About the concert
Blue Notes at the Blue Note: Volume 2! Niklas Lukassen feat.: Kiki Manders & Lorenz Kellhuber
In this new concert series, Niklas Lukassen invites outstanding musicians from the Dresden scene, teachers from the music academy or special artists from Berlin to musical encounters in ever-changing line-ups.
Whether sophisticated arranged, freely improvised, acoustic or electrically instrumented, it is always different, individual and exciting!
On this evening, the elegant instrumentation of vocals, piano and bass, together with Kiki Manders and Lorenz Kellhuber, creates a symbiosis for spontaneous improvisation and intimate communication.
Lorenz Kellhuber: Born as a son of two church musicians in 1990, Lorenz Kellhuber started his classical piano studies at the young age of five. At eight years old, he played his first concert and started to write his own compositions. Aged eleven, he became a Jungstudent at the College of Catholic Church Music & Musical Education in Regensburg. Later on he received lessons by Prof. Franz Massinger, a student of Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, and was discovered by pianist Rob Bargad (Nat Adderley Quintet), who introduced him extensively to jazz stylistics.
At the age of only sixteen, Lorenz passed an exam for the highly gifted and became a student at Berlin Jazz Institute, where Kurt Rosenwinkel, Hubert Nuss, Greg Cohen and John Hollenbeck were among his teachers. During his frequent New York visits, he also received lessons from Fred Hersch and Sophia Rosoff. In 2010, he was one of the youngest graduates worldwide to complete his Bachelor of Arts degree.
In the Summer of 2014, he became the first German musician to receive first place in the renowned Montreux Jazz Piano Solo Competition from Monty Alexander. In 2016, Lorenz was nominated for the ECHO Jazz as “Newcomer of the Year”, in 2018 he was among the ten “new key players” of the German music magazine “Jazz thing”.
He has released a total of nine albums, an EP and several individual pieces since 2012, including “The Brooklyn Session” (2015), recorded with New York musicians Orlando Le Fleming on bass and Obed Calvaire on drums, the solo albums “Live at the Montreux Jazz Festival“ (2017), „Contemporary Chamber Music“ (2021), „Live at Elbphilharmonie Hamburg“ (2022) and the two trio records „Samadhi“ (2019) and „About:Blank“ (2020) with Felix Henkelhausen on bass and Moritz Baumgärtner on drums. His concerts took him through Europe, to the US and to South America.
Kiki Manders: Manders grew up in Venlo in the south Netherlands and graduated from the jazz singing program at the Conservatory of Amsterdam. After graduation, Manders moved to New York City to study Poetry and Improvisation. She started writing songs in the dialect from her hometown Venlo while living in New York and recently recorded a selection of them, amongst other compositions, to be heard on her debut album "Love is yours is mine" (Unit Records).
A finalist in the Voicingers International Singers Competition and a semi-finalist in the Brussels Young Jazz Singers Vocal Competition, Manders’ “irrepressible style” makes her an “in demand musician both as a bandleader and as a sideman.” She lent her voice to Amsterdam-based saxophonist Maarten Ornsteins’ avant-garde funkband DASH! and performed with this band throughout Europe, in the Music Theatre production “Spica”, multi-disciplinary theatre performance “Brilliant Limbs" and toured China with the band.
Manders performed and/or collaborated with The Metropole Orchestra, Jim Black, Maarten Ornstein, Oene van Geel, Vince Mendosa, Yuriy Yaremchuk, Jeffrey Bruinsma, Bodek Janke, Phil Donkin and others.
She performed at world known venues and festivals such as The Bimhuis, Muziekgebouw aan het IJ, Paradiso, North Sea Jazz Festival, and the Concert Hall Amsterdam in the Netherlands, the Unterfahrt in Germany, the Sziget Festival in Hungary, the Brussels Jazz Club in Belgium, Jazzclub Jazz Dock in the Czech Republik, Jazz Club Dzyga in Ukraine, the Jazz Gallerie in Canada and at the Nanjijng Jazz Festival and the Chengdou Jazz Festival in China.
Niklas Lukassen: Niklas Lukassen impresses with his painterly sense of instrumental lyrics on both the double bass and the bass guitar. Characteristic for his personal sound are his affinity for the unbundled bass guitar, as well as his pelectrum-played inserts on the double bass. An elementary part of his still young career lies in New York, where he completed his master's degree with a full scholarship at the Manhattan School of Music under his mentor Ron Carter. His collaborators included among others. Mike Stern, Jorge Rossy, Oz Noy, Richie Beirach and Joe Lovano.
Home to several musical worlds, he also develops into an increasingly indispensable part of the jazz scene in Berlin, with a sound that also radiates an enormous potential as a bandleader. His life as a musician has already taken him on tours to China, Malaysia, the Arab world, the USA and large parts of Europe. These include iconic venues such as Lincoln Center, Beacon Theatre, John F. Kennedy Center, the Berlin Philharmonic and some of New York’s most historic jazz clubs.
With his forthcoming leader debut album Still Waters Run Deep, Niklas Lukassen listens deeply into himself with his quartet consisting of Ben van Gelder, Kit Downes and Francesco Ciniglio and reveals a multifaceted sound world. In this program he reflects on his personal journey of the last turbulent years between New York and Berlin. He addresses current topics of change in poetic form and thus deals with the pandemic, climate change and his own artistic metamorphosis.
- Kiki Manders - Vocals
- Lorenz Kellhuber - Piano
Niklas Lukassen Double Bass