With his waywardly floppy fringe, approximately respectable concert suit, and mildly distracted manner, the 40-year-old Michael Wollny suggests a perpetual music student, startled to be hailed – as he has been for the past decade – as one of European jazz’s premier pianist/composers. In a full-throttle 100-minute set at Kings Place, Wollny and his trio with Swiss double bassist Christian Weber and the implacably dynamic Berlin jazz, rock and hardcore punk drummer Eric Schaefer rattled through fitfully delicate but more often explosive improvisations on much of the material from this year’s Oslo and Wartburg albums – works by Hindemith, Debussy, Scott Walker, and the trio’s own originals mingle on those recordings’ typically sweeping takes on modern music.
The gig’s compelling virtue was exactly that explosiveness, a product of Wollny’s formidable jazz/classical virtuosity, coupled with an appetite in performance for throwing everything he’s learned and knows to the wind. The trio opened with a Schaefer original that began in abstract arco-bass murmurs, shuffling brushwork and clipped treble-piano wriggles before embracing a tender chordal melody, a swerving uptempo jazz groove, and a stretch of warlike rock-drums pounding.
Scott Walker’s Big Louise and Paul Hindemith’s Ludus Tonalis were prodded and unpicked in blues figures, quiet pizzicato bass variations, and polyrhythms veering across postbop and funk. Debussy’s Nuits Blanches and German saxophonist (and former Wollny employer) Heinz Sauer’s Roses Are Black segued as captivatingly slow chord-melodies against busy drumming, ecstatic rock crescendos reminiscent of the late and much-missed EST, and bursts of sleek uptempo avant-swing that highlighted the leader’s audacity of improv phrasing at any speed.
Late in the set, Schaefer’s subtlety with delicately ringing small sounds and Wollny’s soft-stroked lyricism had a seductiveness that could have been valuably prolonged, but the latter’s unaccompanied blur of frenziedly skipping countermelodies and boogieing free-improv on the encore was a thrilling tour de force. A shade too much of this powerful set wound up in chord-hammering, percussion-storming finales, but it was, nonetheless, a spectacular display of formidable improv skill hitched to sweeping knowledge of contemporary music.
