The April/May 2025 issue of JazzPodium, Germany’s oldest jazz magazine, features an interview with me conducted by fellow drummer and journalist Niklas Wandt in early February. He asked me about my beginnings, my first years in Berlin thirty years ago, my instrument setup, and my thoughts on the current state of jazz music. I answered to the best of my ability, and I have included a translated version of the interview below.
A defining drummer who doesn’t seem to care much for the spotlight: Michael Griener has been playing in a wide range of settings for decades, always pushing the music forward with reliability and inventiveness, helping it to go deeper as well. A meeting in Berlin, where he has lived for the past thirty years, reveals a jazz musician who still deserves more recognition – and who articulates his work with striking clarity.
By Niklas Wandt
THE FIRST TIME I saw Michael Griener on stage was in 2014, at the 50th edition of Günter Christmann’s Vario at Berlin’s Exploratorium. He plays a very compact setup. Shallow drums with small diameters, discreetly dampened, a few tiny bells and splash cymbals mounted on the larger ones – anyone who has spent years hauling around a full drum kit, not to mention an entire band setup, will appreciate the advantages of such a minimal rig.
Fast forward to a snowy evening in January 2025. Griener is performing on the tiny stage of Richten25 in Berlin-Wedding with Oùat, his trio with Swedish-Berliner-by-choice Joel Grip on double bass and French pianist Simon Sieger. Given the anarchic spectacle the trio unleashes on this small stage, such instrument listings offer only a rough idea of what’s really happening. Group raps, spontaneous spoken interjections, greetings to guests still squeezing into the little studio after the show has started – many of them fellow musicians from the Berlin scene. Ever the archivist, Griener has set up small cameras around the stage. The concert – like many others – is soon available to watch on his YouTube channel.
A few weeks later, I meet him in his rehearsal space. Berlin-Mitte, third backyard, still with resident craftsmen. Griener shares the room with three other drummers, and it’s packed accordingly. A digital clock with a hygrometer hangs on the wall – the humidity has to stay low so the natural skins on his Slingerland kit keep their tension. It’s a stunning set – turquoise mother-of-pearl, wonderfully bright and crisp tuning, and cymbals that respond with the lightest touch. As we talk, Griener sits at his kit, fully in his element. A subtle Franconian lilt hums gently through the drum shells.
Let’s just start right from the beginning. You told me about the environment you grew up in, and I found that fascinating.
My parents divorced early, and I grew up with my single mother in Nuremberg. When I was twelve, I heard Benny Goodman’s “Sing, Sing, Sing” on the radio – with Gene Krupa on drums – and that was it: I knew I wanted to play the drums. But that wasn’t remotely possible in our rented apartment, so I banged on the mattress with the sticks my mother gave me. When she moved to Hannover, I went to live with my father – I was fourteen at the time. He ran a real old-school dive bar in Nuremberg. Not long after, one of the regulars who couldn’t pay his tab gave up his drum kit instead – everyone knew I wanted to play. I set it up in the basement where they stored the drinks. It was a pretty rough environment. The whole building was home to prostitutes. When their clients came, they’d shut off the lights in the basement. I had to keep quiet for half an hour, then I could go back to drumming.
After a year and a half, I decided to move to Hannover to be with my mom. The first place I went was the local jazz club, and there was Mike Gehrke – he ran the club for years. I asked him where I could play, and he said, “We’ve got rooms upstairs, full of instruments. Talk to the janitor and you can practice there.” So, after school, I’d head straight to the jazz club and practice every day. I’m still grateful for that opportunity.
That’s when things really took off. By sixteen, I probably could’ve made a living from playing. I was in bands with people who were older than my parents – people who’d been making music longer than I’d been alive. And they’d always be negotiating with my mom about when I had to be home. That was my apprenticeship. That’s how I learned to play – on stage.
Did you have any peers who were into jazz too?
If you were a teenager into jazz in the ’80s, you were completely on your own. I met Rudi Mahall at a concert, and we started playing together in the basement under that bar in Nuremberg. It was a pretty wild scene for him – he came from a more middle-class background. That’s where he witnessed his first bar fight. He still talks about it today.
That’s the Nuremberg of Macho Man, starring René Weller!
Rudi’s a bit older than me, but finding someone else who liked jazz was rare – and of course, we started playing together right away. But I really learned to play properly in Hannover, with the older crowd. I met Günter Christmann very early on – he organized the Hohe-Ufer concerts. Of course I stood out as a 15-year-old at the Evan Parker concert. But I got involved immediately – helped, handed out flyers. And of course, I learned a ton. Günter just has phenomenal taste in music. For me, those concerts were like my university.
Straight-ahead jazz and free improvisation – those are really two pretty different worlds, both in terms of structure and maybe also in how they relate to each other.
I had a lot of conversations about that – with Günter, and with other musicians too. There was always this expectation that I had to make a choice: What kind of music do you actually play? Are you a “regular” straight-ahead jazz drummer, an improviser, or what exactly are you trying to be? And I never understood that. There’s so much great music out there, and I wanted to play all of it – I wanted to be able to play all of it. I started with Gene Krupa and quickly got into Count Basie. From there it went straight to Monk, Mingus, and Ornette Coleman – and to me, it all felt connected.
