Schumann Kaleidoskop Johanna Summer

• 1 Glueckes genug - Erster Verlust 09:58
• 2 Mai lieber Mai - Ritter vom Steckenpferd 11:58
• 3 Knecht Ruprecht - Träumerei 12:33
• 4 Von fremden Ländern und Menschen 03:22
• Total Runtime 37:51

Info for Schumann Kaleidoskop

The Süddeutsche Zeitung hailed Johanna Summer's performance at the Young Munich Jazz Prize in 2018 as "a small sensation": for just under an hour, the pianist, born in Plauen in Saxony in 1995 and now living in Berlin, had encompassed a whole gamut from enjoying the harmonic and rhythmic freedom of jazz to savouring the kind of refinement and discipline that her training as a classical pianist gives her. In a packed Unterfahrt club in Munich, the audience had been rapt and totally quiet as it listened: smiles during the more rousing passages, and then a collective holding of the breath during moments of suspense. The Süddeutsche’s had critic marvelled at her "amazing gift to make well-known melodies sound so convincingly her own, they develop a real sense of creative urgency.” The fact that Summer won the prize itself almost became incidental; far more significant was the fact that this competition heralded the arrival of one of the most interesting new pianists in European jazz.

"I always wanted to learn the piano. And not just any piano, but a grand piano. Big instrument. Really suits me!" Johanna Summer remembers. And: "I loved to play very much, but as a child I was really lazy about practising. There were several times when I just wanted to give up because there were so many other things that were interesting me. I would have really loved to become a footballer..." The first steps on her path as musician were to a music school, then a jazz ensemble, and these were followed by her entering the German nationwide competitions ‘Jugend musiziert’ (youth plays music) and Jugend jazzt (youth plays jazz). So the piano and jazz both did take hold after all. "By the time I was sixteen, playing the piano was clearly the thing I was able to do the best, and it was also the thing that captivated me the most," she now reflects. Thereafter followed studies at the Musikhochschule (music academy) in Dresden and a two-year stint with the German national youth jazz orchestra "BuJazzO", an ensemble in which the top young players in Germany congregate.

While studying in Dresden Johanna Summer discovered an enthusiasm for free extemporisation. She was drawn to exploring the expressive possibilities of duos and trios, but when it came to playing solo piano she did something highly individual: she would take a variety of pieces from the jazz and classical repertoires and do improvisations on them which extended the narratives of the original pieces. An important source of inspiration for her has been one of the professors in Dresden, and a major figure in East German jazz, the drummer and educator Günter "Baby" Sommer.

"In the beginning, it was really difficult for me, coming more from pop and classical music," says Summer. "Then you sit in front of this man who is one of the greats knowing that you have never tried to do anything like this before. But that was exactly the reason why I wanted to give it a go. I found it very exciting and then I quickly started to perform like this in public, because I think it's important to just do things; I find it exciting to be compelled to deal with musically challenging situations."

Whereas Summer’s first attempts at extended solo piano improvisation had used jazz standards as their points of departure, her debut album "Schumann Kaleidoskop" investigates a repertoire much closer to her own roots in Saxony. Schumann's cycles of piano pieces "Kinderszenen" (scenes from childhood) and "Album für die Jugend" (album for the young) had been familiar to her since childhood, not just as player and listener, but also – because Schumann was from nearby Zwickau – as works that originate in her region of Germany. From an early age she was enchanted by both the melodic and the pictorial aspects of these short pieces, she had loved how "Ritter vom Steckenpferd" (knight of the hobbyhorse), "Von fremden Ländern und Menschen" (of foreign lands and peoples) or "Mai, lieber Mai" (May, sweet May), convert a childlike view of the world into music. And yet, to make her own adaptations of seven of the pieces was a far from a simple task: "I worked for a long time on re-casting them, trying out all of the pieces in all keys and in a lot of different time signatures, creating several miniature interpretations and finally arrived at this selection, which I shaped into a cohesive sequence with a single arc." The depth of her involvement with the original Schumann pieces comes across strongly on the album. As does her impressive and complex personality as a jazz musician with a very wide range of expression: romantic passages and an instinct for melody, but also powerful grooves and exciting innovations. Despite there being such variety and depth, the listener never has the impression that Summer just wants to fire off as many ideas as she possibly can, or inded that her aim in this debut album is to present herself as a virtuoso. Quite the contrary. Everything she does is imbued with a deep sense of how to tell stories through music, a mature and clear vision of dramaturgy, dynamics, tension and atmosphere. A sentence written by Schumann seems to predict exactly the kind of new life that Johanna Summer has breathed into these pieces: "How infinite is the realm of forms, with everything that can be used and worked on for centuries to come."

Johanna Summer, piano

Johanna Summer
grew up in the city of Plauen in Saxony, Germany. At the age of seven she began with classical piano lessons. As a part of her search for music that emerges in the moment and can be played spontaneously with others, she discovered jazz. Shortly before finishing school, she made the decision to concentrate entirely on this kind of music.

She completed her bachelor’s at the Hochschule für Musik (University of Music) in Dresden. It was there that she came into contact with free improvisation in a class led by Free Jazz legend Günter Baby Sommer. Fascinated by the spontaneity of this music, she began to give solo concerts – initially based on the canon of the “Great American Songbook”, but always with an open and flexible playing style and without a pre-arranged set list. Gradually, she turned her attention more and more to her musical roots and looked for ways to set classical music in an improvised context. Her first program, »Schumann Kaleidoskop« dealt with compositions by Robert Schumann and was nominated for the German Jazz Prize in 2021.

Johanna was a member of the German National Jazz Orchestra (Bundesjazzorchester) and is a regular guest at national and international jazz and classical music festivals. At the beginning of 2023 she finished her master’s degree at the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz in Cologne and is currently living in Dresden again. Her new solo album »Resonanzen« was released in January 2023. With this concert programme she refines the concept of her debut and makes pieces from different composers, ranging from Bach to Ligeti, the basis of the continuing narrative of her music.

Booklet for Schumann Kaleidoskop