Sebastian Sternal

Thelonia, his most intimate work to date. "I had already made the decision for a solo album quite a while before the pandemic," Sebastian Sternal immediately clears up a possible misunderstanding. The fact that the multi-award-winning (WDR Jazz Prize, New German Jazz Prize, etc.) pianist and composer is now presenting his first solo work after almost 20 years of professional career may come as a surprise to some After all, with his large-format Symphonic Society on two albums (both received Jazz Echos, Vol. 2 also the annual prize of the German Record Critics), he has extremely successfully dissolved genre boundaries, among other things, through the combination of jazz octet and string quartet. Sternal then shone in a dynamic trio with the American star bassist Larry Grenadier and Jonas Burgwinkel - for the album Home he received his third Echo in 2018

Sebastian Sternal - Home It was a distinct artistic idea that prompted Sebastian Sternal to lure the internationally celebrated Larry Grenadier from New York to Cologne. After Sternal’s two ECHO-Award-winning, large-scale productions under the name Sternal Symphonic Society, the virtuoso pianist, composer and arranger wanted to play in ”classical” trio instrumentation again. “After the orchestral, late Romantically inspired timbre of the Society, I had an album in mind, that exhibits a more rhythmic and physical attitude,” Sternal summarizes the idea in a sentence and adds: “It is about melodies, the energy in music and about swing; of course in a modern aesthetic, not necessarily in the traditional sense.” Sternal’s artistic reflections quickly led him to Larry Grenadier. The 51-year-old American from San Francisco initially studied English literature at Stanford, then settled in New York via Boston as a jazz musician in the mid 1990s and is a renowned specialist for trio formations.