“One of the great saxophone individualists and the biggest piano talent in Germany develop fascinating dialogues full of unsentimental warmth, with often surprising payoffs. You just want to keep hearing them play” (TZ München)

“Jazz comes back to life here” (Die Zeit)

“...among the best that German jazz has to offer” (WELT am Sonntag)

When told he was considered one of the fundamental greats of German Jazz, Heinz Sauer replied that he saw himself “neither as old nor as a master”. though the saxophonist, celebrating his 82nd birthday on 25 December 2014, is rightfully known as “a giant” (FAZ) and “grand master of saxophone” (DIE ZEIT), has been at the centre of European jazz history since his beginnings at the side of Albert Mangelsdorff, in principle he remains to this day an adolescent; the kind of artist who knows that the path to mastery doesn't have a final destination.

Sauer's sparkling play became one of the distinctive timbres in the self-confident European jazz scene very early on, even though it continually occupied itself with the US tradition, with George Adams and Archie Shepp, later with Bennie Wallace, in recordings with Dave Holland and Jack DeJohnette – and repeatedly with pianist Bob Degen.

Sauer and Wollny gave their first concert as a duo ten years ago in Darmstadt's Literaturhaus, where the stage there has just enough space for two people. Despite not having had time to discuss what they would play and thus forced to improvise, the evening was a huge success. The duo's first album Melancholia came out in early 2005. Both audience and press discovered from the first moment the fundamental qualities in the genuine expressiveness of the generation-crossing duo.

“Giving up the control and then seeing what happens” is how Wollny refers to the credo of playing together with Sauer in a duo. This is just as much a foundation of the improvisations moulded out of quietude, as of the voyages of discovery of their own compositions that present themselves to each other – or even the paths they take through classics by Monk and Billie Holiday.