THE FREE-IMPROVISING pianist Georg Graewe was born in Bochum in 1956, where his parents ran a pub just 50 miles away from the British Forces Radio Station in Cologne.

At that time “it was the entire, mostly British rock scene I was listening to,” he says.”The Beatles, Stones, Who, Georgie Fame and later Cream and Hendrix. I bugged my parents into buying me a guitar when I was eight and started on piano at 12.”

At 15, he joined a rock band but “they already had a good guitarist, so I got stuck with piano.” Three years later, he formed his first quintet, playing a kind of free jazz which involved written parts as well.