Michael Wollny Trio

(ACT)

By  https://downbeat.com/site/author/michael-j.-west" rel="nofollow - Michael J. West   |   Published March 2025

The boldness of Living Ghosts lies not in its selections but in their groupings. One of the foremost piano stylists in European jazz, Michael Wollny — who recorded Living Ghosts live last year with his longtime trio mates, bassist Tim Lefebvre and drummer Eric Schaefer — is known for the bold omnivory of his repertoire. But it’s one thing to have compositions by both medieval maestro Guillaume de Machaut and alt-rocker Nick Cave in one’s book (as the Wollny Trio does, from 2014’s Weltentraum and 2022’s Ghosts, respectively). It’s another to have them both on the same track.

The tracks are here called “sets,” and each contains two — in one case three — compositions. The shortest of these is 12½ minutes and features the one piece new to Wollny’s repertoire, Jeff Babko’s “This West” (the original recording of which featured Lefebvre), juxtaposed against “Willow’s Song,” a folk-ish gem from the 1973 horror film Wicker Man. It works because Wollny casts the two disparate pieces in similar moods, so that the latter feels like a natural outgrowth of the former. In fact, all of these “sets” work, but not always for the same reason. Consider the hybrid of Wollny’s “Hauntology,” a quasi-minimalist piece; Duke Ellington’s “In A Sentimental Mood,” which the trio reworks into something dissonant and menacing; and Jon Brion’s “Little Person” (another soundtrack piece, from Synechdoche, New York), which has the delicate wistfulness we usually associate with the Ellington tune. Why does this cohere? I don’t know, but it does.

The best answer seems to be that the trio’s collective personality functions like glue. That might be the only explanation for the pairing of Cave’s “Hand Of God,” here worked into a frenetic boil that little resembles Cave’s recording, with Machaut’s ars nova masterpiece “Lasse,” rendered as faithfully as a jazz piano trio can render a 14th-century motet while playing a tu-way-pocky-way beat. What should be oil-and-water is instead magic — but don’t ask why. Just go with it.

from https://downbeat.com