Heinz Sauer turns ninety: A virtuoso from the start

The last minutes before the concert starts, in the dark next to the stage, while the stage lights are already going up outside.

A few steps to the instrument.

how to start

Or every year at the counter of the Italian restaurant around the corner from the Romanfabrik in Frankfurt.

Beginning of January.

The first Friday of the new year, always in a duo with Heinz.

How did it start this year?

What do we do with this?

The year 2022 will conclude with Heinz Sauer turning ninety and it is a friend's birthday and a great artist's birthday.

Heinz is the last who can endure a solemnity or holiday speech on his behalf, and the first who will turn away from any historical classification of his person.

But one has to speak of his greatness on this day, and if I do it now in these lines, then in all brevity and with consideration for my friend, who will forgive me these words: Heinz Sauer is one of the few real musical giants who we've ever had in European jazz.

His name should be mentioned when others are circulated.

Throw listeners and players in at the deep end

Ultimately, Heinz is not about the legacy, but about the beginning.

Don't know something yet.

Throw listeners and players in at the deep end.

Premieres that can make you fall in love and that are serious about improvising and surrendering, refusing to follow the rules and challenging people to constantly reinvent themselves.

Doubt, dubious concentration instead of development.

The best way to get to Heinz is without luggage and route, which doesn't suit everyone.

But those who come with us never really want to travel any other way.

After the concert, repeated conversations with listeners who remember him from earlier times;

but who now lets them run aground, who doesn't allow themselves or them any reminiscences, who either wants to start a new conversation or not at all.

Just don't wallow in the old days, just don't unpack licks and just no kitsch.

This is exactly how he approaches the songs and harmonies: as if he were discovering them for the first time.

(The fact that they too are old acquaintances doesn't make things any easier.) Or towards the saxophone: "Actually, I hate my instrument", which can only be said by someone who knows his hated instrument so well that he can only imagine the loss of the unfamiliar fears.

(So ​​we will still have to speak of virtuosity.) Or in relation to my own ideas: "Don't play what I wrote down," was the first instruction to me, the then 23-year-old guest with the jazz ensemble of the Hessian Radio.

Or more generally towards music and jazz: "I've already heard too much", while listening to some acclaimed current recordings together.

Ends were never agreed

How he, initially a physicist, dissects chords, intervals and structures at a glance;

and how he always distances himself from all this knowledge and instead designs something unpredictable in front of his listeners' ears, pulls himself together as if it could succeed this time: this one sequence of tones, wrested from the moment, without intention, measure and pattern.

How sounds are created that are sublime and wise, that make you addicted and frighten, that comfort and amaze.

They come about without expectation and pass away without remembering.

Again and again: not intending to do what is known, functioning, conscious;

do not hold on to what has been achieved and what is successful.

The essence then appears – perhaps – from the outside, in the provisional or just in between.

jazz, isn't it?

A few years ago, when Heinz looked my son, a few days old, in the eye, he said: “

new.” It has to be that way for Heinz too – he chose it that way himself.

A single virtuoso at the beginning and one at that who makes a new beginning a condition for those around him.

Who does not hear the canon in Bach, Argerich, Jarrett or Coltrane, but rather examples of their hard-earned trust in the intuitive, the unheard.

Calculated phrases, optimized fluency or trained accuracy - irrelevant.

Virtuosity always meant: the preparedness to deal with the unintentional, the fearless search for uncertainty, the refusal of the disclosed.

Practice not to play it.

No copies, no mirroring, no credit.

He doesn't want to celebrate birthdays either.

Ninety birthdays, ninety unnecessary memories.

Better: always look ahead and only ahead.

So how to close here?

A coda would be alien to him.

Sometimes we only realized a few seconds later that we had just finished the piece.

Ends were never agreed upon, instead they always kept us from missing the unfamiliar.

I sincerely wish my friend all the best and congratulations: a giant.

Michael Wollny, born in 1978, is a jazz musician.

He met Heinz Sauer in 1999 at the jazz ensemble of the Hessian Radio.

They have been playing as a duo again and again since 2001 and have released four albums together, most recently "Don't Explain" (2012).