If you only know Eric Schaefer from his long stint behind Michael Wollny, you know maybe sixty percent of what he does. That trio work is real and it's good — tight, conversational, the kind of interplay where you can't always tell who's leading. But Schaefer has always had one foot somewhere else, usually somewhere with pedals, loops, or a laptop involved.

What makes him interesting isn't that he plays drums well, plenty of people play drums well. It's that he treats the kit like a sound source rather than a timekeeping machine. He'll run a snare through electronics, build a texture out of brushes and feedback, then snap back into a straight-ahead pulse like nothing happened. You hear a lot of European players doing the acoustic-meets-electronic thing now, but Schaefer was doing it before it became a scene unto itself.

His work with Tamar Halperin in their duo project strips things down to just piano and drums, which sounds like it shouldn't work as a format but does — mostly because Schaefer knows when to lay out. That restraint is underrated in a drummer this capable of making noise. He's not showing off. He's listening and reacting, which is a harder skill than it sounds.

Start with the Wollny trio records if you want the accessible entry point — the interplay there is some of the best small-group jazz to come out of Germany in the last two decades. Then go find his solo or duo material if you want to hear what he does when nobody's telling him to hold the form down. He's a drummer with range, and he's not afraid to use it in directions that don't always photograph well for a jazz purist's idea of what the instrument is for.