Julia Kadel is active in numerous projects throughout Europe as a pianist, composer as well as improviser and has played concerts in philharmonics and at international festivals. Kadel explores the possibilities of expression through playing and a conceptual approach to their own compositions and improvisations in order to share the themes of everyday life with the audience.
Together with Athina Kontou and Devin Gray, Julia Kadel explores the signature compositions of their latest trio album Powerful Vulnerability with a refreshing, honest and inspiring approach.
“an unpredictable, independent sound structure (…) bursting with joy of playing and rhythmic tension. (…) The result is energetic piano trio music that is fully in tune with the present, even without borrowing from high-profile formations such as The Bad Plus or the former, still influential Esbjörn Svensson Trio.” Deutschlandfunk
“The trio (reveals) more references to contemporary music than to American jazz in Kadel’s enigmatically open compositions and expansive, but never fraying improvisations, for example in the way in which everyone in the band creates original timbres, balances on the fine line between harmony and atonality, and deliberately sets counterpoints and dissonances.” FAZ
“You can feel how this musician tries out her artistic balancing acts between intuition and reflection at some height without a net.” Hamburger Abendblatt
“The story is a source of inspiration for a series of emotional moments. (…) Here, quiet, free percussion, piano and bass dabs create an (imaginary) film score for images of melting icicles. In a time of streamlined productions, this disc is a clear, refreshing mountain stream.” Jazz CD of the month, AUDIO
“(…) it is not easy to find a piano trio that is more enthralling and exciting in this constellation than this small band from Berlin.” Jazzpodium
“The melodically very engaging, rhythmically extremely pointed music lives from many beautiful contrasts that magically attract each other: Poetry and rigour, form and freedom, for example.” Jazzthing
“And so Kadel’s trio is not just one of many piano trios, but an absolute exception (…). “ Jazzthing
“Julia Kadel, born in 1986, did not experience the emergence of free jazz at the beginning of the 1960s. This is of no consequence, because she reaps the fruits of this search for something new with aplomb and uses them with the trio for her own improvisations, which encompass dense clusters of sound and filigree tone structures. (…) Even when Kadel elicits powerful cascades of sound from the grand piano, the feeling of an inner, deep harmony remains.”Rondo
“Music here becomes a perfect symbolisation, an abstraction of the deepest emotions that are so clearly perceptible and so aptly suited to this time today. (…) – here the deepest inner self becomes audible – almost like in a meditation.” Concerto
SOLO:
Julia Kadel is active throughout Europe in numerous projects as a pianist, composer as well as improviser and has played concerts in philharmonic orchestras and at international festivals. In 2019, Kadel was named one of the German ‘Top Ten Key Players’ by Jazzthing magazine. In 2013, Kadel won the HfM Jazz Prize and in 2020 was honoured with the Essen Jazz Pott Prize for his innovative musical work. Kadel was also nominated for the German Echo Jazz award in two categories and received several artist grants. Inspired by various artistic collaborations, Kadel has also embarked on a new path of expression as a soloist – most recently at the Green Hours Festival in Bucharest, the Beethovenhaus in Bonn and the Heidelberg Enjoy Jazz Festival. In 2024, the Goethe Institute Venezuela invites Julia Kadel to Caracas as a solo artist at the local jazz festival as well as for further concerts and master classes. Kadel explores the possibilities of expression through playing and a conceptual approach to her own compositions and improvisations in order to share the themes of everyday life with the audience.
In addition to the renowned Julia Kadel Trio, which has already released four albums on Universal/Blue Note and MPS, Kadel is also active as a soloist and in interdisciplinary projects such as How to Fail (Together) with the Australian conceptual artist Julian Day, System Relativism with the installation artist Stefan Mayer-Twiehaus, performances with the dancers Beatriz Silva and Lisa-Marie Skalla and the music theatre Why Chiquinha? Kadel’s art is an ongoing exploration and reflection of social developments and discourses, which is also inspired by Kadel’s background in psychology studies. As well as constantly developing the aesthetic and stylistic aspects of music, Kadel also sees his own art as a search for connection, collectivity, love and spirituality.
Kadel is involved in community activism as a member of the new Future Bloom initiative, a festival network with an intersectional focus. In 2021, Kadel founded the Queer Cheer Community for ‘Jazz’ and Improvised Music Germany, which organises festivals to promote queer artists and spaces. Queer Cheer was honoured with the German Jazz Award 2023. Julia Kadel has played concerts outside Germany in countries such as France, Italy, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Norway, Russia, Lithuania, Romania, Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Turkey.
TRIO:
The Julia Kadel Trio is delighted to announce the release of its fourth album: Powerful Vulnerability was once again released on the MPS label in May 2023. ‘Vulnerability is a key to more strength,’ says Julia Kadel about the inspiration for the album. Together with Athina Kontou and Devin Gray, the new trio explores the characteristic compositions with a refreshing, honest and inspiring approach.
In 2019, Julia Kadel recently wrote a piece of contemporary German jazz history. After two album releases on the famous American label Blue Note under the umbrella of Universal, Kadel recorded the last trio work Kaskaden at the historic MPS studio in Villingen, where celebrities such as Oscar Peterson and Friedrich Gulda recorded. The production was the first to take place there after the temporary end of the MPS label in 1982. The media response was correspondingly great (Spiegel Online and others). Not long after this release, Julia Kadel was honoured with the Essen Jazz Pott 2020 for innovative musical creation.
Around two years ago, Kadel discovered drummer Devin Gray as a new band partner. He is firmly anchored in the jazz and improvised music scene in New York as a bandleader and sideman and lives between the music metropolises of New York and Berlin. Athina Kontou, who recently presented her own debut as a bandleader, Tzivaeri, and is active in numerous international projects, joined the trio in 2022. The trio’s new record was recorded at the equally legendary Hansa Studio in Berlin. It presents highly exciting, stylistically idiosyncratic and very personal music. More than ever, the pieces move between the poles of unconventional compositions and pointed improvisation, harmonic sophistication and multifaceted sound colours. The concentration on sometimes quiet, sometimes energetic, always very purposefully used means of expression creates intense atmospheres and sometimes evokes flickering moods.
On the grand piano, Kadel shines with virtuosity ranging from finely nuanced to powerfully expansive, leaving common jazz idioms behind. The themes of the pieces range from moods of isolation in times of a pandemic, closeness and distance in general and separation in particular, to the composer’s own fragility: ‘When I show myself vulnerably, it goes hand in hand with feelings of insecurity, fear and uncertainty. And yet this is precisely where there is strength, good potential and hope for more stability and connection to oneself and therefore also to others. I would like to see more spaces in which people can show themselves to be vulnerable.’ The common thread of the album is therefore the simultaneity of weakness and strength that lies in Powerful Vulnerability. The new Julia Kadel Trio thus presents a concept album with a broader socially relevant perspective than that of pure musical sound research and aesthetics. It formulates an approach for a deeper, more honest discourse with one another.
