Maria Baptist & Jan von Klewitz
Biography Maria Baptist & Jan von Klewitz
Maria Baptist
Actually, there was never a time when Maria Baptist wasn't at the piano. Growing up in East Berlin, she was surrounded by the music of her father, a pianist and bandleader, from an early age. Fascinated by the modern jazz of the 1960s and 1970s and the creative freedom this music embodied, she moved to New York City—the heart of jazz—a few years after beginning her piano studies at the Hanns Eisler Academy of Music. There, she studied at the New School and was supported by Maria Schneider, who became one of her most important mentors. It was her orchestra that performed Maria Baptist's first big band composition.
In the mid-1990s, Maria Baptist returned to Berlin and deepened her compositional skills by further studying classical composition. She has won major awards, including the HR Big Band Composition Competition, the NDR Promotional Prize, and the Leipzig Young Jazz Prize. The Tagesspiegel newspaper praised her as "our greatest compositional talent." Early in her career, she collaborated with musicians such as Ingrid Jensen, Rolf Kühn, and Gitte Haenning and wrote for ensembles such as the RIAS Big Band and classical symphony orchestras.
Maria Baptist combines jazz and classical music into a unique musical language. She is one of the outstanding solo pianists of contemporary jazz. Celebrated as "masterful" and "virtuosic," she designs her solo concerts as a fluid, dramaturgically sophisticated process in which composition and improvisation seamlessly intertwine. Each concert thus becomes a unique, constantly evolving soundscape. Downbeat Magazine compares her piano style to the great jazz pianists Bill Evans and Keith Jarrett. In addition to her solo concerts, she works in duo, trio, and quintet ensembles, as well as in cross-genre projects with string quartet and piano.
With her orchestra, Maria Baptist creates new sonic spaces between jazz and classical orchestral tradition. The Maria Baptist Orchestra combines the sonic breadth of a symphonic ensemble with the flexibility of jazz. With the premiere of "Jazz Symphony No. 1," it transcends the boundaries of classical orchestral works and large-scale jazz compositions. The debut album, "Here & Now," was nominated for the German Record Critics' Award, underscoring the ensemble's importance for contemporary jazz. The international press has placed the orchestra "in a league with the key figures of modern big band jazz." In parallel, Maria Baptist works as a conductor and composer with renowned ensembles such as BuJazzO, the Big Band of the Deutsche Oper Berlin, the Vogtland Philharmonic, and the Mittelsächsische Philharmonie.
She has documented her award-winning music on 17 albums and performed it in leading concert halls worldwide – including the Elbphilharmonie, the Berlin Philharmonie, the Harpa Concert Hall in Reykjavik, the Hong Kong Jazz Festival, and the Stellenbosch Chamber Music Festival.
Maria Baptist composes for jazz ensembles, string quartets, and even symphonic ensembles, and her works expand the boundaries of what jazz can be in orchestral and chamber music contexts. What unites her diverse artistic output is her unmistakable voice – "highly emotional, moving, and vibrant like life itself" (All About Jazz). Her works reflect a profound engagement with Eastern philosophy and Buddhism – a thread that runs through many of her compositions.
Since 2000, Maria Baptist has been teaching composition, arrangement, improvisation, and music theory as a professor at the Hanns Eisler Academy of Music in Berlin.
She lives with her wife in Berlin and regularly draws new inspiration from stays in Paris and New York.
