Also who Christian Lillinger If you’ve never seen or heard him on the drums before, you can imagine it after talking to him. Lillinger speaks quickly but razor-sharply, physically but always reflected, with clear positions but always discursive. Because the music is a direct expression of his personality, that’s what it looks like on the drum set: always in motion (the long hair flying around wildly used to be almost a trademark), always full of energy, always looking for a dialogue with his fellow musicians, always pushing boundaries of drumming, exploring, shifting, expanding.
The 39-year-old has thus become the leading and internationally respected engine of new improvisational music in Germany. It is deliberately not jazz or modern music here, because Lillinger claims to have left genres behind. “I’ve got through the tradition,” he says, “let’s check out something different, something new. It’s about variety and variety, as they say today. That really does justice to the term jazz, which I’m used to now difficult.”
Of course, the man who grew up in a village of 400 in the Märkische Heide initially followed the usual path of a highly talented jazz player. Socialized musically early in his family (his brother Robert, six years his junior, is now a renowned classical composer, pianist and conductor) and fascinated by drums, he went to the Carl Maria von Weber University of Music at the age of 16 to study with Günter “Baby” Sommer Dresden. A year later he was already in the Federal Jazz Orchestra.
But early on, Lillinger turned off onto his own, freer path. It started with the still loosely existing, equal trio with the saxophonist Philipp Gropper and the guitarist Ronny Graupe, under the same name until 2015 Hyperactive Kidand in the project ensemble Euphorium_freakestra, which primarily resulted in the collaboration with Günter Sommers Central Quartet-companion Ernst-Ludwig Petrovsky. This picked up momentum from 2008 onwards, and since then a sustainable project has been added almost every year, from the first own band Reason about the piano trio Greensthe trio Dell Lillinger Westergaard and Starlight with Wanja Slavin and Petter Eldh, with Peter Evans as a quartet Amok Amok expanded. It continued with Point.vrt.plastic with the pianist Kaja Draksler and the qÖOilp-Quartet with Ronny Graupe and the brothers Valentin and Théo Ceccaldi. Even a kind of supergroup was recently added XXXX Lillinger plays with Tim Lefebvre, Émile Parisien and Michael Wollny in the large halls.
Despite all of this, Lillinger still found and still finds time to play as a sideman with almost all of the important innovators on the German and European scenes. His drumming has now been recorded on around 110 albums. At the end of 2017 he even founded his own label called Plaist. Why? “I’m not that easy to understand. I understand myself best. So I have to communicate as clearly as possible from my point of view. That means I don’t give away my design, I don’t give away my curated existence. If I If you can do it on your own, it’s at least authentic. With most labels you might get two cover suggestions, that’s it. Even though that’s a crucial framing device, a headline, it all belongs together artistically.”
For him, it’s about freedom of design and diversity. “Experiments show new forms of life. Just examples and offers, but better than monotony.” By the way, it doesn’t always have to be completely “free”. Kuu! For example, he has been putting his untamed art – just like the two guitarists Kalle Kalima and Frank Möbus – at the service of the Kammerspiel actress and unique avant-garde singer Jelena Kuljić for several years.
Lillinger is now highly decorated for all of this. Of the German Jazz Prize alone, which has only been awarded for three years, there are already three on his shelf. Lillinger is only likely to be interested in this insofar as the person who always thinks in terms of structures and social contexts (who also sat on the board of the German Jazz Union from 2012 to 2013) considers the appreciation for artists and musicians in general and jazz musicians in particular to be criminally underdeveloped.
He is currently staying at Villa Waldberta in Feldafing
The state capital of Munich now has at least two grants available for Christian Lillinger, who is so creative, productive, interdisciplinary and, last but not least, always sticks to himself. Once a residency scholarship for Villa Waldberta. Since the beginning of July, Lillinger has been staying in the magnificent property in Feldafing, welcoming colleagues, developing ideas and working on new things.
And since he’s already there, it made sense to offer Lillinger the “heavy rider residency 2023”. He is now using this for a three-day festival under the title of his label. From September 27th to 29th, national and international top performers from the improvisation scene will be guests for four short performances from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. In addition to musicians already present on Plaist – on the 27th. Dell-Lillinger-Westergaardand his duos on the following days umbra and Penumbra with the pianist Elias Stemeseder – Lillinger has invited many who are not yet connected to the label. “But they certainly will be, or perhaps soon,” he adds. “I’ve known everyone for a long time.”
There’s the French electronics artist György Kurtag Jr., the Slovenian singer and performer Irena Z. Tomažin, the Swedish vocal acrobat Sofia Jernberg, the Swiss pianist Simone Keller, the Austrian pianist and claviton player Georg Vogel, all of whom will play solo. They will be joined by the Swedish bassist and Lillinger intimate Petter Eldh, who has already been released on Plaist, and the Berlin turntable master Vincent von Schlippenbach together with the dancer Kofie Davibe. After all, Christoph Dell is not to be seen as a musician; the vibraphonist is also a city planner and is presenting his new book “Dialogue Concerts – Conceptual Research on Architecture and Music”.
All of this should fulfill Lillinger’s wish that the Plaist Festival – so beautifully called in the subtitle “Festival for current and future music” – opens up spaces for artistic exchange and process-oriented work. Approaches from different cultures, styles and procedures are negotiated and further thought through on the topics of embodiment, interpretation and articulation. Joint forethought leads to subsequent reflection. It will probably get wild and controversial at times. But in any case exciting.
Plaist Festival, Wed., 27 to Fri., Sept. 29, 7 p.m. to 10 p.m., Schwer Reiter, Dachauer Str. 114, www.geschereireiter.de