défense Jazz Festival.  Not surprising.  The duo’s outstanding musicality and super-contemporary and ever-so-stylish sound, is as compelling as it is exciting.

The Boiling Stories of a Smoking Kettle is the duo’s first UK release (in France, a self –released EP in 2017 preceded a 2-track vinyl earlier this year).  Its quirky opener, Dear You, sets the scene for their striking blend of acoustic and electronic sounds.

Tixier simultaneously plays acoustic piano and synths, while Obradović combines drums with glockenspiel, hapi drum and kalimba, while effects, samples and voice are used to wondourous effect.  Both rhythmic and free, their original compositions are at once delicate and insistent, dreamy and forceful yet always surprising. Tixier’s sophisticated harmonies and lyrical drama interweave with Lada’s polyrhythms, his serial shamanic piano phrases muffled by digital blankets.

Aside from winning awards and performing with her duo, Lada Obradović designed the first Jazz Series of cymbals for TRX Cymbals.  She has launched a charity project, StartAs You Are, for which she designs shoes and which Tixier manages, and as an actress she performs in a new Netflix series ‘The Eddy’, for Oscar winning director Damien Chazelle (La La Land, Whiplash)