Johanna Summer and her album "Resonanzen": She is so free

The jazz pianist Johanna Summer presents a new album with "Resonanzen".

To do this, she drew inspiration from composers such as Bach and Beethoven and continued to narrate their works.

If you want to get an idea of ​​how the art of Johanna Summer works, you should read Erich Ohser (1903-1944).

Sounds awesome?

Moment!

Both the pianist and the draftsman come from Plauen in Saxony.

There are many wonderful, apt "father and son" comics by eo plauen, the way Ohser signed his works, and there is this one, drawn many decades before Summer was born, of course, in 1995.

Nevertheless, "The First Day of Holiday" reveals how the jazz musician works on the grand piano, but above all: How her music works.

Johanna Summer presents "Resonanzen" in Munich in the Schwere Reiter

eo plauen only needs four panels for this.

Image 1: The father and a friend sneak up to the sleeping son's bed.

Image 2: They carry the sleeping person and the bed to the car.

Photo 3: The father is driving, the bed with his son tied behind.

With their fingers on their lips, he and a gendarme ask other road users to be quiet.

Image 4: The son wakes up, completely perplexed, in a fantastically beautiful idyll in the middle of nature.

The father is happy that the surprise was a success.

Summer has absolutely nothing in common with this bald man with a mustache - except that she surprises her with her music just as much as he surprises his son with the trip.

This can be heard on Summer's album "Resonanzen", which will be released on Friday (January 27, 2023) on the Munich jazz label Act and which the pianist will present on Sunday (January 29, 2023) in the Schwere Reiter.

On "Resonances" Johanna Summer continues to narrate works by Bach and Beethoven

The artist takes works by composers such as Bach, Beethoven, Ravel, Scriabin - and tells them improvised.

Sounds horribly academic, but it's creative, focused and gritty music.

Because while your listeners think they are still at home, in the well-known, the next breath, the next attack, surprises you!

– a new soundscape.

Best of all, the way there is almost as if you were asleep.

Igor Levit is also enthusiastic about Johanna Summer's game

Summer doesn't stop at elaborating the character of a more or less well-known composition, exposing its core - she is so free and uses these sounds to see where they lead.

What notes, runs follow.

Your miniatures will sparkle.

"Johanna Summer is an outstanding jazz pianist," said her colleague Igor Levit after the release of her debut "Schumann Kaleidoskop" in 2020, which was acclaimed by critics and audiences alike.

"She's so centered and on her own, handling the material so confidently and yet hitting her own tone the whole time." The latter is probably her greatest talent.

Of course you can hear on "Resonanzen" which composers inspired the pianist.

And yet the nine pieces are autonomous, independent.

New works: exciting, contemporary, worth listening to.

"Even as a child, I liked to improvise without knowing what I was actually doing," Summer said in an interview with our newspaper two years ago.

In the meantime she knows it very well - and yet her music has lost none of its surprise.