Natascha Roth

Liner Notes by Leo Sidran 

Unbreak embodies the idea that music moves through people and that people move through music. It is a document of a consummate vocalist and composer, surrounded by musicians she loves and admires, challenging herself to take chances; and a testament to the transformative power of a life spent in the service of singing and songs.

Until her mid-teens Berlin-based singer Natascha Roth grew up largely with her father, a journalist and foreign correspondent, while her mother by birth struggled with mental illness. The circumstances forced Roth to grow up quickly and, she says, partly disengage from her own emotions.

But music provided a doorway.

Roth became obsessed with jazz at age 16, the first time she heard Ella Fitzgerald singing with Count Basie. On singer Mark Murphy’s recommendation, she eventually studied jazz voice in Graz, Austria, where Murphy and Andy Bey became two of the most important mentors in her musical life.

Bey was constantly practicing his craft. Roth remembers asking him whether that degree of passion was available to everyone. “I don’t know,” he told her, “but I think you can cultivate it.”

If Bey’s invitation to cultivate passion was the map, Murphy helped Roth identify her biggest roadblock as an artist. “Honey,” he told her, “you gotta free those emotions.”

For years, Roth was fascinated by singers who seemed able to reach emotions she herself couldn't quite access. “It took me 30 years,” she says. “But I knew he was right.”

She has also placed enormous faith in musical connection: the feeling of recognizing something in another artist and following it. For decades she returned to a filmed performance of Brazilian singer Dolores Duran singing “A Noite Do Meu Bem,” transfixed by the emotional intensity of the performance.

She felt a similar connection hearing trumpeter John Sneider accompanying Andy Bey on Tuesdays in Chinatown. Years later,

after being connected to Sneider through guitarist James Scholfield and singer Curtis Stigers, Roth got up the courage to ask him to arrange some songs. He agreed almost immediately.

“I have since learned that when you love what people do, there’s a chance they might love what you do as well.”

That spirit of trust became central to Unbreak, a record where lived experience created the conditions for live spontaneity. Jobim’s “Luiza,” a song Roth had carried for years, was learned with the band on the spot. “A Noite Do Meu Bem,” the Dolores Duran song, was suggested with only a few hours left in a session.

The willingness to sing a song for the first time in the studio is at the heart of Unbreak. So is Roth’s preference for first takes, uncorrected vocals and moments when uncertainty becomes a creative tool.

“I'm best on first takes. It's got to be intuitive, and I have to trick myself into it.”

Perhaps the greatest risk was trusting her own writing. Four of Roth’s compositions appear here: “More,” “Healed,” “Halfway There,” written for her teenage daughter, and the title track. She deliberately kept some of the songs from Scholfield while writing them. “I didn't want anyone to comment on it,” she says. “I had to really find myself in that.”

That process ultimately led Roth back to what she had spent much of her life trying to contain.

For Roth, to “unbreak” is not to undo the past, but to allow herself to experience what came with it: “You gotta feel the love, and you gotta unleash the pain to be able to unbreak.”

Unbreak was recorded in a matter of days. But it took decades for Roth to arrive at the place where she could make it this way: trusting the songs she loves, the musicians she admires, her own compositions and, finally, the emotions she once learned to contain. Music moves through people, and people move through music.

On Unbreak, we hear both: a lifetime of music channeled through Roth’s singular voice, and an artist transformed by letting it through.

Leo Sidran

NYC, September 14th 2026