projects
NEIL YOUNG COLLAGE
“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
"Whereby Thomas doesn't even begin to stick to Young's melodies, he jazzes them up, swirls them, disassembles them and puts them back together again. It's an event." - Bert Strebe, HAZ
Label & Booking: o-tone music
The jazz pianist and voice 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 that provokes images and memories in the listener’s mind. 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 the stage 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 the Schauspielhaus Bochum, 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” (“carried by the outstanding music of Jens Thomas” SZ) 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 the book “Raumpatrouille” by Matthias Brandt, in 2020 the chanson album “jENS tHOMAS” (misitunes) with his own German and English lyrics was released.
MATTHIAS BRANDT & JENS THOMAS.
MEDICAL RECORD ROBERT SCHUMANN. A Word-Music-Collage.
Matthias Brandt and Jens Thomas dedicate their new project to the work and the complex personality of composer Robert Schumann. His psychic instability, the recurrent depressive episodes and states of "utter nervous exhaustion," the obsession with being insane- all of this is undoubtedly reflected in Schumann`s music. Matthias Brandt and Jens Thomas, who in the last years celebrated remarkable successes with "Psycho - Fantasy of cold horror" and "Life - Space Patrol & Memory Boy", stage this phenomenon in an individually designed collage of word and improvised music. Nothing seems to be fixed or routinely rehearsed on these evenings. While Brandt lets the audience's nerves vibrate, Thomas improvises on the piano and sings own songs as well as interpretations of songs by Robert Schumann - a fascinating game of text and sound that juggles with the emotional depths of the character.
"Jens Thomas sends haunting overtone oscillations and ethereal falsetto into the dark stage, he sings and plays Heine (whose poems Schumann had not only set to music, but with which he also shares the same year of death), plays lyrical, tender, dramatic, upset. Thomas thus creates a music, a soundscape that reaches for Brandt's words with almost physical intensity, wrestling and suffering with them, and wraps them around for one last, sadly sad dance." MANNHEIMER MORGEN
"A great, a sad evening." ALLGEMEINE ZEITUNG MAINZ
MATTHIAS BRANDT & JENS THOMAS. PSYCHO. Fantasy of cold horror.
