A Few We Remember and Live In Italy

Jonah Parzen-Johnson and Lau Nau return with a double CD edition on We Jazz Records bringing together their 2025 debut duo release A Few We Remember first time on CD, plus a live recording from the album release tour recorded in Bolzano, Italy, in April 2026.

In April of 2026, Lau Nau (Laura Naukkarinen) and Jonah Parzen-Johnson crossed into Italy separately and made their way by train to meet in Bolzano for their first tour together. There was a bit of the energy of the first day of school. Nervous. When they arrived, they realized they had matching luggage. Two little samsonites, a modular synth, and a baritone saxophone.

When does a memory become a story? Perhaps it's when the person you shared it with turns around and shares it back. In that moment, it becomes something a little fantastical. Amplified. Alive. A story can live in the world in a way a memory never could. From the moment they began the first concert of the tour, with all the anxiety and excitement of a first day, you could feel the memory of the album coming to life. Eight living characters they could summon, intact, each night.

As the tour continued across the Italian border into Austria and Germany, recordings arrived from the first concert in Bolzano. You could recognize much of the studio album, but they were playing with both patience and reckless abandon. The kind of freedom that seems to exist only when music is played live. We are proud to share these recordings alongside the studio album in this new iteration. A Few We Remember: first memory, now story.

A Few We Remember is a series of improvisations for baritone saxophone, modular synth, and little instruments interpreting a collection of narrative scores by Jonah Parzen-Johnson. Each score is a story you can read, but more than that, it is a trigger for a sensation. If all goes well, that's what finds its way into the improvisation. It might be tempting to ask to read the scores, but try to resist. This music isn't about the stories; it's about how it feels to tell them.

What began as a studio album continues here with this live document, recorded at Carambolage in Bolzano, Italy, on the night of 13 April 2026.