American-German, Brooklyn-based sax player-composer Ingrid Laubrock channels her literary interests into a most poetic work and one of her ambitious ones, setting music to American, New York-based poet, essayist, and teacher Erica Hunt’s poem “Mood Librarian – a poem in koan”, a personal interpretation, or introspection of Zen Buddhism’s illogical riddles – kōans. Laubrock met Hunt (who performed before with reed master Marty Ehrlich) in 2019, and liked this “collection of sixty micro poetic fragments – cryptic, intuitively relatable, sometimes funny, and, true to the nature of koans, open-ended”. Laubrock’s producer (and poet), David Breskin, suggested the title Purposing The Air, for this evocative double album by modifying a line from the penultimate koan (“birds purpose the air / so you purpose /pen and paper”), corresponding with the cover photo of four workers building the Golden
