Michael Wollny
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Jazz was already more than one hundred years old when Michael Wollny started to get involved with it – as a composing and active German jazz pianist. There were times when the job description of “German jazz pianist” would have sounded quite exotic. Jazz was once a non-European music style which was imported and it only became common in Germany later on.
But times have changed, jazz has long become also a European style and, with this, it is perhaps something very new. Michael Wollny is a musician who represents this “something new” which has resulted from and with jazz. He is a natural jazz pianist. He improvises and affirms his musical roots while constantly discovering new ground at the same time. Yet his musical origin is, without a doubt, European with a clear focus on the venerable western European music history. Johann Sebastian Bach, Franz Schubert, German romanticism and the French composer Olivier Messiaen have all influenced him just as much as the music from the other side of the Atlantic and new influences are continually joining these.
In Michael Wollny’s music both traditions are not in the way of each other but, more so, they complement each other for mutual enrichment. He alludes to a tradition which, in the past one and a half centuries, appears to have been forgotten in our European artistic music. Although this music is apparently so strongly defined by the thought of notation and the work division between the creative and the active musicians, there was a lived tradition of fantasising here, particularly amongst the pianists. And fantasising is not really much different to improvisation without jazz roots.
Michael Wollny does not have to choose between two traditions – for him this decision and differentiation would be very artificial. With each of his concerts he proves that jazz need not stand in the way of any other musical origins because it is liberating. And also that European artistic music need not hinder the imagination because it has created a musical grammar which can, at the same time, also be an instrument for innovators.