If you grew up thinking German jazz meant polite ECM atmospherics, Michael Wollny will rearrange your expectations fairly quickly. He came up through the classical conservatory system in Leipzig, which you can hear in his touch — precise, articulate, unafraid of silence — but he's spent his career actively dismantling the good manners that kind of training usually instills. He'll follow a tender, almost Satie-like melody with a passage where he's hammering clusters or running a drumstick across the piano strings like he's trying to find a sound the instrument was never built to make.

He first got noticed in the trio em, which he led for over a decade with bassist Eva Kruse and drummer Eric Schaefer. That group built a reputation on taking unlikely source material — folk songs, Alban Berg, Tom Waits, Björk — and running it through a filter that was part chamber music, part noise experiment. Albums like Wasted & Wanted (2012) and Weltentraum (2014) show the range: there's real tenderness in there, but it never sits still long enough to become background music.

Since the trio wound down, Wollny has kept moving in directions that make him hard to pin to one lane. He's recorded solo piano records of genuine intimacy, done duo projects with saxophonist Heinz Sauer that lean into free improvisation, and worked with electronics in ways that feel more like texture than gimmick. What ties it together isn't a style so much as an appetite — he seems to actually enjoy not knowing what a piece will do next, and he trusts an audience enough to take them along for that.

I wouldn't hand a Wollny record to someone who wants jazz piano as comfort food. But if you're the type of listener who gets a little bored once you can predict the next eight bars, he's exactly the kind of pianist worth your time. He's German, he's classically trained, and he still manages to sound like he's discovering the instrument in real time — which, honestly, is harder to pull off than it sounds.