Bio:
Olivia Trummer (*1985 in Stuttgart, Germany) hails from a musicians' family and started studying classical piano at age 4, learning all music by ear at first. Soon after she became passionate about improvising and composing as well and continued to develop these creative skills while benefiting from an open-minded Classical music education. She eventually studied both Jazz Piano and Classical Piano at the University of Music in Stuttgart and graduated with distinction in both. Equipped with a full scholarship of the DAAD, she went on to pursue a Master's degree at the Manhattan School of Music in New York City and spent formative years dividing her time between New York City and Berlin after her return.
Olivia unfolds a musical spectrum that is just as wide as it is authentic. Her discography to date contains seven albums mirroring her astounding metamorphosis: Starting off as a jazz pianist by releasing two instrumental trio albums with original music she went on to also reveal her talent as a vocalist and songwriter, producing lyrics in English as well as in German for her third and fourth album. Her fifth album Fly Now (2014) was recorded in New York with Matt Penman, Obed Calvaire and special guest Kurt Rosenwinkel. The songs of Fly Now received international acclaim, particularly in the UK. For her sixth album C2J – Classical to Jazz One (2015) Olivia went back to her Classical roots and approached selected piano works by Scarlatti, Bach and Mozart from a jazz perspective. Her seventh album, a live recorded solo concert at the renowned Bauer Studios was released in June 2018. The album features Olivia on piano, Fender Rhodes and vocals and contains several of Olivia's songs as well as her arrangements of music by Stevie Wonder, Burt Bacharach, George Gershwin and Claude Debussy.
Olivia mostly appears as a bandleader of her own projects and has performed her original music in many countries including Germany, USA, Austria, Ireland, England, Italy, Switzerland and Czech Republic. She has appeared in concert venues like Carnegie Hall (NYC), Konzerthaus (Berlin), "Porgy & Bess" (Vienna), The National Concert Hall (Dublin), "Pizza Express Live" (London) and "Il Torrione" (Ferrara). She has been invited to perform at jazz festivals such as "London Jazz Fest", "12points" Festival and "Galway Jazz Festival" in Ireland, "Pescara Jazz Festival" in Italy, "Solo Piano Festival" in Prague, "Theaterhaus Jazz Festival" in Stuttgart, "Jazz Open" in Hamburg and the "Jazz Festival Ingolstadt" as well as Classical Music festivals such as "Ludwigsburg Festival", "Bachfest" in Stuttgart and "Bachwoche" in Ansbach.
Since October 2016, Olivia is also touring with Kurt Rosenwinkel as a member of his new project "Caipi". So far, the band has played over 40 concerts, performing at top venues and festivals such as the Montreux Jazz Festival, the Birdland Jazzclub in New York, the Blue Note in Tokyo and in Beijing, the Vancouver Jazz Festival and the Montréal Jazz Festival. Further collaborations of Olivia include the NDR Big Band, Wolfgang Haffner, Tim Garland, Gerard Presencer, Bodek Janke, Phil Donkin, Hadar Noiberg, Max Ionata, Matthias Schriefl and Sebastian Studnitzky.
Olivia has earned numerous awards and scholarships: Five National Awards at "Jugend musiziert" 1999-2003, Scholarship from the German Academic Exchange Service 2008/09, German Quarterly Critics’ Choice Award 3/2008, Art Foundation Baden-Württemberg 2010, Bruno-Frey Foundation 2010, Jazz Award Ingolstadt 2014. She has received funding and support from Initiative Musik as well as from Bayer Kultur in Leverkusen, being chosen their "stART" Jazz Artist 2013-2016.
Olivia is based in Berlin. She is currently working on a new series of original songs for the Olivia Trummer Trio, featuring Haggai Cohen-Milo (ISR) on bass and Nicola Angelucci (ITA) on drums.
The Recôncavo is an almost invisible center-of-gravity. Circumscribing the Bay of All Saints, this region was landing for more enslaved human beings than any other such throughout all of human history. Not unrelated, it is also birthplace of some of the most physically & spiritually uplifting music ever made. —Sparrow
"Dear Sparrow: I am thrilled to receive your email! Thank you for including me in this wonderful matrix."
—Susan Rogers: Personal recording engineer for Prince, inc. "Purple Rain", "Sign o' the Times", "Around the World in a Day"... Director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory
I'm Pardal here in Brazil (that's "Sparrow" in English). The deep roots of this project are in Manhattan, where Allen Klein (managed the Beatles and The Rolling Stones) called me about royalties for the estate of Sam Cooke... where Jerry Ragovoy (co-wrote Time is On My Side, sung by the Stones; Piece of My Heart, Janis Joplin of course; and Pata Pata, sung by the great Miriam Makeba) called me looking for unpaid royalties... where I did contract and licensing for Carlinhos Brown's participation on Bahia Black with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock...
...where I rescued unpaid royalties for Aretha Franklin (from Atlantic Records), Barbra Streisand (from CBS Records), Led Zeppelin, Mongo Santamaria, Gilberto Gil, Astrud Gilberto, Airto Moreira, Jim Hall, Wah Wah Watson (Melvin Ragin), Ray Barretto, Philip Glass, Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd for his interest in Bob Marley compositions, Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam and others...
...where I worked with Earl "Speedo" Carroll of the Cadillacs (who went from doo-wopping as a kid on Harlem streetcorners to top of the charts to working as a janitor at P.S. 87 in Manhattan without ever losing what it was that made him special in the first place), and with Jake and Zeke Carey of The Flamingos (I Only Have Eyes for You)... stuff like that.
Yeah this is Bob's first record contract, made with Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd of Studio One and co-signed by his aunt because he was under 21. I took it to Black Rock to argue with CBS' lawyers about the royalties they didn't want to pay. They paid.
MATRIX MUSICAL
The Matrix was built below among some of the world's most powerfully moving music, some of it made by people barely known beyond village borders. Or in the case of Sodré, his anthem A MASSA — a paean to Brazil's poor ("our pain is the pain of a timid boy, a calf stepped on...") — having blasted from every radio between the Amazon and Brazil's industrial south, before he was silenced. (that's me left, with David Dye & Kim Junod for U.S. National Public Radio) ... The Matrix started with Sodré, with João do Boi, with Roberto Mendes, with Bule Bule, with Roque Ferreira... music rooted in the sugarcane plantations of Bahia. Hence our logo (a cane cutter).