“As an improviser, you often find that it‘s not the compositions themselves you‘re playing, but your own memories of them. And as these memories come back to you in the moment, they assert their continuing existence in the here and now,” says pianist / composer Michael Wollny.

Wollny‘s new album, ‘Ghosts’, is a gathering of some of the ghosts that regularly haunt him. Typically for Wollny, they range from classics like Franz Schubert’s ‘Erlkönig’ to jazz standards, film music, songs with a certain fragility by Nick Cave, say, or the band Timber Timbre, and also his own darkly evocative original compositions.

All the tracks on the album have one thing in common: each is a snapshot in the life of an individual song. Wollny: “Especially in jazz, there is never one definitive version of a piece. The standards repertoire always haunts you in the best sense of the word, these songs are never finished, they always resurface.” And so, when it comes to classics such as ‘I Loves You Porgy’ and ‘In a Sentimental Mood’, Wollny, bassist Tim Lefebvre and drummer Eric Schaefer’s primary point of reference is not the original composition, but versions by Nina Simone and John Coltrane / Duke Ellington. And from a time before jazz standards, there are the spirits that inhabit folk songs, which reappear whenever these songs are sung. As, for example, in the traditional Irish folk song, ‘She Moved Through the Fair’, which is almost a prototype for the idea that ghost stories are to a large extent also love stories.

“All the songs are living ghosts and long for a living voice,” wrote the Irish poet Brendan Kennelly (1936 – 2021) in one of his most famous poems. For Michael Wollny, this line is a cryptic and yet profound insight. It adds an eerie beauty and serves as a motto for his fascination for the magic of songs that this recording represents.