Jens Thomas - Neil Young Collage (2023)

“Jens Thomas is not only a gifted pianist and singer: he literally dives into the music and takes his listeners on an exploratory tour in which listening plays a central role and there are no limits to improvisation.” – Claus Röck, NDR Kultur

Jazz pianist and vocal performer Jens Thomas, to whom the Süddeutsche Zeitung devoted an entire Page Three in 2019, sings and plays Neil Young. Unconventional, surprising and highly emotional. His Neil Young Collage is a sound journey beyond styles and categories, provoking images and memories in the listeners’ minds.
provokes.

The term “collage” is close to the expression “bricolage” and means here to “tinker” (French: “bricoler”) with the found songs and texts of Neil Young and to come to new and independent solutions by intuitively “listening” to the material. What was an instinctively painterly process of layering piano improvisations, vocals and percussion instruments during the production of the album turns live into a fascinating “tinkering” in the moment before the eyes and ears of the listeners.

Jens Thomas sings “as if he were a medium offering temporary asylum to different personalities, from sopranos to overtone singers. In his music, Thomas is an ecstatic performer who can transform sounds and stories into a stream of emotion,” according to the Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung.

After studying jazz as a pianist, the SWR Jazz Prize winner released four albums on the ACT label from 2000 to 2003 (including “Plays Ennio Morricone” with Paolo Fresu and Antonello Salis, “Pure Joy” and “The Sting Project” with Christof Lauer). From 2003-2012 he improvised live incidental music in the legendary “Othello”.
production by Luk Perceval at the Münchner Kammerspiele (ZDF live recording) and discovered his own voice, which he continued to develop autodidactically in the following years. He freed himself completely from the conventions and routines of contemporary jazz and questioned all elements of his concert performance. For Thomas, improvisation now also meant integrating body and space, language and audience into his performances.

Various theatre and dance theatre productions (including NT Gent, Thalia Theater Hamburg, Folkwang Tanzstudio Essen, Burgtheater Wien), his own art performances in galleries and a two-year “artist in residence” at Schauspielhaus Bochum, have led him to extraordinary album productions such as “Goethe! Gesang der Geister” (2007, ITM) and “Speed of Grace-A Tribute To AC/DC” (2012, ACT) as well as the ARD “Tatort” drama “Ich hab im Traum geweinet” (“I cried in a dream”) to the encounter with the actor Matthias Brandt. With him and the “word-music collages” they create together, Thomas has been performing on the major German-language theatre stages since 2013. For Brandt, the musician is “the most important artistic encounter I’ve ever had.” In 2016, the album “Memory Boy” (Roofmusic) with exclusively original songs was released, which was written in parallel to Matthias Brandt’s book “Raumpatrouille”, in 2020 the
Chanson album “jENS tHOMAS” (misitunes) with original German and English lyrics.