Julia Kadel is active across Europe in numerous projects as a pianist, composer, and
improviser, and has played concerts in philharmonic halls as well as international festivals. Kadel explores the possibilities of expression through performance and a conceptual arrangement of her own compositions and improvisations, in order to share everyday themes with the audience.
Together with Athina Kontou and Devin Gray, Julia Kadel explores the characteristic compositions of the last 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 across Europe in numerous projects as a pianist, composer, and improviser, and has played concerts in philharmonic halls as well as international festivals. In 2019, Kadel was named one of Germany’s “Top Ten Key Players” by Jazzthing magazine. In 2013, Kadel won the HfM Jazz Prize and was awarded the Essen Jazz Pott Prize in 2020 for innovative musical work. Kadel was also nominated for the German Echo Jazz 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 heard in Bucharest at the Green Hours Festival, in Bonn’s Beethoven House, and at the Heidelberg Enjoy Jazz Festival. In 2024, the Goethe Institute Venezuela is inviting Julia Kadel as a solo artist to the jazz festival in Caracas, as well as for further concerts and master classes. Kadel explores the possibilities of expression through performance and a conceptual arrangement of her own compositions and improvisations, in order to share everyday themes with the audience.
In addition to the renowned Julia Kadel Trio, which has already released four albums with Universal/Blue Note and MPS, Kadel is also active as a soloist and in interdisciplinary projects such as How to Fail (Together) with Australian conceptual artist Julian Day, Systemrelativismus with installation artist Stefan Mayer-Twiehaus, performances with dancers Beatriz Silva and Lisa-Marie Skalla, and the music theater Why Chiquinha? active. Kadel’s art is an ongoing exploration and reflection of societal developments and discourses, also inspired by Kadel’s background in psychology studies. In addition to the continuous development of the aesthetic and stylistic aspects of music, Kadel also sees her own art as a search for connection, collectivity, love, and spirituality.
Kadel is involved in community work as a member of the new initiative Future Bloom, a festival network with an intersectional focus. In 2021, Kadel founded the Queer Cheer Community for “Jazz” and Improvised Music Germany, which organizes festivals to promote queer artists and spaces. Queer Cheer was awarded the German Jazz Prize in 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:
In May 2023, Powerful Vulnerability was re-released on the MPS label. “Vulnerability is a key to greater 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 most recently wrote a piece of contemporary German jazz history. After two album releases with the famous American label Blue Note under the Universal umbrella, Kadel recorded the last trio work Kaskaden in the historic MPS studio in Villingen, where luminaries like 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 accordingly significant (SpiegelOnline, among others). Not long after this release, Julia Kadel was awarded the Essen Jazz Pott 2020 for innovative musical work.
Around two years ago, Kadel discovered drummer Devin Gray as a new band partner. He is firmly established 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. In 2022, Athina Kontou joined, who recently presented her own debut as a bandleader, Tzivaeri, and is also active in numerous international projects. The trio’s new album was recorded in the equally legendary Hansa Studio in Berlin. Kadel presents highly exciting, stylistically distinctive, and very personal music. More than ever, the pieces navigate the tension between unconventional compositions and pointed improvisations, harmonic sophistication, and diverse timbres. The focus on sometimes quiet, sometimes energetic, always very deliberately used means of expression creates intense atmospheres and at times suggests flickering moods.
At the piano, Kadel shines with finely nuanced to powerfully expansive virtuosity, leaving common jazz idioms behind. The thematic spectrum of the pieces ranges from moods of isolation in times of a pandemic, to proximity and distance in general and a separation in particular, up to one’s own fragility: “When I show myself vulnerable, it comes with feelings of insecurity, fear, and uncertainty. And yet, precisely therein lies a strength, a good potential like a hope towards more stability and connection to oneself and thus also to others. I wish for more spaces where people can show themselves vulnerable.” The common thread of the album is thus the simultaneity of weakness and strength, which lies in Powerful Vulnerability. Thus, the new Julia Kadel Trio 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 exchange with each other.
