Heinz Sauer (tenor saxophone) Michael Wollny (piano) “Wollny is the spearhead of a new generation of European jazz musicians” Jazz Magazine (France) “Sauer really ought to be up there with the biggest sax names you’ve ever heard of” John Fordham, The Guardian. Now 75, Heinz Sauer is finally being heralded the great European saxophonist. His duo with the big jazz discovery of recent years, jazz and classical pianist Michael Wollny of the trio [em], has just released two acclaimed albums on ACT and is one of the most beautiful jazz projects at work. With a repetoire from Gershwin and Monk to Prince and Bjork, Sauer’s expressive sax and Wollny’s virtuouso piano combine to create music rich in colour and sublety. Forty-eight years separate these two headstrong musicians, but musically they could not be closer. Saxophonist Heinz Sauer, a great and highly influential figure in post-war west German jazz, and Michael Wollny, the big discovery in European jazz were born in 1932 and 1978 respectively. One of them grew up in a time when jazz was the expression of the awakening after the Second World War and the other in Berlin in an age, in which anything goes, and musical symbols have become ambiguous and iridescent. Heinz Sauer is not only one of the most influential players of the German post-war period; he is one of the great individualistic stylists on the world scene and a master of the tenor saxophone. Sauer combines the warmth and lyricism of Ben Webster with the experimental eccentricities of Archie Shepp and the rhythmic variety of Sonny Rollins, but in the end, the tone is his own. And yet perhaps it’s not just his tone that distinguishes Heinz Sauer from all the others. It is his stance, his continual struggle with this tone. Expressive is the magic word that best defines Heinz Sauer’s music. As one critic mused “had Heinz Sauer lived in New York, he would be standing on the jazz saxophone immortals”. Michael Wollny is widely regarded as the finest young jazz pianist in Europe. He has won widespread acclaim and awards for his trio [em] and his various leader projects including that with Sauer and Joachim Kuhn. The music that Sauer and Wollny unfold in their duo is at times adventurous, rough, always pulsating with strength, uninhibited, yet infinitely tender, full of light and shadow, a magical prism of colour, rich in subtlety, and at once persistently and radically personal. "It's one of the great mysteries of jazz how saxophonist Heinz Sauer can be such a hero on the German scene, but so low-profile everywhere else. Few jazz improvisers have evolved something so trenchantly characterful from such a broad span of influences: 1940s swing-ballad smokiness, the brusque motivic diversions of Sonny Rollins, post-Coltrane free-sax multiphonics and a lot more. This confirms that Sauer really ought to be up there with the biggest sax names you've ever heard of." The Guardian on Sauer's The Journey (ACT) "State-of-the-art for the difficult sax-piano duet business" The Guardian on Sauer & Wollny ...... Tickets Wednesday 3rd March, John Field Room, National Concert Hall, Dublin Tickets 20 Euro from National Concert Hall Bookings: 01-4170000 or online at www.nch.ie Show 8.00pm