Chilean composer and musician Pablo Sáez is celebrating ten years of his fusion project Surensemble. His music takes South American folk traditions as its roots, contemporary jazz as its mechanism, and European music as its conceptual framework.
Today, he is celebrating his most personal project: Surensemble. Formed by musicians from different parts of the world, the group has released three albums. More than an ensemble, it is a mechanism made up of multiple interconnected gears, constantly taking on different forms and sounds.
Musically, it is an encounter between three worlds: Latin American folk traditions, contemporary jazz, and European music of the 20th and 21st centuries. A broad and deeply rooted fusion of sounds and narratives, built around the drums—the engine of Surensemble.
“I was born into fusion, I am a fusion musician, and I will die in fusion.”
A PLAY ON WORDS
The name Surensemble is itself a play on words that completes Sáez’s conceptual approach to the project. It takes the French expression sous-ensemble, meaning “subset,” and replaces the prefix sous- with sur, meaning “above.”
The idea of sur, however, is geographical rather than grammatical: it refers to the cardinal direction from which Pablo Sáez comes, the place from which his first ideas emerge and from which they connect with other musical sources as they expand.
“Subsets are essential to this music. When I finished my studies at the Folkwang Conservatory in Essen, I began composing music from recurring motifs. I found myself repeating these motifs, extending them or reducing them. The idea of subsets had a lot to do with that,” he explains.
Surensemble debuted in Germany as a quintet featuring Chilean and Brazilian musicians. That formation recorded the self-titled Surensemble (2017), alternating original compositions with mantras. In 2022, the group released Inmanencia, a live recording made at Loft Cologne with German and Colombian musicians.
The third album, Stay Together (2024), grew out of the experience of the pandemic.
“It was something that really marked me. Seeing people who did not know each other helping one another and creating a community,” Sáez recalls. Around that time, the hashtag “stay together”—“let’s remain together”—was circulating widely on social media in Cologne.
“We address themes connected to the spirit of our time and all the changes we are experiencing in the 2020s: technological advances, diasporas, exegesis, and the new interpretations of the world that are emerging today,” he concludes.
Edición Nº 183 – Julio 2026
