Piano-drum duos are a rare but special thing. Even more scarce are duos where both players operate on the same level… Cecil Taylor and Max Roach come to mind first, immediately followed by the same Cecil and Tony Oxley. Misha Mengelberg and Han Bennink. Fred Van Hove and Roger Turner. Irène Schweizer played with a whole run of drummers… We almost forgot Alex von Schlippenbach and Paal Nilssen-Love. 

Marta Warelis and Mariá Portugal are the freshest duo on the block. The Polish-Brazilian tandem hasn’t played many concerts as a duo yet, but based on both players’ individual output, this combo can’t go wrong. Reviews of their scarce shows have been raving about piano preparations, a drum kit adorned with small percussion objects, Portugal adding song-elements with her voice, and ‘unrestrained outbursts of energy’.

We spoke to Warelis and Portugal about following the music to new home ground, the stress of playing solo improv, the pleasure of finding new musical companions and the urge to give something back to the community.

Mariá, you moved from Brazil to Germany, and Marta you relocated from Poland to the Netherlands, ending up in Germany as well. Could you both sketch your musical path before the decision to follow the music? 

Mariá Portugal: Brazil is a country with a strong popular music tradition and my family was always very musical, too. I started playing classical piano, and as a teenager I switched to drums. I studied a bit of classical percussion at the conservatory and popular Brazilian percussion as well. After that, I ended up studying classical composition at the university. The reality of being a musician in Brazil is that you are doing many different things at the same time. So I was touring as a side musician with Brazilian pop singers and I was also playing Brazilian popular music that was more connected to the tradition. At the same time I was really into techno, all while I was studying classical composition and diving deep into the European 20th century orchestral repertoire. 

My affiliation with improvisation came through playing with dancers, making soundtracks for theatre and dance companies. I did that for almost twenty years and that really was my door into the world of improvisation – I did not enter through jazz or even classical contemporary, as it usually goes for European players. And then I came to Germany because I was invited to be the improviser-in-residence at the Moers festival for one year, in 2020. And I stayed. 

Didn’t you go to Germany prior to that, to study with Karlheinz Stockhausen? 

MP: Yes, when I was 23, I did a composition course in Kürten, where Stockhausen lived. It was three months before he died. But I should add it wasn’t a one-to-one course. People sometimes think it was me and him: ‘Come on, Karl, tell me your secrets!’ (laughs) But we did get daily lectures by him and I did meet him, and I have a Klavierstück score signed by him. 

Marta, you moved from Poland to the Netherlands and later Germany, what happened before that? 

Marta Warelis: I started listening to jazz quite late in life. As a child, I studied classical piano. But I listened to everything: pop, rock, metal, and especially punk. By the age of twelve, I started playing in a garage group, playing punk and covers of songs by bands like Red Hot Chili Peppers and Led Zeppelin.

When I think of improvisation, I’m reminded of one of my teachers from elementary school who owned a pub that was selling pizza and beer, and once a week blues sessions were organised there… After a while my group would open the sessions. That made a very big impact on me, in terms of improvising. And then, when I was around eighteen years old, I saw a late night jazz program on Mezzo, a French television channel, and I was mind-blown – I couldn’t understand how they created these compositions without charts. 

I can imagine that blows the mind of a classically trained young player. When did you realise that was what you wanted to do yourself? 

MW: After high school I wanted to study languages at the university of Wrocław. But I also craved to understand jazz, so I found a school that had some jazz musicians teaching. It was the kind of evening school where people of all ages study together, but for me it was great, because it opened my door to the Wrocław scene, even if I didn’t have the skills to participate at the beginning – I had to understand harmony better. I played different things back then: I worked with theatre and played in an avant-pop group with lots of synthesisers. With time, jazz became more and more absorbing, so when a friend of mine went to study at the Prins Claus Conservatorium in Groningen, he asked me ‘Why not try?’ That made me decide to move to the Netherlands, at 23. 

The Groningen Conservatory was small, but it had students from all over the world. One of the teachers was ICP Orchestra’s Michael Moore, and he became a big inspiration. Michael saw that some students were interested in free improvisation and created a band called Michael Moore Pool, helping us getting experience playing by taking us to play all over Netherlands. He also introduced us to musicians like Ab Baars, Han Bennink and Michael Vatcher, who came over to give workshops. Later, when I moved from Groningen to Amsterdam, especially the older players really wanted to collaborate and explore. 

Did you get to see Misha Mengelberg play in that period?

MW: Only once. I saw him with the ICP orchestra, but he was already in a deep state. So  unfortunately I didn’t see him at his full potential. 

