Michael Wollny Trio: Living Ghosts review

The Guardian

07-03-2025

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.
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Tunisian oud star and composer Anouar Brahem is rejoined by old associates Dave Holland (bass) and Django Bates (piano) with eclectic cello luminary Anja Lechner on the all-original After the Last Sky (ECM). Lechner's rapturous long tones and Holland's darting counterpoint against Brahem's nimble urgency and Bates's attentive piano figures create a restlessly beautiful soundscape – deeply affected, as Brahem stresses, by the disaster of Gaza.
The unique German/Afghan singer Simin Tander's The Wind (Jazzland Recordings), a mix of originals and Pashto and European traditionals, draws on her tender ballad delivery, wild, wordless improv and percussive exhalations, while Norwegian-Indian violinist Harpreet Bansal and electric bass and drums often kick up hard-grooving storms. And that idiosyncratically inventive UK pianist/composer Elliot Galvin is joined by bassist Ruth Goller, drummer Seb Rochford, Shabaka Hutchings and strings on The Ruin (Gearbox Records), a cyclical electro-acoustic work inspired by his early recordings on an old family piano, and morphed into a trip of typically quirky revelations.