The women of Artemis move gracefully through jazz styles and moods

Artemis is the jazz-world equivalent of rock’s legendary Traveling Wilburys: a group of supremely talented solo artists who also happen to be stellar as an ensemble. Audiences seem to agree, including these folks at the Newport Jazz Festival in 2018, the packed house brought to its feet at Carnegie Hall in 2019 and this crowd at New York City’s Le Poisson Rouge in January 2020, just a few months before COVID-19 began wreaking havoc worldwide.

The music media is quite enamored as well. Here’s Rolling Stone from 2018: “Their set played like an expertly crafted mixtape, moving from a knotty version of Thelonious Monk’s ‘Brilliant Corners’ to a surprisingly dramatic version of the Beatles’ ‘Fool on the Hill.’ ”

A few years later, upon the release of Artemis’ self-titled Blue Note debut, the Wall Street Journal hailed the “ensemble’s cohesion, its ability to move gracefully through various styles and moods, and to sound, by turns, authoritative and playful, locked-in or loose-limbed. In the tradition of drummer Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, Artemis crafts an identifiable band sound rooted in sturdy yet flexible rhythms. ... Artemis means to upend expectations, gently and yet with force. Its music comes off like a nuanced argument for a fresh point of view.”

The fact that Artemis has no men in its ranks is merely incidental. Or should be. Jazz has long been and to a large but gradually diminishing degree remains male-dominated, so the subject of gender invariably arises in reviews and articles. But it’s merely a perfunctory response. The music, not the chromosomal composition of its makers, is all that matters.

That’s certainly the view of Artemis trumpeter and celebrated soloist Ingrid Jensen, who will appear in a Symphony Center Presents Jazz concert April 29 with her equally lauded bandmates: pianist and musical director Renee Rosnes, clarinetist Anat Cohen, tenor saxophonist Nicole Glover, bassist Noriko Ueda and drummer Allison Miller. They’ll share a bill with award-winning jazz vocalist Dee Dee Bridgewater and pianist Bill Charlap.

Dismissing the popular description of Artemis as a “super group,” Jensen, whose day job is directing the Jazz Arts Department at New York’s Manhattan School of Music, insists they’re just “a bunch of people that happen to dig playing together and who challenge each other in really unique ways.”

“Everyone has to have some ego to play this music,” Jensen says. “There has to be that happy balance.”

But it’s the helpful ego of self-knowledge rather than the destructive one of self-glory.

“I think we actually empower one another to be even more like who we are when it’s time to hit with the band, but we’re also coming to the table with the personalities that we have and knowing that we don’t have to change them,” Jensen says. “Because we’re listening on such a deep level of trust, it’s just a rise. I never played in a great rock band, but when you play in a world-class band where everyone’s so good, even when it’s a sucky night, it’s still pretty happening.”

While the notion that Artemis might have a “sucky night” musically is pretty laughable, the last few years have been far less than ideal from a performance standpoint, courtesy of COVID-19. Just as the ensemble was gaining traction with crowds and critics alike, the pandemic struck and shut everything down for more than a year. Then, just as the contagion was receding in many areas after another long and infectious winter, the brutal war in Ukraine cast another pall. But it’s times like these when music, and entertainment in general, is more valuable than ever for the emotional respite it provides.

“Personally, I feel a little bit more responsibility to show up as someone who can bring healing and escape in a healthy way,” says Jensen, who performed front-yard concerts from her home during the COVID shutdown. “And there’s also a feeling that it doesn’t really matter how good or bad [a performance] is anymore. What matters is where we’re coming from as a unit. What I’m bringing to the stage is hopefully a sense of community and family, so that everybody in the audience gets to step into our world and see what it’s like, just for a second.”

On a personal level for Jensen, Artemis “has been very healing for me, too, because I went through some pretty heavy traumatic stuff right before our first tour in 2019,” she says. “That was just a huge healing sanctuary to exist in for a while.”

At this point, Artemis have such a solid personal and musical rapport that getting back together and jamming in Jensen’s basement after an extended forced separation was “like a day had passed.” Since they barely have time to rehearse, that synchronicity is a gift — and something they’re always striving to improve.

“I don’t want to sound like we’re snobs or anything, but we really are trying to come in with a higher level of empathy than the night before and a deeper sense of listening and obviously more and more storytelling ammunition,” Jensen says. “It’s like, What can I say tonight that’s going to be different and that’s also going to challenge us to go in a different [direction]? Is it the room that will inspire me? The acoustics? We don’t know, because we’re just operating from moment to moment and trying to stay in that moment without ruining it with any extraneous bad ego.”

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