Werner Zangerle is a saxophonist and composer based in Vienna. His music seeks the space between melody and noise, between jazz and free improvisation, between carefully crafted composition and the open moment. He has been working in this space for over twenty years, in formations ranging from intimate duo to large ensemble, with musicians from Vienna, Europe and beyond.
At the center of his work is sound as communication: the moment when something emerges that no one planned alone. That requires genuine listening. And the willingness to let go at the right moment. This approach runs through all his projects, however different they sound.
In the duo singer zangerle with bassist Walter Singer, two instrumentalists meet — minimal means, maximum attention. In Memplex, contemporary jazz meets collective momentum and a musical language built over many years of playing together. With Little Rosies Kindergarten, the fourteen-piece Vienna collective, the scale shifts: heavy grooves and meditative sound clouds that emerge equally from the moment and from careful composition. In Extempore, he finds another register altogether, somewhere between European improvised music and American free jazz, with an energy that comes from listening.
His solo project Extended Isolation is the quietest pole of his work. Long tones, electronics, a meditative mood that grows from daily practice at the instrument and finds its strength in stillness.
His music is neither comfortable nor inaccessible. It finds its own way, one that does not play beauty against friction and distrusts stylistic tidiness without losing itself in arbitrariness.
Zangerle studied at the Anton Bruckner Private University in Linz, graduating with distinction in 2007 with a thesis on the Tristano school. He has lived and worked in Vienna since 2009. He has collaborated with writers including Felix Mitterer and Bodo Hell, and with visual artists Götz Bury and Anton Thiel. His concert activities have taken him to the USA, Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Latvia and the Czech Republic. He founded the record label Listen Closely in 2012, and as leader and sideman can be heard on over twenty recordings. He received the Startstipendium of the Austrian Federal Chancellery in 2016, and the Jahresstipendium für Musik of the province of Salzburg in 2022.
