Jazz Festival > Program > MOTHER - TZIVAERI

Friday, March 14, 2025 ● AASSM Small Hall ● 20.30

 

 

MOTHER - TZIVAERI

 

Athina Kontou, bass

Luise Volkmann, saxophone

Dominik Mahnig, drums

Lucas Leidinger, piano

 

MOTHER

“Mother” is an expression of the German-Greek bassist Athina Kontou’s engagement with the music culture of her Greek homeland. With this ensemble, she works on songs and dances from Greek music culture and asks herself how her identity as a jazz musician connects with her Greek roots. The band enriches the traditional music with contemporary soundscapes and creates an atmosphere that is intuitively understandable and very personal. The repertoire of “Mother” includes arrangements of pieces of music from different styles and countries of origin, such as traditional dances,

rembetiko and compositions by contemporary Greek artists.

Athina Kontou’s work is based on the search for what connects the different cultures, - a border crosser between music deeply rooted in tradition and personal experience and at the same time striving for new expression. With her three fellow musicians Luise Volkmann, Dominik Mahnig and Lucas Leidinger, she forms a lively, colourful sound body, producing an organic, independent artistic product of a cultural debate through the intensity of their interaction and the sensitivity of the arrangements. Mother’s debut "Tzivaeri" was released by nWog Records and was nominated for the

German Record Critics' Award and the German Jazz Award.

 

Athina Kontou, bass

Athina Kontou is a Greek-German bass player and improvising musician based in Cologne, Germany. She grew up in Frankfurt/Main, Germany and Athens, Greece and considers both countries her home. She studied musicology in Mainz and Athens, and jazz-double bass in Weimar and Leipzig, where she lived for 13 years before moving to Cologne. 

With her band „Mother“she combines Greek music tradition with contemporary jazz sounds. The core of her work is the search for the connecting elements of different cultures, as she herself is a border crosser between the different musical cultures. With her band's live performances she wants to create spaces for people to connect, to feel as part of a community, to reflect on their own experiences in the topic of migration. 

The band released their debut album „Tzivaeri“ in 2022 on the Swiss label nWog-Records and got enthusiastic reactions by the press and audiences. 

Her working bands are Luise Volkmann’s Été Large, Conni Trieder’s Trieders Holz and the Julia Kadel Trio. With those and her own band she is touring internationally in clubs and festivals. Kontou is also active in the free improvising scene and performs in this context. Athina Kontou was nominated twice for the German Jazz Prize: 2023 in the category „debut album of the year“ for „Tzivaeri“ and 2024 in the category „string instruments“. 

She cares about the environmental crisis and tries to contribute to sustainable practices in the music world. 

 

Luise Volkmann, saxophone

Luise Volkmann (*1992) is a jazz artist and sound composer from Cologne. Her favorite tool is the saxophone- Her project circles around the transformative potential of music with various bands she brings and brought to life. She studied jazz saxophone, composition and musicology in Leipzig, Paris and Cologne. 

Luise's albums were voted among the best albums of 2018 and 2021 by the magazine Die Zeit and Redaktionsnetzwerk Deutschland. She has won several awards as a saxophonist and was nominated for the German Jazz Award. Over the past decade, she has performed at renowned festivals and jazz clubs in Europe, Brazil and Asia, with excursions into pop, contemporary and world music. 

Since her creative years in Paris, Luise Volkmann has been organising many Franco-German projects. 

 

Dominik Mahnig, piano

Dominik Mahnig, born in Willisau (CH), is a percussionist, improviser and composer. He began his studies in 2008 at the HS Lucerne - Music and graduated in 2015 with a Master of Arts at the HfMT Cologne. His playing can be heard on over 30 releases and in various radio productions. 

He is co-leader of The Great Harry Hillman and The True Harry Nulz, the Zooom Trio and Placebo Domingo. He explores the combination of Eurorack synthesizers and percussion to create an electro-acoustic soundscape. His artistic achievements have been recognised and awarded several times, e.g. in 2015 with the ZKB Jazz Prize (with The Great Harry Hillman), in 2017 with the Cologne Jazz Prize (Horst and Gretl Will Scholarship) and the new German Jazz Prize 2017 with the Tamara Lukasheva Quartet. He also plays with the following bands and musicians: Philip Zoubek Trio, Sebastian Gramss‘ States of Play Athina Kontou - Mother, In Cahoots (Gratkowski, Zoubek, Landerman, DM) Jonas Engels Own Your Bones, Ava Mendoza, Simon Nabatov, Leonhard Huhn, Christian Lorenzen, David Helm, Luise Volkmann, Lotte Anker, etc.

