Artist(s)

Leszek Możdżer, born 1971, is regarded as the most important discovery in Polish jazz during the past 10 years. His international reputation as one of the outstanding pianists in jazz is founded on his groundbreaking and smooth interweaving of sound aesthetics and mixing the culture of classical music with the openness and energy of jazz. His sparkling and technically unrivalled playing style has been connected to lyrical and emotional melodies ever since. British newspaper The Guardian wrote on his playing: “Możdżer's swaying swing and slow-melody nuances suggest Keith Jarrett at times, but his outburst of percussive playing, flinty treblenote parks and staccato drum-pattern sounds are all his own.”

Iiro Rantala is "a natural phenomenon on keys" (German jazz magazine Jazzthing); an all-rounder of whom New York-based pianist and arranger Gil Goldstein quite rightly said: "Iiro Rantala is a pianistic sensation who makes the strongest case I know to believe in reincarnation, because his pianistic technique and musical sensitivity speak of depths that appear impossible to have been achieved in this lifetime alone". Up to now, Rantala was mainly associated with the trio Töykeät, one of the weirdest, funniest and most visionary piano trios in international jazz. He sounded out all the possibilities of this formation: Sometimes playing the energetic lion on keys, sometimes the sensitive romantic or the burlesque clown. His playing blasted away all stylistic boundaries and was as uncompromised as it was entertaining, but kept together by a magical triangle: his boundless technical ability and his unmistakeable senses of humour and style.

Michael Wollny, born in 1978 in Schweinfurt, internationally successful jazz pianist, music inventor, unconventional thinker, popular figure. Nobody plays piano like him. His trademark: the unpredictable, the quest for the never-before-heard, the courage to devote himself to the moment, to make the unforeseen sound self-evident. His desire to keep reinventing himself, both in terms of sound and composition; that is what makes him a “consummate piano maestro” (FAZ) and “the biggest (jazz) musician personality that Germany has produced since Albert Mangelsdorff” (Hamburger Abendblatt).

Composer(s)

Press