'Halbträume' (Half-dreams) is the debut CD from the Thomas Kolarczyk Ensemble.

In recent years Berlin-based double bass player Thomas Kolarczyk has earned a reputation as a multi-faceted, genre-spanning musician and composer. In addition to Kolarczyk, the band includes Berlin clarinetist Viktor Wolf, Berlin-based alto saxophonist Otto Shepherd and tenor saxophonist Slawek Pezda from Krakow. The Polish power-drummer Cuba Gudz keeps the sound structure free for expressiveness in places with immense power.

The ensemble, who gives itself the subtitle "Musical initiative for the internationalization of the Occident", plays with many spheres of influence, which have developed in jazz over the past decades into unique forms of expression. The power and wildness of the "free jazz" era and the creative finesse of modern jazz cultivated in all its details meet the melodic strands of the Balkans and the Orient, which in turn have developed long since into a metropolitan hybrid as a sound language. When the whole is played with the approach of the Thomas Kolarczyk Ensemble, which joins the individual mosaic pieces equally to a whole, then this is music that seems a bit more international than that of the Occident.