Name: Johanna Burnheart
Occupation: Violinist, composer
Nationality: German
Current release: Johanna Burnheart's new full-length album Bär, is out December 1st 2023 via her own Burnheart Records.

If you enjoyed this interview with Johanna Burnheart and would like to stay up to date with her work, visit her official homepage. Or check out her profiles on Instagram, Soundcloud, and Facebook for recent updates.

We also have a previous 15 Questions Johanna Burnheart interview for an even deeper dive as well as an interview with her about improvisation and about her relationship with the violin.



I have always been fascinated by the many facets of improvisation but sometimes found it hard to follow them as a listener. Do you have some recommendations in this regard?

I also very much struggled to follow improvisation when I first started listening to improvised music properly as a teenager. You can get completely lost by the lack of melody to hold onto. It only starts making sense when you get a feel for the form of a piece. This is of course speaking in terms of any improvisation that is following a form.

Free jazz has different rules and following them very much depends on the group or player you’re listening to. The London scene has made a big fashion out of improvising over one or two chords indefinitely, until there is a big cue and everyone meets back at the head or the bridge. This has made it a little more accessible to get into listening to improvised music.

We need a point of “relief” of - I know where we are in the piece and everyone is with me - and that is always a euphoric moment. The more you listen to people improvising over chords, the more you start being able to pinpoint certain moments in the changes. Imagine you’re driving around a city you don’t know. If you’re trying to remember which way you came, you latch on to certain landmarks or signs along the road. So when you eventually come full circle you realise, I’ve seen this sign before.

The bassline will be your biggest signpost as the bass puts down the roots. So if you start being able to follow the bass, you will be able to understand what the rest of the band is doing much more. Next to that, drummers tend to mark the beginning of a form so if you hear a big crash that sounds like a downbeat, you’re most likely at the top of the form. After some time you start to feel 4 bars, 8 bars, 16 bars and so on.

Sometimes forms are odd which then shakes up your feeling of form in a delightful way. Similarly with odd time signatures which is one of my favourite tools. If you would like to dig deeper, transcribing someone’s solo and the bassline behind it will tell you everything you need to know. And it definitely helps understanding other solos as well without transcribing them.