Michael Wollny Trio Klangspuren

"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.

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…

This story begins with just one sound, originating in the place which Berlin jazz people think of as their living room, the A-Trane. Back in December 2019, the club was host to four leading figures in today’s improvised music scene, who turned this cozy space into their blank canvas, their research lab. In eight sets over four nights, piano phenomenon Michael Wollny, re-inventor of the soprano saxophone Emile Parisien, electric bass icon Tim Lefebvre, and that free spirit of the drum kit Christian Lillinger were given free rein.