Georg Graewe
Ever since the release of my "Six Studies for piano solo" from 1987, solo recitals have become a constant part of agenda. The 3-CD-Box “Nothing Personal” compiles a selection of recordings from 2012 through 2019. Solo concerts require a certain stamina in terms of technique and imagination, but have the advantage that no one gets in your way – except yourself, and that’s enough to deal with. Georg Graewe, Vienna, September 16, 2023

„Lyrically playful, highly virtuosic, sensitive to sound and clearly structured: Georg Graewe’s solo performance in Ludwigshafen impressively demonstrated the pianist’s exceptional status.
Graewe’s musical language has absorbed jazz history from Jelly Roll Morton to Bill Evans to Fred van Hove as well as the elegance of the French piano tradition or the laconic conciseness of the Second Viennese School.“ Julia Neupert, SüdwestRundfunk (SWR), 2015

„What distinguishes Graewe is his remarkable control, a focused urgency making his compositions/improvisations feel twice as dense. The way his hands tumble across the keys and over each other should make it inevitable that his fingers would get twisted up like Bugs Bunny playing Liszt, yet there is never a moment of anything other than perfect articulation. This is complemented/contrasted by an unusual rhythmic sense in some sections, almost a drunken lurch approaching proto-stride. And when he plays slow passages, the loveliness is highlighted by his seeming to wait until the absolute last possible millisecond to play a note.“ Andrey Henkin, New York City Jazz Record, 2018

Ray Anderson 'Marching On - Solo Trombone'
Solo trombone, for the duration of an entire CD; you first have to dare to do that, because a trombone is a sparse, sometimes stubborn thing, it can usually only play one note at a time. And then you have to have something to communicate, something that goes beyond the usual suspects, beyond the vocal velvet sound of the instrument, beyond the certainty of a melody, something that is based on the surplus of information produced by each individual note. Among the trombonists of modern jazz, Ray Anderson has always been the one whose playing was particularly characterized by the enormous wealth of forbidden sounds from the arsenal of early Afro-American jazz trombonists such as Vic Dickenson or Trummy Young. On "Marching On", his trombone solo album, he now expands on the spirit of the old, how fun and warmth of heart are combined with an instrument for which there is no distinction between legitimate sound and illegitimate noise, music and noise. (Stefan Hentz, Jazz thing 146)