Joachim Kühn & Matthias Schriefl #2

Joachim Kühn, born in Leipzig on March 15, 1944, is one of the few German world stars of jazz. His piano playing defies all categories and has shown contemporary jazz new ways. Kühn, a musical citizen of the world, sees himself in the tradition of jazz, as well as connected with European concert music, but with all this directly committed to a sound language of the present. In interplay with long-standing musical partners, in ever new and often unusually challenging playing constellations or, completely on his own, in his solo concerts, Joachim Kühn succeeds in making music an event.

The pianist is rarely seen live. It is therefore a very special pleasure for us to be able to present Joachim Kühn on two concert evenings at the same time and together with multi-instrumentalist Matthias Schriefl in the Stadtgarten. Today, Saturday, the evening begins with a solo part by Kühn, followed by the duo together with Matthias Schriefl.

Joachim Kühn
Joachim Kühn learned his outstanding craft during his classical training. His path as a concert pianist seemed preordained, but the jazzy influence of his brother Rolf, who was almost 15 years older, had a more decisive effect. He took his first steps in the direction of jazz with well-known GDR free jazz musicians such as Ernst-Ludwig Petrowsky, Klaus Koch and Klaus Lenz. In his mid-twenties Kühn performed at jazz concerts in Prague and Warsaw, and in 1966 he traveled to Vienna for a piano competition organized by Friedrich Gulda and from then on lived in West Germany. There he quickly found his way onto the international scene, immediately playing with his brother at the Jazzfest Berlin as well as at the Newport Jazz Festival, and was accepted early on as one of the few white musicians in jazz to set a style.

The album "Impressions of New York" (Impulse!), produced with Rolf Kühn, was probably an important calling card at that time. Whoever speaks of European jazz today always means Joachim Kühn. In the more than five decades that he has been active on the scene, there has hardly been a style in which Kühn has not had his piano hands in play at a decisive point. In his extraordinary solo work, he combines elements of German late Romanticism and French Impressionism with jazz-inflected improvisation. In the meantime, Joachim Kühn has also returned to the works of the composer J.S. Bach.

Matthias Schriefl
Matthias Schriefl, born in 1981, grew up on the edge of the Alps in Maria Rain. From 2000 to 2005 he studied in Cologne and Amsterdam. Since 2006 he has organized the concert series Jazz-O-Rama at the Artheater Cologne. From 2008 to 2010, he toured Europe's major concert halls with his band Shreefpunk as a "Rising Star" of the European Concert Hall Organization. After that he experimented mainly with alpine music. In 2012, he released the multiple award-winning album with Six, Alps & Jazz on ACT in the "Young German Jazz" series. Until today, new CD recordings with various bands have followed regularly, in which he, as a musician and composer, writes his pieces as if "tailor-made" for his respective fellow musicians. Schriefl lives in Cologne and partly in the Allgäu. His musical curiosity inspires him again and again to longer study trips to India and stays in African and South American countries, where he deals with different musical traditions. In 2016, his multifaceted commitment paid off with the RUTH world music prize in Rudolstadt. In 2019 he won twice in Mannheim at the New German Jazz Prize, the band prize with his band Shreefpunk plus Strings and the soloist prize. In the Corona year 2020, he went on foot in the summer with Johannes Bär as a duo from the latter's hometown to his, playing open-air concerts along the way. This tour was accompanied by a camera crew that released the film "Auf Tour Z'Fuaß" in 2021, which will be released on DVD in 2022. In 2021 he founded the band Geläut, with which he set many church bells to music and interacted with them live, resulting in an elaborate CD production. He also led the BundesJazzOrchester in 2021 with an alpine jazz program written especially for the band. He knows and loves big stages and the wide world, but makes a point of regularly bringing jazz to small, rural venues.