Michael Wollny Trio – Weltentraum (2014)

Michael Wollny (born 25 May 1978) is a German jazz pianist and a professor at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Leipzig. He has played with international musicians including Joachim Kühn, Tamar Halperin, Marius Neset, Andreas Schaerer, Émile Parisien and Vincent Peirani, and recorded award-winning albums. In his Michael Wollny Trio, he has played with percussionist Eric Schaefer [de] and bassist Tim Lefebvre.

Wollny took piano and violin lessons at the Musikschule Schweinfurt and at the Hermann Zilcher Conservatory in Würzburg until 1997, successfully competing in the Jugend musiziert. He then studied at the Hochschule für Musik Würzburg with Chris Beier [de]. He took the artistic diploma with distinction in 2002, and the master classes diploma in 2004. He also studied with John Taylor and Walter Norris.

From 1998 to 2002, Wollny was a member of the touring Bundesjazzorchester [de]. He also played in a quartet led by Hubert Winter [de]. Wollny’s debut album was recorded with Wolfgang Kriener and Joachim Leyh. Wollny has played with Heinz Sauer from 2001 both as a duo and in a quartet. He was also a member of the trio [em] [de], with bassist Eva Kruse and percussionist Eric Schaefer [de]. He recorded CDs as a member of the group Young Friends (Great German Songbook, 2005), with Winter (Different Kind of Stories, 2003), with Hans-Peter Salentin [de] (Beyond Your Thoughts, Sound of Silence), and with Nils Landgren (The Moon, The Stars and You, 2011), among others. He was a regular pianist at the Staatstheater Nürnberg and the Nationaltheater Mannheim from 1999.

In 2005 Wollny signed a contract with the label ACT Music + Vision on which he released several albums with his trio and in collaboration with other artists, such as Sauer and Nils Landgren. In 2007 he released his first solo album Hexentanz. In 2014 his trio, now with bassist Tim Lefebvre, recorded the album Weltentraum, which made the pop charts. A review in The Guardian noted “They are one of the world’s great jazz-driven piano trios, and Nachtfahrten takes nothing away from this assessment.” In 2017, he was an artist in residence (Fokus Jazz: Michael Wollny) of the Rheingau Musik Festival, interviewed in a Rendezvous, and playing three concerts, improvising with Marius Neset in the first,[8] with vocalist Andreas Schaerer, Émile Parisien and Vincent Peirani in the second,[9] and finally with his trio and the Norwegian Wind Ensemble.

Since 2014 Wollny has lived with his family in Leipzig, where he is a professor at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Leipzig.

Wollny has been awarded several scholarships and prizes, including the cultural prize of Schweinfurt in 2003, and in 2005 both the Preis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik (for Melancholia with Heinz Sauer) and the Bayerischer Kunstförderpreis. He received the Choc de l’annee 2006 from the French magazine Jazzman (for Certain Beauty with Heinz Sauer), the Jazzpreis of the Nürnberger Nachrichten in 2007, and in 2008 the SWR Jazz Prize [de], again with Heinz Sauer.[3] He was awarded the Echo Jazz in the category Instrumentalist/in des Jahres national – Piano/Keyboards in 2010 when the prize was awarded for the first time.

The trio received Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Award as Most Promising International Newcomer of the Year in London in May 2007. In 2011, they received the Neuer Deutscher Jazzpreis [de] (as a band, and for Wollny as the best soloist), and the Echo Jazz in the category Ensemble des Jahres national.[12] In 2013, Wollny received the Preis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik for his album Don’t Explain – Live in Concert with Heinz Sauer, and the Bayerischer Staatspreis für Musik [de]. The trio received the Echo Jazz as ensemble of the year. Wollny and Sauer were awarded the Binding Culture Prize [de] in 2013. In 2015 and 2016 he was again awarded the Echo Jazz. (wikipedia)

Michael Wollny, best known as being one third of the thrillingly inventive young contemporary piano trio [em], is a musician who knows no boundaries in his search for new jazz ‘standards’. “Not a jazz standard in the traditional sense,” he points out but, “it also simply describes a song as a starting point that enables the musicians to grow a tune on top of it, a great melody and a few chords. In that respect I consider all of these tunes ‘standards’.”

Wollny‘s new trio recording Weltentraum is a stunning example of contemporary interpretation in the hands of a unique, fluidly virtuoso artist. Wollny, with both elegance and wit, explores the connection between songs that are worlds apart in terms of both centuries and cultures on Weltentraum. But in the pianist’s hands, the combination of interpretations of ‘God is a DJ’ by the riot girl power pop star Pink and the piece ‘Lasse!’ by Guiliaume de Machaut (the French Medieval composer and poet) gets to feel entirely natural. With the resourcefulness of a world class contemporary jazz improviser, Wollny finds common value in the songs’ starkly haunting melodies in spite of arriving from hugely diverse sources.

