Sharon Mansur - Trigger (2025)

Perhaps you remember The Goblins, that cult-favorite Italian prog-rock band that infused Dario Argento’s films with eerie, unforgettable soundtracks in the 1970s. There’s a whiff of that haunted nostalgia in Triger, the latest album by Israeli composer and keyboardist Sharon Mansur. But that’s only the beginning of the story. Add a dash of Erik Satie’s elusive lyricism, a grounding in classical training, a theatrical flair honed in metal bands, and a restless instinct for jazz improvisation, and you’ll begin to understand the singular soundscape of Triger, a radically imaginative, genre-defying release that asserts itself as one of the most compelling jazz albums of the year.

Mansur’s music is visionary, idiosyncratic, and startlingly sincere. It is not built to please but to provoke, to stir, to reveal. Within this dense sonic world, melody and rhythm do not merely coexist, they argue, they dance, they flirt. The trio, anchored by drummer David Sirkis and bassist David Michaeli, plays with uncanny cohesion, as if drawn together by some gravitational pull beyond their control. This isn’t just a tight ensemble; it’s an ecosystem.

Born and raised in Israel, Mansur can’t help but carry her classical background like a signature stitched into every phrase she composes. Her work, dense, intense, and unmistakably personal—feels like a reflection of the fractured times we live in: global dissonance, political complexity, personal resilience. And yet, Triger doesn’t brood. It hopes. It insists on joy. “My first deep musical experience came when I saw The Lion King at age six,” Mansur recalls. “Some of those orchestral passages were so powerful, I thought my heart might explode.” That moment of emotional overwhelm, she says, shaped her sensibility for good.

From there, she plunged into the world of classical piano, Chopin, Rachmaninoff, the great romantics, while also developing a taste for the heavy and the sublime. Symphonic metal, psychedelic rock, progressive experimentation: this was not a binary musical upbringing but a kaleidoscope of collisions. At one point, she played keyboard in a metal band fronted by an operatic soprano, fusing bombast and delicacy in equal measure. “It was dramatic, theatrical, over the top,” she says, smiling. “But it taught me about intensity. About not being afraid of excess.”

That willingness to live at the emotional edge, to embrace contradiction, saturates every measure of Triger. Its pulse can be erratic, even unsettling. The compositions refuse conventional resolution. It is music that might alienate casual listeners, but for those who lean in, it offers rare rewards. One hears in it the trajectory of a restless spirit, someone unwilling to settle into the expectations of genre or geography.

Mansur’s journey into jazz was not inevitable. “At first, I didn’t feel I belonged,” she says of her early days at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance. “I came from this world of drama and rawness, in both classical and rock. Everything in jazz felt so light—so carefree. But what seduced me was the freedom, the playfulness, the idea that I could invent my own voice within it.”

And invent it she has. Triger moves at breakneck speed, propelled by Sirkis’s crisp, often explosive drumming and Michaeli’s supple, ever-responsive bass lines. At times, the trio seems less like a band than like a single, multi-limbed organism, shape-shifting in real time. There is chaos here, yes—but it’s a chaos Mansur controls with the precision of a master illusionist. Beneath the surface turbulence lies a composer with an unshakable command of form and an instinctive grasp of melodic storytelling.

“The way I see it,” she says, “music shows that we can cooperate. That we feel the same emotions, even when we don’t speak the same language. It’s the language of the heart, of nature. I hope, through it, to have a small positive influence on the world around me. I stay humble, I know I know nothing. I just do what I do best. And if I can make people from different cultures smile and cry together, in the same room, then all of this means something.”

It’s hard not to subscribe to such a worldview, especially now, in an age where borders blur and digital networks connect and confuse us in equal measure. Mansur’s music is born of a fractured planet, yes, but it does not fracture further. Instead, it gathers the pieces into a coherent vision, sometimes difficult, often dazzling, always deeply felt.

Triger is not background music. It’s not safe, and it’s not easy. But for those who believe that art should challenge as well as comfort, should interrogate as well as entertain, it offers something rare and necessary. It’s a conversation starter. A provocation. An invitation. Best shared with friends, and played loud.

Thierry De Clemensat
Member at Jazz Journalists Association
USA correspondent for Paris-Move and ABS magazine
Editor in chief – Bayou Blue Radio, Bayou Blue News

TRACKLIST

1. Sharon Mansur - Outside In
2. Sharon Mansur - Tunnel Maze
3. Sharon Mansur - If I Can
4. Sharon Mansur - February
5. Sharon Mansur - Trigger
6. Sharon Mansur - Change Your Narrative
7. Sharon Mansur - Big Dreams in Kadikoy
8. Sharon Mansur - From the OV