Welcome to my website!
I’m Pablo Liebhaber, born 1992 in Germany, and I’m a musician, performer and teacher – all around drums and percussions. I mainly work in the field of improvisation, jazz and experimental music, spanning various musical projects and different interdisciplinary encounterings. I research on the coherences of movement and sound, about the conscious use of the self through the Alexander Technique and I deeply believe in that everything is vibration! I’m also a teacher for drumset, percussion and for improvisation.
My musical journey began with the age of 5, when I first got a toy drumset that didn’t survive a year. At the age of 7, I took my first lessons in drums and classical percussion. Later on I studied a BA of Music in Jazz-Drums and an MA of Music in Improvisation. I did my BA of Music at the HfM Würzburg, Germany, with Bill Elgart and Bastian Jütte, from 2011-2015 and my MA of Music at the Folkwang UdK in Essen, Germany, from 2016-2019. During my studies I’ve taken masterclasses and workshops from esteemed artists such as Gerald Cleaver, Bob Moses, Gerry Hemingway, Rudresh Mahanthappa, Joe Lovano, Billy Drummond, Ghatam Umashankar, Eric Schäfer, Leon Parker, Michael Wollny, John Riley, Jerry Bergonzi, Jojo Mayer, Claus Heßler, and more.
In 2017, and as part of my further education during my Master’s, I first started to work with Professor Nadia Kevan by taking her Alexander Technique and Physcho-Physical Support System lessons. Since then and up to this day, I find myself in a continuous process of discovering and learning about the conscious processes of being creative and also of going through everyday-life as such. Maintaining my training with Nadia Kevan has led to all sorts of enrichments for my performative and also educational work and always finds its way to inspire those.
Since 2011 I’m working as a freelance drummer and performer. In projects including the Modern Creative and experimental Jazz Trio Luong/Neubauer/Liebhaber, my improvisational Solo Project Pablo Liebhaber, with the Free-Jazz Band Liebhaber/Neubauer, with Jakob Jentgens’ Jazz Ensemble Entrop, the collective Improvisation Project Flextett, and with several Jazz, Latin and Funk Projects like, Philharmoe & Strings, Los Pioneros Latinos, and Good God Organ Trio – releasing albums such as Tales (Leo Records 2021), Movement, Patchlight, Symphony, and Intermission.
Being driven to explore interdisciplinary encounters with different art forms, I co-founded the interdisciplinary performance duo Gu Gu Shan that melds contemporary dance theater with avant-garde percussive music, together with my wife and performing artist Hsiao-Ting Lee in 2018. Since then Gu Gu Shan has appeared at various venues, such as Maschinenhaus Essen, Lothringair Festival in Aachen, Crude Saturdays at the Tictac Art Center Brussels, Wenism Café Taipei, Rabbithole Theater Summerfestival in Essen and at Bahnhof Ottersberg, showing what we call Instant Composition Performance, where each performance is an exploration of the profound connection between movement and sound, where drumming and dance intertwine in spontaneous unity, giving rise to what we describe as “Sound Dance Theater.” Our idea of this “Sound Dance Theater” first led to the research Melting Pot in cooperation with the Festspielhaus Hellerau and was funded by the Fonds Darstellende Künste as part of the TakeHeart graduate residency program. With this research, we were able to approach our idea by integrating expressive possibilities from the fields of physical theater and by using field recordings and composed material of both sound an movement. In October 2022, Anybody Else To Tell Us was a realization of these possibilities in the form of a production.
With being fascinated by the coherences of movement and sound, there have been several research-projects resulting in music, film and in performances. In my research Patchlight (funded by the individual funding Musikfonds e.V. 2021), I searched for scenes of moving light in everyday life and developed a sound and visual language from the interrelationships and analogies of movement and rhythm. The result of this research was finally published as a solo album and a short film, also including the interdisciplinary work with Hsiao-Ting Lee.
Other interdisciplinary collaborations include my work with municipal theaters as a stage musician, for example at the Schauspielhaus Düsseldorf, Schauspiel Dortmund – Dortmund goes Black Festival (Physical Theater Piece Muinda), at the Rheinisches Landestheater Neuss (The Black Rider and Shockheaded Peter) and the Westfälisches Landestheater Castrop-Rauxel (musical director, performer and stage musician for Conference of the animals). Also in the encounter with visual art and spoken word, there were projects like Luong/Neubauer/Liebhaber + Franco Consales – ACHEMY (performing at Loch Wuppertal and Makroscope Mülheim in 2023) together with London based filmmaker Franco Consales, the interdisciplinary stage-experiment PAPIT by Jakob Jentgens, or the spoken-word short film The Elementary #2 by Jan Alexander.
I’ve been a teacher for drums, percussion and improvisation since 2011, offering private lessons to individuals and groups, sharing my expertise with aspiring musicians. Additionally, I conducted instant composition workshops for children and teenagers in a theater context. With my work as a teacher I thrive for creating a personal approach to music, without the idea of getting better as a competitive idea. For me, music is communication, so it is also about getting to know each other, getting in touch with one’s own body and enjoying the expression of feelings. It is about the discovery of one’s own creativity and development of a unique expressiveness, allowing the musical imagination to blossom and to access the very own and personal flow on the instrument.