Says Wollny, “The basic idea for the whole album was to collect ‘songs’. At the very beginning Siggi Loch and I discussed the possibility of doing an album with ‘standards’ – not in the usual sense, but songs and music that I would consider “my” standards. this was the starting point. When I then started to think about the terms “standards” and “songs”, I was looking for music, that really “sings” to me – melodies, that touched me, that were speaking to me. The first thing I realised was that I needed to look for music not so much in traditional jazz or contemporary pop and rock, but also in the “lied” and “kunstlied” tradition, which brought me to Alban Berg, Gustav Mahler, Paul Hindemith etc. Also at one point I really got into the idea of doing a ‘night’ album, so this is how David Lynch, Nietzsche and Charlie Kaufman suddenly were in there as well. Some of the themes that were important to me for this album: tonality and atonality; fragility and force, melodic purity, romantic totalism, endless melodies, dark abysses, angels, dream logic, light darkness, gothic beauty.” Welcome to the unique world of Michael Wolllny.

Yet Wollny is also a team player and the assembled trio consists of an important new voice. That’s the New York-based bassist and Wayne Krantz sideman Tim LeFevbre who has been a friend of Wollny’s since [em] played alongside his singular rock-fuelled band Rudder in 2011. “He got to know our music back then and when Eva [Kruse] decided to take some time off for maternity leave, Eric and I figured that Tim would be a natural choice, let alone being a dream come true,” says Wollny. “Tim is one of the most astonishing bass players out there”. They started gigging together as a trio in early 2013. “Tim is just full of ideas, finding counterpoints, taking initiative and of course he is the absolute groove master”. The latter especially gives a vigorously fresh rhythmic grounding to the album.

The other trio member is the drummer Eric Schaefer, Wollny’s regular partner in the internationally renowned [em] a piano trio formed in 2005. “It’s a very inspiring situation to have a trio with two members knowing each other for over 10 years and a third new member, so on the one hand there is all the musical confidence, experience and trust that Eric and me built up over the last decade. On the other hand there is this constant freshness from Tim, who is playing different from Eva [Kruse], therefore keeping us very awake, surprising us, opening new doors.”

Wollny, who’s playing was recently described by The Guardian’s John Fordham as “one of the most exciting recent developments in European jazz”, has built an international reputation with the trio [em], one of the most compelling pianists of the new European jazz scene in the millennium years. With their four albums to date on ACT, the trio has catapulted him to the limelight with a sublime imagination and ferocious technique that draws from his unique mixed heritage of classical, jazz and rock music. But he has also demonstrated a heartfelt intimacy in his duo partnerships over the previous decade: recording four times with luminary saxophonist Heinz Sauer (From Monk to Prince) as well as with pianist Joachim Kühn and Nils Landgren. 2009’s award winning collaboration with harpsichordist Tamar Halperin on Wunderkammer delivered a fresh dimension to his playing; these new dreamily ambient and sonic tone colours are reflected also on the new album Weltentraum. “When the album was recorded, we thought about a title for quite some time, because ‘songs’ or ‘my standards’ didn’t feel right. Finally, Siggi Loch came up with Weltentraum (which is referring to a phrase by Gustav Mahler), and I immediately loved it. The idea of an album as a way of painting a picture of the world with a utopian force and the fragility of a phantastic dream.”

Although consisting of just one vocal track – Pink’s ‘God is a DJ’ features the vocalist Theo Bleckmann – words are of utmost significance to Wollny’s music. “I don’t think it’s possible to separate lyrics from songs. I’ve always been very interested in words and language,” he says. “After all, poetry and literature is simply composition with words. Since we are an instrumental band the only way to employ this aspect is through titles and liner notes; so I wanted the “words” on the album to be simple, utopian, naive, surreal, dark, all at the same time. No concepts, no analysis, no description, no political statements, no definitions, but poetry.”

In spite of being a romantically lyrical virtuoso, Wollny’s subtly investigative approach to improvisation always steers him away from the overly sentimental. What essentially draws Wollny to the fascinating selection of material on Weltentraum is, he says, an endless love of melodies. “Simplicity as space that allows the trio to grow stuff on top of it,” Wollny calls it. “These are simple resonances that lay the ground for complex improv.” (Press release)

Michael Wollny Trio’s dark, subconsious journey through the dreamworlds took pianist and composer Wollny’s increasingly inspired vision to a new level of performance and imagination (Jazzwise)

Personnel:
Tim Lefebvre (bass)
Eric Schaefer (drums)
Michael Wollny (piano)
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The Bleckmann (vocals, electronics)

Tracklist:
01. Nacht (Berg) 3.31
02. Be Free, A Way (Coyne/Drozd) 3.47
03. Little Person (Kaufman/Brion) 3.38
04. Lasse! (de Machaut) 4.27
05. In Heaven (Lynch/Ivers) 3.31
06. Rufe in der horchenden Nacht (Hindemith) 5.32
07. Fragment an sich I (Nietzsche) 1.04
08. When The Sleeper Wakes (Wollny) 3.57
09. Hochrot (Rihm) 3.39
10. Mühlrad (Traditional) 3.46
11. Engel (Wollny) 4.11
12. Un Grand Sommeil Noir (Varèse) 3.45
13. Fragment an sich II (Nietzsche) 2.37
14. God Is A DJ (Pink/Davis/Mann) 8.43

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