Silke Eberhard in conversation with Maxi Broecking

The German saxophonist and composer Silke Eberhard founded her large ensemble Potsa Lotsa XL in 2009, and it has now been awarded the German Jazz Prize 2023. At this year’s Jazzfest Berlin the group will play a commissioned composition by Henry Threadgill together with his band Zooid, for which it will adopt Threadgill’s Zooid system: the musicians are each allocated certain intervals, within which they are free to move as they wish. The result is an extremely lively and at times very dense polyphony. The author and curator Maxi Broecking visited Silke Eberhard in her rehearsal space in Berlin and talked to her about Threadgill’s own language of intervals, about Eric Dolphy’s importance to Potsa Lotsa XL and about collecting, research and practice as essential musical working methods.