The pianist and singer Michael Kaeshammer, who lives in Canada, wants to play more often in his German homeland in the future. The audience is very open to North American music, the 46-year-old told the German Press Agency on the sidelines of a performance in his native town of Offenburg in the Ortenau district of Baden. "It's great fun." So far he has been on tour mainly in North America and China.

Kaeshammer emigrated to Canada with his parents as a teenager. Father and mother have since returned - the musician stayed and lives on Vancouver Island on the west coast. "I actually see myself as Canadian," he said. The country accepted him well and made it possible for him to pursue a career in music. How would things have gone in Germany? "I would certainly have continued to play the piano, but I would have done another job."

Some call Kaeshammer's style piano pop. He didn't commit himself. "I only see myself as a pianist." He loves Rock'n Roll, Soul, Boogie Woogie and Jazz. Accordingly, Kaeshammer and his band are dynamic on stage. In Berlin and Hamburg, viewers were not kept on their chairs, he said. "I love it when people get up and dance."

The artist's sentences are peppered with English words - so he finds it "amazing" ("great") when the people in the audience are not so stiff. Are there people and things he misses in Canada by the sea? Yes, the parents were absent sometimes. And in winter I occasionally long for a nice Christmas market.