Some say that there is hardly any jazz formation that has been more tested than the piano trio and that you have to do something special to get noticed.

Julia Hülsmann doesn´t have to concern herself with thoughts like these. She and her trio around bassist Marc Muellbauer and drummer Heinrich Köbberling have been shaping contemporary jazz in their own special way since 2002, on the path of concentration and careful reduction and sonic awareness.

Over many years and through many concerts around the world, the trio has developed a kind of blind understanding in communication, an unbreakable trust in one another but also a subtle, winking humor through sometimes ludicrous situations on concert tours that can only be faced with humor.

In many of her projects, Julia Hülsmann has worked with poetry or songs and has collaborated with singers – covering a spectrum from William Shakespeare to Kurt Weill. If, in the meantime, she repeatedly concentrates entirely on her trio, she proves – without words – her strength as a poet of sound, as a lyricist of the jazz piano.

She proves to be “with the haunting melody lines of her right hand, so to speak, her own singer” (Weltwoche, Peter Rüedi).

All of these experiences gained in expanded line-ups have flowed into the playing of the core trio with Muellbauer and Köbberling – the cohesion has grown, at the same time the freedom to go beyond the usual, which leads to constant further development in a completely organic way.

With “The End of a Summer” (2008) and “Imprint” (2011) the trio released two acclaimed albums on ECM, with their sixth ECM trio album “Sooner And Later“, following a quartet (In Full View, 2013) and quintet recording with the singer Theo Bleckmann (A Clear Midnight – Kurt Weill And America, 2015).