Monika Weiss

As a little girl I grew up in Warsaw trained as a classical musician. Piano was always a physical place, a site, that I loved most. It was also an instrument I played. Later I grew up to be a visual artist and filmmaker but composing music remains part of my work as an artist. Jazz was never in the picture in a home where my pianist mother would decide what was music and what was not. Chopin, Mozart, Brahms or Schubert were those whose music was familiar to me from a very early age. Yet in my teens I discovered and fell in love with Keith Jarrett. I think the first recording was his Cologne concert. It was as if a vast space opened up around me, a space of rhythm and repetition, a space of sparse (and at times absent) melody, which I felt was replaced with thickness and reverb. At the same time I recall listening a lot to Scriabin and reading Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus (which I think I read at least 5 times) that was loosely inspired by the life and work of Schoenberg. And I became obsessed with the idea of music as a kind of redemption or revolt, or both. Since then I remain most attracted to music that disintegrates as it happens... Music that in a sense, laments, falls apart, that exposes its vulnerability. It was Thomas Mann who said in his dairies in 1943, that music recognizes itself as lament, finally, in the 20th century. Contemporary, experimental and crossing over to new music kind of jazz, in my mind, provides that vast space and thickness and fragility of sound that I fell in love with as a teenager. These days I still listen to Schubert and Scriabin and to Derek Bailey, or to Phill Niblock (my dear mentor). In my own work (when I work with sound in my experimental films) I find inspiration in Steve Reich's music, especially in his Different Trains. I am also indebted to some of the ideas that John Cage left us with, especially his insistence on silence. But piano and contemporary jazz for piano, remain the most exciting to me, such as my recent discovery, composer and pianist Kris Davis, and my long standing appreciation of the work of Cecil Taylor.