Vesna & Axel Dörner | #PANDAjazz

• PANDAjazz

Vesna Pisarović – voice
Axel Dörner – trumpet

Free entry. Donations are welcome!
Eintritt frei. Um Spenden wird gebeten.

Vesna Pisarović was immersed in music from an early age: through formal education in flute, through youthful experiments in punk-rock, through a rigorous study of vocal techniques, and, even more distantly, through a degree in phonetics and linguistics at the University of Zagreb. And yet her route to jazz and improvised music seems quite circuitous. At the age of twenty, Vesna embarked on a path of stardom in the popular music industry in Croatia, releasing five commercial albums which reached golden or platinum sales, performing uncountable concerts, appearing in numerous live broadcasts. Vesna even competed at the Eurovision Song Contest in 2002. However, an encounter with the music of the free jazz artist Peter Brötzmann in a Berlin club would turn this experience around. Enchanted by such intensity and expressive freedom, Vesna decided to devote herself to the study of jazz, enrolling at the Royal Conservatory in the Hague and earning a Master’s degree in musical performance at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. In 2012 she released her debut jazz album With Suspicious Minds for the well-known German label Jazzwerkstatt. She currently resides in Berlin where she performs with many renowned musicians such as Greg Cohen, Tony Buck, Chris Abrahams, Zeno de Rossi, Chris Dahlgren, John Betsch, Gerhard Gschlößl, Steve Heather, Clayton Thomas, Dieb 13, Martin Sasse, Frederick Köster, Francesco Bigoni and many others.

http://vesnapisarovic.me

Axel Dörner is one of the most unique voices in free improvisation. He developed a completely different language for the trumpet in the late 1990s. Most of the ensembles he is part of are characterized by a non-hierarchical collaboration of the musicians involved. Since 2000 he is working on an electronic extension of his music on the trumpet (together with Sukandar Kartadinata). Dörner has lived in Berlin since 1994 and is an integral part of the Berlin scene of new improvisational and experimental music. With Rudi Mahall on bass clarinet, Joachim Dette (bass) and Uli Jennessen (drums) he started the band Die Enttäuschung playing exclusively compositions of Thelonious Monk. In 1996 this quartet (with Jan Roder as a new bass player) was joined by Alexander von Schlippenbach and became the quintet named Monks Casino. Around that time Dörner also started collaborating in different formations with Sven-Åke Johansson, which continues until present time. Besides playing solo and in his trio TOOT (with Phil Minton and Thomas Lehn), he has played with artists such as Otomo Yoshihide and in groups such as Die Anreicherung (with Christian Lillinger, Håvard Wiik, and Jan Roder), Ig Henneman Sextet, Ken Vandermark’s Territory-Band, Hedros (with Mats Gustafsson, Günter Christmann, Barry Guy, and others), and the London Jazz Composers’ Orchestra. Axel Dörner has won the SWR Jazzprize 2006 and Jazzprize of the city of Berlin 2019. His discography consists at this time of more than 150 CDs & LPs.

http://www.axeldoerner.org/