The people I could play that music with were often very closed off to each other’s worlds – they had blinders on and thought what the others were doing was somehow dumb. That never bothered me. On the contrary, actually. And that’s probably one of the reasons I ended up in Berlin – people here left me alone about that. In other cities, I always felt like I had to justify what kind of music I was “allowed” to play.
Things definitely spread out more in Berlin. You can decide not to exist at all – or to exist in lots of different contexts.
For me, I’m mostly just looking for good musicians to make music with. How it ends up sounding – that comes later. I hear someone, I think they’re amazing, and I say, “Let’s play!” That’s the beauty of Berlin. I can have a session every day – no need for a concert, no need to rehearse. We just want to make music.
But that openness also creates a paradox here in Berlin – for musicians, I mean. The freedom to play with everyone and anyone… it’s also led to the reality that you can barely make any money with music anymore.
I see it a bit differently. I’ve been teaching at the conservatory in Dresden for twenty years now, and I get a lot of young musicians who come to me, excited and full of energy. The first thing I tell them is: “You’re not learning a profession here. You’re learning a skill that almost no one cares about. Your profession will be figuring out how to turn that skill into money.”
Unfortunately, that side of things – how to survive – is barely covered in a university setting. So I try to prepare my students for it in my teaching. I never went to a conservatory myself, but I’ve always had gigs. And it’s not because I’m super organized. It’s just that I do what I have to do to get enough concerts.
There aren’t many ways to make money just within Berlin itself. But on the flip side, I meet people here I never would have met otherwise. For example, I’ve been playing with Canadian trumpeter Lina Allemano for over ten years now. She emailed me back then, we played together, and – wow – it just clicked. We’re still playing together to this day.
Sure, I’m on the road a lot too. It’s going well, and things are pretty relaxed right now. Harder times are probably coming, but hey – we’re jazz musicians. We improvise. I’m fairly optimistic. Tough times are good for music – maybe not for musicians, but for the music.
If you were just starting out today, do you think your path would still work the same way?
Hard to say. I do think it’s a problem nowadays that everyone believes you have to study jazz before you’re allowed to make music professionally. What I did back then – that kind of thing doesn’t really happen anymore. Just playing with people who go up on stage and make music. They weren’t my teachers, but they knew exactly what they wanted from me and told me.
In today’s younger scene, people mostly stay among themselves. The moment there’s someone older in the band, that person gets automatically seen as a teacher – like they’re going to lay down the law about how music is supposed to work. But that cuts them off from a sense of continuity in the music, and that continuity is so important.
I played with people who had been on stage with Ella Fitzgerald. They knew what that felt like. If jazz students only ever play with other students – where’s that supposed to come from? And where are the gigs supposed to come from? Then you end up playing competitions and door-deal gigs in student bars, and the crowd is just other students again. It becomes this parallel universe that has almost nothing to do with the real world you run into if you want to actually make a living from music. And I really feel for the young people. They just need to play. And if they don’t do that, they can practice all they want – it won’t help.
That’s a contradiction I see everywhere: a treasure trove of knowledge at your fingertips, but a huge lack of experience.
I remember one moment really clearly – I must’ve been 16 or 17. I was playing in a band with the English swing trombonist Bernie Newland. I was deep into my Tony Williams phase, but we were playing old swing – Ellington tunes and the like. After the gig, Bernie pulled me aside and said, “Michael, maybe you’re the best drummer I’ve ever played with. But if you ever play like that again, don’t bother coming back.” I had played absolutely terribly.
The way jazz is taught now, the music gets broken down into parts that can be graded, and everyone’s trying to play faster, higher, and louder. But that’s not what music-making is about. I play with all kinds of people – some have amazing instrumental technique, others can barely play their instrument, and yet they still make good music.
How much technique you have is, in a way, your own personal business. Make sure you have enough to play the music you want to play. But don’t turn it into a goal in itself.
And what I see with students sometimes is that they have too much technique for the ideas they’re working with – not the other way around. You should be able to play your instrument without having to think about it while you’re making music. That’s when your technique is good – when it doesn’t get in the way of what you want to express musically.
How do you deal with those tendencies as a teacher in Dresden? I assume you’re also bound to certain structural requirements?
Of course I want them to learn to play the drums well. But more than anything, I want to help them make the music they want to make. I can’t totally prevent my personal taste from coming into it – but at the same time, I have zero interest in them ending up making the kind of music they think I want to hear. I really want them to find their own thing.
So I play them lots of music and we talk about it. And then we tackle the technical problems that come up when they realize they can’t yet play the stuff they want to play.
But without an idea – there’s really no point in practicing drums. It’s that simple. If you don’t know what you want to play, don’t even start. First, figure out what you like. Figure out what you want to hear. And then learn how to play that. It’s also way easier that way – you’ll have to practice less. I recommend it to everyone.
The fact that you found your own path so independently also had a lot to do with the opportunities you had here in Berlin. What did you find when you first moved here?
