May 7, 2021, 4:37 am | Read time: 4 minutes
A piano stands on the beach of a Thai island. Thousands of people watch the sunset and listen reverently. The man playing in this picturesque setting is a German. His name: Joe Löhrmann. His mission: to travel the world with a piano on wheels. TRAVELBOOK spoke with him about his experiences.
While others struggle with their backpacks, Joe Löhrmann has a much heavier travel companion: a piano. He travels around the world with it, playing in places where one wouldn’t expect a piano: by lakes, mountains, rocks, or on the beach. “I just had to have my piano with me when traveling,” thought the young Joe Löhrmann. Back then, without gray streaks in his hair and fresh out of training at a German car manufacturer. He wasn’t happy at the time. Wearing a suit and tie every day wasn’t his thing. He felt trapped in his job.
After his training, Löhrmann set off on a world tour. “That changed everything from the first week,” he tells TRAVELBOOK. He can finance the trip through his passion: playing the piano. He plays in hotels and restaurants, at weddings or on cruise ships. But he didn’t have his own piano with him back then. However, Löhrmann wanted to combine his two passions, so he simply put his piano on wheels. “My Travelling Piano” was born, and Joe now travels through Europe with his unusual travel companion, giving concerts.
Also interesting: “We gave up everything for our world tour–and then came Corona”
A Piano Concert Where the Wolves Howl
“I went where the people are,” Löhrmann says in the interview. But playing in the midst of hectic shopping streets quickly became too exhausting for him. So he changed his approach. Now Löhrmann goes into nature, to places he likes, and gathers people there. A concept that works.
At the nature concerts, he comes into harmony with his environment. At one of his concerts in a national park, the wolves howled, and even deer have been drawn to the piano music, he says. A highlight was a performance at the “Dachzelt Festival” in Bavaria. There, Löhrmann played on a floating platform in the middle of the lake. The rising moon reflected in the water, the audience on the shore listened reverently–a unique moment for Löhrmann.
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Löhrmann Becomes a Star in Japan
But not in all countries is the pianist accepted from the start. “In Japan, I noticed that people were even more in their rhythm, and it was damn hard to get them to stop,” he says. Still, Japan is one of the countries that has stayed with him the most. Because a few years ago, a video of him went viral on Twitter there. When Löhrmann saw an older Japanese man tinkling on a grand piano in a shopping center’s music department, he sat down at a nearby grand piano and improvised to the Japanese man’s melody. Two boys stopped, filmed, and posted the video on Twitter. Shortly after, the clip went viral, and the German pianist was even recognized on the street in Japan.
See “My Travelling Piano” Live
Normally, Löhrmann tours Europe in the summer–but due to the coronavirus pandemic, he stayed in Thailand, where he has been for a year now. He can still enjoy island life. “Here on Koh Phangan, life returned to normal relatively quickly,” the pianist says. If you need a dose of Thailand, you should watch one of his online concerts from the island. There’s even one scheduled for Mother’s Day. Information is available on his Facebook page. More about him and his well-traveled piano can also be found in Joe Löhrmann’s book “My Travelling Piano,” which will be published on May 7 by Eden Books.
One last question for the pianist: How much can we Germans get excited about spontaneous concerts, in his experience? The surprising answer: “Germans are actually quite receptive to music compared to the rest of Europe,” is the expert’s verdict.