 

 

Athina Kontou Tzivaeri

For some time now, the name Athina Kontou has symbolized a deep understanding of how music can captivate us. So far, the bassist with the earthy tone has been heard in different contexts, for example, alongside saxophonist Luise Volkmann or pianist Johannes Bigge. With her debut album Tzivaeri, the German-Greek now sets her own accents and presents pieces she has adapted from Greek musical culture.

The title track of the album is a very well-known folk song from the Dodecanese, which, like so many traditional Greek songs, is about emigration – a theme that permeates recent Greek history. It is a lament in which a mother, who sent her child away so that he could have a better life, speaks to him and mourns her loss.

“Tzivaeri mou” means “my precious” in the local Greek language, a dialect that has been influenced by many cultures. It is an important personal concern for Athina Kontou to combine her experiences as an improvising musician in a jazz-influenced environment with her Greek roots. Greek-influenced jazz is much less common in this country than, for example, fusions of jazz with Latin American and Arabic music or Balkan sounds. The bassist, who lives in Cologne, has all the more leeway to find individual hinges for her album, connections that elude common formulas. Although jazz and Greek music may seem quite far apart at first glance, Athina Kontou has

grown organically into both traditions. “Improvisation is an important part of traditional Greek music,” she tells us, “and that applies to urban music like Rebetiko as well as folk songs and dances, especially in long intros from the bouzouki or clarinet. The intro to ‘Harmandali’ on the record, for example, is played in a very traditional way.”

To prepare for Tzivaeri, Athina Kontou embarked on a long journey. She not only confronted her family roots on an artistic level, but did so by questioning her identity in a persona manner. Through this process, she gained a sovereignty that provided her with an original angle to access her own artistic exploration. From the security of her own self-discovery, she gave the project “Mother” increasingly clear contours. Each answer resulted in a new question -and the process continues to this day. To realize her ideas, Kontou needed musical companions willing to deal with this kind of music, or put differently, to engage unconditionally with her journey. Athina Kontou’s art of storytelling was far too strong for her to have left her companions with notes that they simply had to play. Instead, she assumed they would intensely grapple with the material and its background. On Tzivaeri, this intensity translates immediately into a collective sonic experience that needs no explanation at all. The poignant emotional and formal beauty of the songs speaks for itself. The basic formation of the album is the jazz quartet “Mother” with her long time musical partner Luise Volkmann on soprano and alto saxophone, pianist Lucas Leidinger and drummer Dominik Mahnig.

Here, the bass permanently penetrates the earth’s crust, the saxophone escapes into the stratosphere, while piano and drums hold heaven and earth together. This way, the melodies become physically tangible, transforming into movement, imagination and memory. The imagery of the interpretations in each song is again so amazing that one would like to pin them on the wall as postcards. Some of the tracks feature guests: the oud and bouzouki player Epaminondas Ladas, as well as Koray Berat Sari on the lavta. “Greek music cannot do without stringed instruments. I felt the desire to play with a jazz quartet. The soprano saxophone seemed to me to be the ideal bridge between the clarinet, which is often found in traditional music, and the signature sound of jazz. The minimal preparation of the piano should evoke the typical string sounds of Greek music. However, with the two guests on string instruments, we merge into a solid unit without breaks." For all her involvement with her roots, working on Tzivaeri was also a voyage of discovery for Athina Kontou. The songs on the album contain, without exception, components of Greek musical culture. Some are traditional songs, while others are popular songs by contemporary

composers, including Nikos Xydakis. However, when delving deeper into the sources, the bassist found that some songs have Armenian or Turkish roots. "At first, the repertoire was mainly songs that meant something to me, that have been with me since childhood. But then during my research I found out that, for example, Armenian folk songs are included, which enjoy great popularity in Greece since they have been interpreted with Greek lyrics. And the Turkish dance "Harmandali" is also played in Greece." The songs on Tzivaeri not only have a captivating effect, seeming to suspend the uniqueness of space and the irreversibility of time. Athina Kontou also impressively demonstrates on her debut record how arbitrary and superfluous geographical, cultural or traditional demarcation lines are. Her music is a great invitation to all who simply want to listen and marvel without reservation.

 

 

Saturday, March 15, 2025 IKSEV 11.00

 

MOTHER - TZIVAERI WORKSHOP

 

Athina Kontou, bass

Luise Volkmann, saxophone

Dominik Mahnig, drums

Lucas Leidinger, piano