Pretty much nothing. The city was totally open and new, and there weren’t any power structures you had to fit into. Rudi Mahall, Axel Dörner, and I all moved to Berlin on the same day, in January 1994. East Berlin was full of empty storefronts, and for some reason, the electricity and water were still running in them. People just went in with a lock pick, put a fridge inside, and suddenly it was a bar. They fired up the coal stove and started putting on concerts.
I once flipped through my old calendars from that time – I was playing 25 or 30 gigs a month. Most of them didn’t even start until after 11 p.m. I’d get home at four in the morning, grab a roll from the bakery, and crash.
It was a one-of-a-kind situation. Kind of how I imagine 52nd Street in New York in the ’30s. I’m really glad I got to be part of those ten years, before things started tightening up in Berlin. It was a wild time – and unfortunately, barely documented. There was hardly any infrastructure back then. No one from the radio was at those clubs, no microphones, it just happened – and now it’s over. But it was incredible while it lasted.
Sure – after all, it’s been more than thirty years. And even in the ten years I’ve been here, I can really feel how much more intense and tighter the city has become. Your generation really had the gift of time.
Evan Parker said something during a recent workshop – he said he feels sorry for young musicians today because they just don’t have the time to make music in peace. And I see that with all the young folks moving to Berlin now. They’re paying way too much for a room in a shared flat and scrambling just to get by. That leaves them with hardly any time to actually play. It’s rough, and honestly, kind of unfair.
Because Berlin still has a ton to offer. Every night, there are ten or fifteen gigs with improvised music. But trying to make ends meet just from playing – that’s tough here now.
You’ve played a lot with Alexander von Schlippenbach, but also with Uli Gumpert and others. Did you notice differences in the way they approached playing?
Oh yeah, absolutely. Alex has a much deeper connection to the jazz tradition. He was actually at those concerts back in the day. He once told me how Monk helped himself to one of Alex’ joints – he really lived that world up close, and he played it too.
That wasn’t so common in the East. There, people mostly accessed the jazz tradition through old Amiga records, and then they built something else on top of that. Gumpert has a massive record collection, but a lot of people in that circle are actually not all that close to jazz, even if they’re amazing players.
But they made strong music – music that was authentic and true to who they were. It reflected their lives, their experiences. And that’s the kind of music I care about: music that’s human.
In improvised music, it’s been quite normal for drummers to play highly individual setups for the past sixty years or so. Your setup has changed a lot over the years as well. I remember seeing a video of you at the Sprengel Museum in Hannover- your kit there looked very inspired by Tony Oxley. These days, you often bring your own set to your concerts. What role does your gear play for you?
I consider myself a jazz drummer, but I started getting into European improvised music pretty early on. What’s stayed with me after all these decades is mainly a sense for sound and the need to hear certain sounds when I play. Everything – my gear, my sticks, and the way I produce sound – is built around that. That’s one reason I only use calfskin drumheads now – they just have a warmer sound.
My small travel kit has evolved over time. What I’ve found is that shallow drums respond well even at low volumes. That way I can get a full sound without stepping on anyone else’s toes, and without losing intensity. I’ve done a lot of research and collected tons of vintage stick models to see what players like Roy Haynes or Art Blakey used. I actually have an original stick from Art – he lost it at a festival in Hildesheim. I tried to give it back and he said, “You’re a drummer? Keep it!”
Then I randomly found a drummer in Louisiana who owns a machine that can recreate those old sticks. The machine is the size of my rehearsal room and constantly breaks down, so I always have to wait forever until he can make new ones. But he can make sticks that are exactly like the originals.
Wow! It’s super light – feels like a toothpick!
My cymbals come from a company in Portland that makes their instruments based on old Istanbul designs. Dizzy Gillespie always carried a cymbal that all his drummers had to use. I loved the sound of it, so they recreated it for me – down to the exact cutout and the 17 rivet holes the original had. I’m a total nerd about this stuff and very meticulous when it comes to choosing my gear – it’s all exactly the way I want it. My setup is basically a classic jazz kit, and I have a small bongo as a nod to Tony Oxley and my “family” – that’s what I call all the small cymbals, woodblocks, and odds and ends I’ve collected over the years. Every piece has its place, and I can shape every sound. If I had to, I could go onstage with just one of my cymbals and play it the whole evening.
Sounds like you really aim for something stripped down and ensemble-friendly.
That’s key! I want to play with people. That’s the easiest way for me to communicate – way easier than talking. And everything – the gear, the technique – is just a tool to serve that purpose. That’s what it’s all about for me. And it just keeps getting better. That’s the amazing part – I’m enjoying it more than ever.
Why do you think that is?
It’s becoming clearer and clearer to me what I want to do, how I want to sound, and I’ve found the people I want to do that with. I don’t have to turn down gigs. But I also can’t just smile my way through a job – I’m terrible at faking it. You can tell right away if I’m not having fun. And then I don’t get called again. So over the years, things naturally sorted themselves out, and now I’m always onstage with the right people. It doesn’t get better than that. So yeah – it’s all working out really well.
I honestly can’t wait to keep playing. Sure, I probably won’t get a proper pension one day, and who knows – maybe I’ll regret it one day. But right now I feel really blessed.