Mariá, you moved to Germany in 2020, having lived your entire life in Brazil, where everything is immersed in music. How much of a culture shock was that?

MP: Well, I think Germans have an amazing musical culture. In fact, music is one of the best things German culture has produced. Of course it’s a hard comparison, first of all because Brazil is such a big country with such a complex and diverse musical culture. And Brazilian music is, overall, deeply rooted in black musical culture, largely coming from the musical traditions of West and West Central Africa… The musical tradition in Germany is also special, and people here are connected to music in a very deep way. I appreciate the respect for silence, which I think is characteristic for this culture in general. Also, the schooling here is amazing, so the players have a technical knowledge of music that is insane. Also: the community in Berlin, where I live now, is a melting pot of people from all parts of Germany, the Middle East, South America, Eastern Europe, Asia… So I’m not bored here, on the contrary. 

Let’s talk about the piano-drum duo. 

MP: How did we meet, Marta? I don’t remember. 

MW: I think we met at TOMA CHOCOLATE!, your concert series, and then we went for a coffee. And a bit later we got a gig at Sowieso. 

MP: I remember finishing that gig, and immediately telling Marta we had to do that again. And then Heino, a habitué of the improvisation nights at Sowieso came to me, and said ‘Mariá, I think this is one of these beautiful nights when we see the birth of something special.’ That feedback was a confirmation that not only the two of us had felt it was a special meeting. 

MW: The piano-drum duo is one of my favourite things, because they are like two drums. What I remember from that first show, is that we had fun with all these percussive exchanges and we were creating melodies with rhythm, but also that Mariá would sing from time to time. We were creating something in the moment, and then this melody – from a song that may have existed, or may have been improvised – came in. I liked the combination of using the piano as a drum, but having this melodic aspect of a song at the same time. It felt very special, also because it felt as if it came so easily to us…

Marta, your piano playing takes you all around the piano, and sometimes also under it. You’ve talked about how playing a different piano every night is a magical thing to you. At Summer Bummer 2023, with Turquoise Dream, you played Fred Van Hove’s Elysian medium grand piano. Did the fact that it’s a piano with a history, restrict your playing?

MW: I don’t think I had a different approach to it. The things I do to the piano don’t really damage the instrument anyway. But that piano does have character: the action is pretty heavy and the sound is quite dark. But yes, it’s fun to play a different instrument every night, so I can be receptive, not trying to impose something on the instrument, and try to be open and see what it brings. 

How is it for you Mariá? Do you carry your own drums around?

MP: I never travel with my drums. I usually don’t even bring my cymbals, just some small percussion instruments and objects that I put over the drums… I do take some different drumsticks and a small bow…

So that’s basically the same approach as Marta’s. 

MP: Yes, but in Europe, the drums are usually nice. The cymbals can sometimes be a challenge, but I like that. I think it’s nice to try and generate a beautiful sound from what you have available. 

When I was talking with Karen Ng and Jonathan Horne, they agreed that improvising solo is the scariest thing in the world. Marta, you play solo quite a bit. 

MW: I love playing solo, and I do it pretty often. It’s challenging, and at the beginning it was very hard, so I feel Karen and Jonathan. But to me it doesn’t feel different than playing in a duo and the other person drops out and I continue playing. I still continue my thoughts from before…

MP: For me, playing solo is also very hard. I guess that’s due to the fact that in my deepest roots I’m a pop drummer. My background and my origins are in playing with other people. That’s the way I learned my instrument, so I’m still trying to find out how to do the solo thing…

How is playing in a duo different from playing in a larger ensemble? 

MW: It’s maybe a little bit like having a conversation with two people versus having a conversation with a bigger group. With two people it will be much more intimate… In a bigger group you can choose a different kind of layering and perhaps go along with one person or choose to go with the whole group…

Simply put: if one person stops playing in a duo, the other one is left to do a solo…

MP: Yes, but with Marta it’s radically different. When she lets me play alone, I don’t feel alone. It’s like Marta said: in the end we’re playing the same instrument, so when she stops playing, it’s because the music is asking for that. And Marta will come back when the music asks for it. I trust her 100% with that. And I’m sure she trusts me 100 % too. You are creating something together, even if you’re not playing all the time. I feel totally comfortable with Marta. 

Shall we talk about the output you have recently put out as band leaders? Your record ‘EROSÃO’, Mariá, is made up of recordings that you made while you still lived in Brazil. But then COVID arrived… Would it have been a completely different record if the world hadn’t gone into a hard pause in March 2020?

MP: Yeah, because I wouldn’t have been able to take so much time to edit it. I was editing for almost a year. I had my residency in Moers, but I couldn’t play concerts because of COVID, so I was basically finishing my album that whole year. Maybe it was too much, I really went down the rabbit hole. The next album will be a bit more composition-based. 

