Michael Schiefel is a riveting, hugely talented singer on the thriving Berlin jazz scene. In solo and group formats, he has released 12 albums over the past decade, each one winning more praise than the one before. Particularly in solo performance, he augments his distinctive, virtuoso voice with experimental loops and other effects to achieve extraordinary expressions of passion, joy, and alienation.
Michael’s latest album–My Home is My Tent–is about travel: traveling between cities, between cultures, between musical genres. Released by Traumton Records in May 2010, My Home is My Tent is an intensely personal reflection on the frenetic pace and jarring discontinuities of a life spent on the road.
It is a fine follow-up to highly praised albums such as his 2007 Don’t Touch My Animals, on which, wrote Jazzthing, “his vocal range traverses a variety of moods and personae, from melancholic to euphoric and from crooner to diva”.
Michael Schiefel’s apprenticeship in Berlin clubs in the early 1990s after the Wall fell, as the city flourished with a new cultural sense of possibilities, has reaped huge artistic rewards for him. Reviewers and fans sing his praises for the way that, chameleon-like, he inhabits varied songs in idiosyncratic styles. “Germany has never seen a singer like Michael Schiefel before,” Sueddeutsche Zeitung said last year of Schiefel, who in 2001, at the age of 31, became a professor of vocal jazz at the Franz Liszt Conservatory in Weimar—and the youngest music professor in Germany. He has proved himself as “one of the few German jazz musicians who possesses a truly original style” (German Jazz Encyclopedia, 2005), whether performing solo or in a Duo with pianist Carsten Daerr; with the funk-pop band JazzIndeed; with the classical-inspired big band, Thaerichen’s Tentett; with the Balkan-beat German-Bulgarian quintet Batoru; or with modern jazz stalwart David Friedman.
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- Tickets: Rmb 30
