A collection of standards, lovingly and skillfully performed by a close-knit group of top tier musicians in a reverent, traditional style — you can find it on any given evening in jazz's still-capital, New York City, if you hit the right clubs. What you usually won't find on those tiny basement stages, though, are women instrumentalists like Pureum Jin, founder of the new all-female saxophone quartet The Empress.

“Sometimes it can be challenging to keep my career moving forward, especially with the late-night jam sessions," says Jin, a mother of two young children. "I think jazz is still a world where being a parent can make things a bit harder to manage." So instead, Jin created her own stage upon which to pay homage to jazz icons like Charlie Parker and John Coltrane through those same familiar standards — one that was more welcoming to women artists like herself, but featured the same high level of artistry and expertise as those late night jam sessions. Square One is the result of those efforts, and the first release from Jin's Empress ensemble: two-time Grammy Award-winning baritone saxophonist Lauren Sevian, who also serves as a production advisor on the album, internationally acclaimed upstart Erena Terakubo and Chelsea Baratz, a genre-bending fixture of the New York scene. Fittingly, the album is being fully released on March 21, 2025 to celebrate both Women’s History Month and International Women’s Day.

As much as Jin envisions the project as a new starting place (hence the title) — proof of her and her collaborators' mastery of jazz's building blocks and thus an appropriate argument for their place within the music's DNA — it is much more than boxes being checked. Bright, crisp, fluid playing abounds, with a verve and enthusiasm that feels as wonderfully vintage as many of the tunes being played. Two originals, "Instant Composure" and "Reminiscing," are both composed by German saxophonist Michael Lutzeier, who is also responsible for all but one of the release's timeless arrangements. Jin herself took on "Everything Happens To Me," creating a lush, romantic musical world around her and her collaborator's solos. 

Jin has been planning the project for over a decade. Initially, she fell in love with Lutzeier's arrangements as the only female member of his ‘Supersax Korea’ project in the early 2010s — long before she'd moved stateside to pursue music in New York. The idea of reprising those arrangements stuck with her for years, and to make that same music as an all-women ensemble struck her as an ideal full-circle concept. "There weren't many saxophone players in Korea at that time, and especially not women saxophone players," she remembers. "I thought it would be really cool to highlight women in traditional jazz." After moving to New York in 2015, Jin started to meet the women who are now on this record — and the men who make up its rock solid rhythm section, Steve Ash (piano), Joey Ranieri (bass), and Pete Van Nostrand (drums). It is gender diversity, not any kind of exclusivity, that Jin is after. Once she had the arrangements from Lutzeier, all that was left was to book time at the renowned Van Gelder Recording Studio — which Jin had interviewed Don and Maureen Sickler about for Jazz People, a Korean jazz magazine years before. At that time, she had played a little within those famous walls and thought, "I really want to make my record here someday." 

She did just that, bringing lively, swinging improvisation and a still-underrepresented perspective into the hallowed studio. Maureen Sickler engineered the project, and Jin was the executive producer — another anomalous all-woman component of the record. The tempi are blistering, the tunes classic, and the solos bold and nimble all to channel the fervor of those after hours jazz clubs. Though the tunes are carefully arranged, they are dynamic rather than stiff — old-school without being sleepy. Tunes like "Stablemates" and "Milestones" hearken back to a time when jazz's machismo was even more unrelenting than it is now, so to hear them reclaimed by a band led by a quartet of women is all the more invigorating. "It's definitly getting better and I’m seeing more jazz musicians with children making a success in the scene, but there is still more work to be done and I want to be a part of it," Jin says. "I just want to show that we can also play this very hardcore music and that, simply, is my message."

— Natalie Weiner 

Natalie Weiner is a writer living in Dallas whose work has appeared in JazzTimes, Pitchfork, Billboard and more.

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