But it will be collage-based again? 

Yeah, I really love taking the improvised material and editing it. I’ve been doing that since I was a teenager. It’s a very different approach from what is usual in free improvisation. I sometimes have a little clash with colleagues, because I want to edit everything. But I think of the album as something in itself. 

That way of working reminds me of certain electronic musicians. When I first listened to the record, I couldn’t help but think of Uwe Schmidt, the German electronic producer who lives in Santiago de Chile and is best known as AtomTM.

MP: (lifts both fists in the air) Yeah! He’s my hero! I’m so happy you said that, because Atom is one of my main influences. I actually wanted Uwe to co-produce the record, and I tried to find funds for it. I even had dinner with him in Santiago to talk about this possibility. 

Wow, I didn’t know that when I compared your music to Schmidt’s. My very first music interview was with Schmidt, in a pizzeria in Santiago! 

MP: He was one of the people who added this glitchy approach to the house and techno of the 80s and 90s. But Atom is so much more than that. It’s really hard to frame him into one category, because he did everything. I think he’s very underrated, overall, maybe because it’s too hard to grasp the diversity of his work.  I think if you don’t listen to at least twenty of his albums, you can’t really understand his scope. Because, if you only know Señor Coconut or his techno stuff, you’ll hardly grasp the multiplicity of his output. 

I always felt a bit uneasy playing his Señor Coconut material to my Latino friends, because it’s a very German take on Latin music. 

MP: Absolutely, and I think the first Señor Coconut album is genius precisely because of that, because it’s a German artist working with those Latin stereotypes that the North loves, which are those bits of Latin culture which were absorbed and disseminated by US mass culture throughout the 20th century. Maybe it speaks more about the North than about the South. But of course it can also be reduced to a piece of fetishistic work, especially if we look through today’s lens.

Are there other electronic producers you are influenced by? 

MP: During my studies, electro-acoustic music was really important to me. Stockhausen of course, but also Bernard Parmegiani, Gilles Gobeil… I’m also a big fan of the compositions of Dennis Smalley, from the UK. His theoretical writings on electro-acoustic music have really shaped my way of thinking, editing and approaching the song-form. And then also, the whole techno and house scene from the 80s and 90s in Chicago and Detroit: Underground Resistance, Dopplereffekt… When it comes to collage: Akufen’s album ‘My Way’ had a big influence on me in the way he edits fragments he recorded from the radio, and makes house music with them. 

Do you have an affinity with this world of electronic music, Marta? 

MW: I like it, but I never went through such a phase where I dove deeply into it, like Mariá did. 

Back to ‘EROSÃO’. When did you decide that Brazilian traditional song form would be part of that improvisation work?

MP: I never decided that. The combination of song and improvisation was always there for me. As I said, I started improvising with dance, and there was never a separation between the improvised music and the song repertoire. When I came to Germany, it was the logical thing to keep on doing that. 

‘EROSÃO’ is an album about processing songs through improvisation and through electronic processing. You know, to erode songs, to treat them like any material that can be transformed or manipulated. My ensembles EROSÃO Trio and EROSÃO Septet follow two different approaches to the same question: how to treat the song form as something that is not closed, but can be transformed into different forms? 

At Summer Bummer, apart from your duo with Marta, you will bring the EROSÃO Septet. Can you tell me a bit about that band? 

MP: It’s Angelika Niescier, Lotte Anker, Mathias Müller, Reza Askari, Moritz Wesp , Carl Ludwig Hübsch, and me. The band is more or less symmetric, with two saxes, two trombones, and two basses – a double bass and a tuba. They are all amazing improvisers. Actually, we started as a much more free group. We had the songs from the ‘EROSÃO’-album, and we had strategies to approach those songs, but the order of the songs was totally open. Currently, I’m moving towards writing more composed material, but I still keep it very open, because all of them are such amazing players: I want them to improvise all the time. 

It seems like songs are making a bit of a comeback in free music over the last few years. If we look at Summer Bummer, Julien Desprez is working in that territory and Jonathan Horne and Karen Ng are also coming from that world. The late jaimie branch also reintroduced songs into free music… Back in the 70s even Ornette Coleman worked with songs… 

MP: There’s this amazing album by Neneh Cherry and The Thing, where they improvised around songs. 

That’s one of my favorite records of all time. I once listened to their version of Suicide’s ‘Dream Baby Dream’ on continuous repeat on a plane flight – quite the trip.  

LEMONS AND DEMONS

Let’s talk about Marta’s newest band, Still Life with Lemons.

