müller - guitar, double bass, percussion, electronics. Lothar Müller, Andreas Henze, Thomas Hempel, Albrecht Husen. müller - a quartet with a centre of gravity: Lothar Müller’s guitar. The Hannover musician plays his instrument with the expression of a singer - the guitar sings, speaks, tells stories. Is this jazz? müller - opens all the closets. And gets jazz dressed up in the prettiest things: rock grooves, country, sampling, soundscapes, wah-wah, slide, feedback. Everything deftly combined, from the skin to the outer layer - and nothing gets tangled. With simple, beautiful melodies in the foreground, Lothar Müller’s compositions are characterised by clear structures, intensive, often melancholy atmospheres and the warm vocal tone of the guitar. Everything started with the Beatles. Their extraordinary wealth of ideas and inventions influenced Lothar Müller. Via Santana, Hendrix and Clapton, the path led to Abercrombie, Scofield and Frisell because the instrumental realm, jazz, had enticing things to offer: more expressive possibilities, more space and time. But Müller was careful to avoid the classical jazz trio sound and that “now-I’m-playing-jazz feeling,” as he puts it. Borders are fluid - or disappear altogether; the force, the power of music makes everything possible. Sound journeys are journeys across the face of the earth. Exporations of “No Man’s Land” and “Kids’ Country” slip in easily alongside arrangements of pieces by Luiz Bonfas and Björks. And all the while, it doesn’t matter what jazz is. The language of müller is universal; the guitar is song. Lothar Müller refers to himself as an autodidact. “It never occurred to me that what I was looking for could be taught. If someone had said to me, hey, here you can learn Beatles songs, I’d have been there in a flash. Maybe there were those possibilities and I just didn’t know about them.” So he learned on his own, with the help of a book called “Beatles Complete” and a hi-fi. Müller started out as a singer in various bands; he began playing solos “because I was the only one in the band who could find notes that sounded good, even if it was only two.” In the 90s he took lessons with John Abercrombie and Jim Hall. After receiving the International Jazz Prize of Trier in 1990, Lothar Müller went on to win the Jazz Podium of Lower Saxony several times (the last being in 2002). He has played with Cunnie Williams on the latter’s tour of Europe, taken the Müller Trio on concert tours to Russia (2001) and China (2002) and worked as a theatre musician at the Schauspielhaus Hannover and the Berliner Ensemble. Thomas Hempel studied percussion at the Hilversum Conservatory and has played with Bart van Lier, Rolf Zielke’s Blow Up, Paul Imm, Jerry van Rooyen, Klaus Ignatzek and others. Andreas Henze completed his study of the classical double bass at the music academy of his native town Kassel, then moved to Berlin with a sojourn in Hamburg. Today he is strongly involved with improvised music. Albrecht Husen studied percussion at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Hanover, composed and did arrangements for musicals, commercial jingles and his band “Coustics,” with which he won the Jazz Podium of Hanover in 2001. Thomas Hempel and Andreas Henze have been playing with Lothar Müller in the Müller Trio since 1999. After “Mahlzeit,” the CD “Q” came out in 2002; Albrecht Husen joined the band the same year. Müller Trio became simply müller.