Michael Wollny, Joachim Kühn

It’s a very special kind of meeting, a leap across the generation divide: Melancholia documents the creative collaboration between one of the most important influences on post-war jazz and one of the greatest talents of the new breed of jazzers in Germany: Heinz Sauer and Michael Wollny.
Sauer has always been a master of the terse miniature, but not in the way that it is shown in this CD. The music can be contrasted with his compositions for the Jazz Ensemble of Jazz Ensemble of the Frankfurt Radio where he brings together strange themes in amazing elaborate arrangements…

The exciting Berlin trio Michael Wollny / Eva Kruse / Eric Schaefer present their third album: no easy task, after all of the last few years’ critical praise that has accompanied the two previous albums they recorded for ACT, and the same critical acclaim has followed their live performances.
At its best, and in its greatest moments, jazz is the art that unearths the universal elements that lie buried in each individual. The ad-hoc arrangements of many jazz recordings stand in stark contrast to this aspiration, and to escape the curse of the smallest common denominator, it’s also necessary to have a fixed formation in jazz. Yet especially in German jazz, groups that remain together and come out with new CDs over a longer period of time are the exception…

"As an improviser, you often find that it‘s not the compositions themselves you‘re playing, but your own memories of them. And as these memories come back to you in the moment, they assert their continuing existence in the here and now," says Michael Wollny. In other words, songs are like ghosts. Wollny‘s new album "Ghosts" is a gathering of some of the ghosts that regularly haunt him. Typically for Wollny, they range from classics like Franz Schubert's "Erlkönig" to jazz standards, film music, songs with a certain fragility by Nick Cave, say, or the band Timber Timbre, and also include his own darkly evocative original compositions.