MP: Can I tell something funny? I always thought it was Still Life with Demons, with a D. 

It’s quite the line-up: you, Marta, Ben LaMar Gay, Ab Baars, Karen Ng, Ingebrigt Håker Flaten and Frank Rosaly. For some reason, it feels like a project that could have a long life.  

MW: I hope so. It’s not an easy group to bring together, with people living spread out, especially Karen and Ben, who live overseas. 

How did the sextet come about? 

MW: I was invited by BIMHUIS for a series called REFLEX, in which they ask a musician to create something new. So I decided to invite all these dear friends. I wanted to write music, because most of the time I’m either a side musician or I improvise… Sitting down, hearing something in my head and deciding I want people to play it and see what happens, was very new and exciting to me. And of course those are all incredible musicians and unbelievable improvisers. That was very important to me because I had this idea to write very fluid things. Everyting could become something else at any moment: melody, rhythm, phrase, the song… It’s stil evolving, the first meeting was just about trying to understand what we are together and how we can interpret the melodies that I came up with. It was an incredible thing to do for me. I grew so much, and I gained a lot of confidence. I received a lot of trust from all of them and they all put their heart in it. 

They’re all players you’ve played with before, right? 

MW: Yes. Some of them I played a lot with, like Ingebrigt or Frank. I played with Ab, but we never did a project or a tour, and with Karen I played a few ad hoc sessions. When I was thinking about the project, I selected personalities with a particular approach to music: they all embrace silence and they have lots of patience in their music. Maybe it’s a weird thing to say, but we share a feeling that the music is a little bit like a trance, entering something together, and it becomes more about embracing the moment than about having a concept and trying to fight towards it…

Every composition on the record was written before you recorded it?

Yes, it was amazing to have four days together to work on music, before we had a concert and the recording. That gave us the time to get to know each other, and I got to hear what the music in my head actually sounded when they played it.  

CURATORS

Like so many people in the scene, you both organise concerts yourselves. A few days ago, Marta, you put on a show in Berlin by Magda Mayas and Tony Buck. Both of them will be playing Summer Bummer, as a part of Das B.

MP: Magda and Tony are an amazing piano-drum duo!

MW: The name of the series is Luisen105. I organise those concerts every first Wednesday of the month, together with Kit Downes, Camila Nebbia and Jeremy Viner. They take place in the backroom of a church: a loft space with a wooden floor and a beautiful grand piano. It’s also in Charlottenburg, a neighbourhood where nothing much is happening, so it’s a way to bring the music to that neighourhood. 

I once organised and curated a small festival and I will never do it again. I’ve become a big admirer of organisers since… 

MW: When I have to bring the sextet together, I always put a big effort in taking care of everyone and making everyone feel good. And every time I swear I won’t do it ever again, but after we play the concert in the evening, I invariably ask ‘When’s the next one?’ It’s always a headache, but compared to organising a festival, putting up a concert once a month is not the worst… You put an effort in it, of course, but it’s a nice way to give something back.

Mariá, you curate TOMA CHOCOLATE! at Sowieso. 

MP: The premise is simple: I program Latin American musicians passing through Berlin, with a very broad compass: from singer-songwriters, to noise-musicians, electro-acoustic improvisers and improvpeople – mixing different schools and backgrounds on the same night. It’s a different connection to the scene… As Marta said, it’s a way to give something back and keep the wheels spinning. It’s also about creating a meeting place. This year I’m also a guest curator at Wels Unlimited, which is a festival with a long history, going on for forty years. 

Do you have total freedom in curating that? If so: did you just program every alias of Atom TM?

MP: (laughs) I actually thought of inviting Atom, but in the end I didn’t. I did invite Dopplereffekt, though, who are one of the precursors of this whole early 2000s electro scene I mentioned earlier. I am pretty excited with the Wels Unlimited lineup and I think it will be a great party. 

To conclude, what Summer Bummer concert are you looking forward to? 

MP: There will be so many great concerts going on: Das B, DaughterDaughter, Integral, Joëlle Léandre of course, Gerald Cleaver, Paal-Nilssen Love – all great influences for me. I also look forward to the duo of Diana Miron and Laurențiu Coțac. 

MW: It’s such a fantastic program: Integral, DaughterDaughter, Erosão, Das B, Joëlle Léandre, Jonathan Horne and Nasim López-Palacios Navarro, Hanne De Backer, Schlippenbach in duo with Nilssen-Love… What a feast!

Mariá Portugal & Marta Warelis interviewed for Head to Head / Summer Bummer 2026 by Stijn Buyst
© Sound in Motion vzw