[em]/ Wollny / Kruse / Schaefer - Back From The Brink
Friday, October 22, 2010
The piano trio known as [em] – Michael Wollny, Eva Kruse and Eric Schaefer – came very close to splitting up 12 months ago, in spite of their three successful albums together.
Their new live album recorded in the summer shows what the fuss was all about when they first appeared. Stuart Nicholson tell the story of a remarkable resurfacing ianist Michael Wollny is in a hotel room in Yekaterinburg. It’s Russia’s fifth largest city with a population of just under 1.5 million situated on the eastern side of the Ural Mountains.
He is midway through a solo tour performing and is in a thoughtful mood. Just 12 months ago, almost to the day, he announced to his fellow members of the trio [em], bassist Eva Kruse and drummer Eric Schaefer, that he’d reached a point where he felt the band should split up. With three critically acclaimed albums behind them, the band the German daily newspaper Die Zeit claimed was “The most exciting piano trio in the world,” who had, according to Süddeutsche Zeitung, “saved German jazz,” was about to be no more.
Yet a year on and they have just released what is arguably the finest jazz album of the last quarter of a century. [em] Live is a towering achievement in today’s post-modern jazz scene. Recorded at JazzBaltica in July this year, it was one of only two dates the band had played in 2010 as they wound up their contractual commitments. But what happened that night was something very special, and resulted in Wollny making a complete U-turn about his decision.
That night they rediscovered themselves and with it an awareness that the band had become greater than the sum of its component parts. “It was really weird, we have talked about it a lot,” says Wollny. “It really feels like being in a relationship; sometimes at the point where you are about to split up, or have just split up, there is a new energy and you get a new perspective on things and move on together. I think we’re all very grateful that this has happened.” Bassist Eva Kruse also sees [em] in terms of relationships, summing up what has been an extraordinary year by saying “bands are like relationships. You have to go through the occasional crisis but if you manage to stay together, you grow through it.”
This is an extract from Jazzwise Issue #147 – to read the full article click here to subscribe and receive a FREE CD...