«Living Ghosts 2025»
Michael Wollny Trio
JazzContemporary Jazz
Limited Freedom as an Art Form: The Michael Wollny Trio and the "Living Ghosts"
In June, the Michael Wollny Trio will be performing their latest album, Living Ghosts, at Moods. Although it sounds free, it is nevertheless limited. How does this contradiction work?
The destination is uncertain
But how can you imagine making music under this premise? 'We go on stage knowing our repertoire, but we don't know who will start, where it will take us, whether we will play all the pieces or completely different ones, or whether we will improvise,' Wollny explains to the German magazine "Jazzthetik". Everything flowed together, enabling them to make music in a completely different way. At any moment, everyone can decide to take the band in a different direction.The "spirits" conjured up in "Living Ghosts" represent the core essence of each piece. These can be cadences, sequences of notes, on-stage situations or even certain moves by one of the three musicians. Wollny enthuses: 'Tim can question the key via a bass note, and then we follow that. Eric can introduce a new tempo or metre. And suddenly, we're in a different piece."The trio's work is both well thought out and intuitive. Although Wollny can describe everything analytically in conversation, he says the process is about "things that can be reconstructed in retrospect, but which happen intuitively in the moment". Wollny compares it to dancing: "You don't think about every muscle; you just follow the other person."Finding freedom within boundaries
What now sounds so far-reaching is, nevertheless, clearly defined. According to Wollny, it's simply not possible without them: 'Improvisation and creativity arise within boundaries. If you can do anything without limits, it's meaningless. You need a form.' The trio's free playing is always an exchange. They limit each other's means of working. This is how 'freedom arises from the limitations of the possibilities you have at the moment'.The jazz pianist compares the musical process to a quarry. Individual stones can be chipped away at repeatedly. These are then worked on and combined with other stones to create an architectural structure. At the next concert, a different stone is selected to create a new object. “It's amazing how many fascinating buildings you can create from a single stone,” Wollny concludes.If you examine the structure of "Living Ghosts", you can see all of these elements. These could be lyrical parts, grooves, a rain of arpeggios, or parts reminiscent of the free experiments of other jazz greats. The album invites you to listen, revealing something about the processes and conditions required for profound improvisation through the music itself. All kinds of things happen. It feels as if you are immersed in an ongoing conversation.