Ulrike Haage


Ulrike Haage is a German pianist and composer, producer for radio plays and a sound artist.

Biography

The jazz years

Ulrike Haage spent her childhood in Ruhr. She grew up listening to the big jazz record collection of her parents and trained to play piano listening to masters as Bill Evans and Thelonious Monk, improvising. As a teenager she started singing and playing guitar in a garage-band.
After studying music and music therapy at Musikhochschule Hamburg, she stayed on an taught improvisation and orchestra direction from 1985 to 1989. During this time she begins to compose and starts playing piano for the first German Female Jazz band: Reichlich Weiblich. While working with Peter Zadek on the theatre play Andi, she meets FM Einheit. With him, Alfred 23 Harth and Phil Minton, the group Vladimir Estragon is founded, where Ulrike begins to introduce electronic music. A year later, because of the departure of Alfred Harth, the quartet becomes the trio GOTO, with the vocal acrobatics of Phil Minton.

Pop and theatre years

In 1990, she joins Katharina Franck in the pop group Rainbirds, which is already facing recognition. They release Two faces and In A Different Light.
Between tours and recordings for the Rainbirds and the theatre music group Stein Ulrike Haage works at theaters in Zurich, Düsseldorf and Berlin
In 1999 a close collaboration with the actress Meret Becker begins. In addition she becomes the music director of the concert’s program Nachtmahr and records the CD Fragiles.
With the translator and publisher Sylvia de Hollanda, she founds Sans Soleil, a publishing house for books and radio plays.

German jazz award: Alfred Mangelsdorff Preis

In 2003 Ulrike Haage becomes the first and up to then the youngest woman to win the German Jazz Award. Markus Müller, presenting the award, pays tribute "to her outstanding and truly versatile life-work that permanently reinvents itself ». He emphasizes her artistic way through pop, art and avant-garde.

The solo period, not so solo

Sélavy, her first instrumental solo album is released in 2004. In the next two years, the Goethe Institut of Moscow invites her to tour the cities along the Wolga and Siberia, playing concerts and giving workshops.
In 2006, she records her second solo album Weißes Land.
Since then, she participates among other projects in the Ring with choreographer Felix Ruckert and musician Christian Meyer, where she plays simultaneously to the choreography happening in front of her in interaction with the dancers.
2007, she becomes an artist-in-residence at the Hartung-Bergman foundation, composing a "dialogue", a music piece for chamber vibraphone, marimbaphone and electronics, in correspondence to the paintings of Anna-Eva Bergman
and produces more and more radio plays for the German public radio. For example, Alles aber Anders , a radio play for the Bavarian Radio, Bayerischer Rundfunk, after the diary of the sculptor Eva Hesse. For the celebration of the 90th Anniversary of the Bauhaus, she performs her radio play Der Kreis ist rot, after the diary of Oskar Schlemmer.
The opera radio play Amnesie der Ozeane in collaboration with Stephan Krass, is produced in 2010, as is the music for the sound-book Heimsuchung. Between concerts and conferences her third solo album In:finitum is in the making and released in 2011.
In 2012 Ulrike Haage spends 3 months at the artist-residence Villa Kamagowa in Kyoto, Japan. Here the idea for the composition of For all my walking takes root. Another artist-in-residence program, this time at the Leuphana Universität Lüneburg, is where she produces an audio-visual piece between sound and silence, which deals with the subject of public space as a sound space.
2015 saw the release of her fourth solo album Maelstrom. The same year the production of two radio plays Lockbuch and Geld were finished and the composition of the soundtrack to the new Doris Dörrie film , which was running at the 66th Berlinale International Film Festival, was recorded. Also showing at the 2016 Berlinale was the film by German filmmaker Volker Koepp featuring music by Ulrike Haage.

Influences

When you listen to her music, you can go to the quest for the different musics which have had a strong influence on her style. Of course, there is the jazz – since her debuts with the records of her parents, up to her first jazz-band. Her compositions, even today leave a big part to improvisation. Oft one could find on her partitions only an indication of chord on which she will improvise during the concert.
Her very thorough and classic training of music brings an instrumental acuteness and sharpness to her music. Each break is controlled, each period has its sens. She puts her music together using repetitions of more or less long terms, according to the tradition of the ostinato.
Music is not her sole inspiration, she is also an artist with words. She works with them as she works with musical subjects. A lot of these play-on-words have an artist´s words for inspiration. Alles aber Anders, from Eva Hesse´s journal, is a particularly interesting example; she repeats certain words according to a particular rhythm, replaced by a sound, until exhaustion. Just like these visual artists, whose words she puts into music, we can hear breaks, "flat areas", as if she were drawing musical landscapes with big streaks of colors.
Ulrike Haage herself is an influence to new artists such as Nepomuk, who remixed "Magic Waters".

Defining the "genre"

How could her music, taking inspiration in the whole music history, be defined? electro-jazz? nu-jazz? film soundtrack? theatre music? and what about the piano? and the more classic parts? Ulrike Haage is constantly redefining her music and her way of composing and creating. She flees in order to invent a new writing each time.
An adjective stands out: eclectic. Then, others come to mind; still, light, crystalline. Maybe the time has come, as Frédéric Derval said it, to forget about the encompassing "genres" and names in order to find a new way to express music.

Discography

Reichlich Weiblich - Live in Moers
Vladimir Estragon - Three Quarks for Muster Mark
Rainbirds - 3000.live, Forever, Making Memory, The Mercury Years, In a Different Light, Two Faces
Gruppe Stein - König Zucker, Steinzeit
Goto - Goto, Phil Minton, FM Einheit, Haage

''Filmography''

Other projects