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With this album we open a new musical chapter - and can indirectly connect to past chapters in European Jazz history. The "TransEuropeExpress" (T.E.E.), has a lineup that is in the middle between the common small groups in Jazz and the bigband und that successfully unites musical mobility and improvisatory freedom with a broad palette of colors. It is conceived in a way that it gives room for improvisation also outside of soloistic contributions and it achieves a transparent chamber music sound. In this octet outstanding musicians of contemporary French and German Jazz have united to draw creative energies from the dispute and fusion of their different dialects and to form colorful and multilayered images of European Jazz. The music is beyond postmodernism in the sense of a juxtaposition of styles, but goes a step further by incorporating and integrating different musical colors into unified layers and webs. This happens melodically and rhythmically, harmonically and formally. Everything is interwoven and their is no sharp line of distinction between solo and collective, form and freedom, harmony and dissonance, composition and improvisation, but all these blend with each other constantly. The music is polyphonic, polyrhythmic, polyharmonic, polychrome and polystylistic and can be subsumed in the term "PolyJazz". The music may sound both "light French" or "structured German" - even if these are probably only clichés that could be turned around. The musicians are not stylistically limited to Jazz, but draw from a universal understanding of music. The instrumentation with violin and guitar, trombone, saxophones, bass clarinet, piano, double bass and drums is not necessarily typical for Jazz, but offers a certain freedom from a clearly defined stylistic classification. One can sense a collective and cooperative spirit in the band that is expressed in a sensitivity, vigilance and agility that is constantly present. (Hans Ludemann)

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Even more assured in its newest recorded effort, the appropriately named eight-piece Trans Europe Express (TEE) has become a confident, vigorous and multi-faceted ensemble as it evolves. Part of the reason is the freedom in composition and improvisation encouraged by the leader, German pianist Hans Lüdemann. Case in point: Of Polyjazz's 10 tracks, four were composed by the pianist; two were composed by French bassist Sébastien Boisseau; one by French violinist Théo Ceccaldi; one by French trombonist Yves Robert; one by German drummer Dejan Terzic and one by German saxophonist Silke Eberhard. The other two members are French saxophonist Alexandra Grimal and Finnish guitarist Kalle Kalima.

     —jazzword.com