Michael Wollny Trio - Living Ghosts

Styles: Contemporary Jazz
Year: 2025
Time: 70:35
File: MP3 @ 320K/s
Size: 161,8 MB
Art: Front

(18:16) 1. Nacht / Rufe in der horchenden Nacht
(19:36) 2. Hauntology / In a Sentimental Mood / Little Person
(20:13) 3. Hand of God / Lasse!
(12:28) 4. Willow's Song / This West

More than a century ago, jazz’s early improvisers rarely strayed far from the secure consensus of a tune. That is, until the bebop revolutionaries of the 1940s started blowing impromptu ideas that often sounded better than the pop songs whose chords they borrowed. Post-1960s, free improvisation took themes and variations on epic, extemporised journeys that sometimes never returned to their starting point. Michael Wollny, the 46-year-old German pianist/composer, has long been familiar with the implications of that rapid evolution, and his powerful decade-old trio with David Bowie’s Blackstar bassist Tim Lefebvre and punk-to-postbop drummer Eric Schaefer has become one of the world’s most skilfully free-thinking contemporary jazz groups.

Now comes the exceptional Living Ghosts, a live recording of one night on tour in Germany in 2024 that shows just why Wollny refers to the group’s recent concerts as “seances where the ghosts of the trio’s songbook visit us at their will”. There’s no setlist, no agreed arrangements or forethought about which tunes might be made to segue into each other or for how long. Two night-themed miniatures by Alban Berg and Paul Hindemith are recast in racing solo piano streams, bowed-bass sweeps, a tramping rock-drums pulse, and then flat-out postbop over Lefebvre’s fast bass-walk.

The harmonic implications (though only barely the tune) of Duke Ellington’s In a Sentimental Mood give way to the lovely pop-song melody of Jon Brion’s ballad Little Person. A warp-speed treatment of Nick Cave’s Hand of God ascends to a tumult of mercurial piano runs over a marching drum pulse before hymnal harmonies turn it into Guillaume de Machaut’s Lasse! A one-off rammed with surprises, but of the kind that bear plenty of repeated listening on what already sounds like a 2025 standout.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2025/mar/07/michael-wollny-trio-living-ghosts-review-tim-lefebvre-eric-schaefer-german

Living Ghosts (mp3 320)
Living Ghosts(FLAC)

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