Fola Dada comes with new songs in the luggage. "Essence" is the name of this song collection. Everything that makes Fola, appreciates and touches is united here. This refers to the different musical styles, such as soul, jazz, house or reggae and works on topics such as, life in a world that is changing and must change, love, the search for contentment, dealing with uncertainty ...
How does intercultural music sound that exists beyond the categories of Orient and Occident? Massive jazz/rock groove aesthetics merge with the delicate sounds of quanun, oud, baglama, trumpet and nay. With Magic of Maqam, the Fityan Band creates a global band sound that expresses the diversity of Arabic, Turkish and Persian musical cultures. Magic of Maqam takes you on a ...
The curator of this year's SWR NEWJazz Meeting is the American composer and pianist Micah Thomas. Micah Thomas was born in Columbus, Ohio in 1997. At the age of 2, he began playing songs on the piano by ear, and shortly thereafter took private piano lessons. Since his sophomore year in high school, Micah performed regularly with violinist Christian ...
Claus Boesser- Ferrari ( git.) Joss Turnbull (perc) and Mia Ferrari (film) have come together for an intermedial project. The starting point of this unusual evening, perhaps also the inspiration, is the novel "The Principle" (2015) by the French writer and Concourt Prize winner Jérome Ferrari, who creates a poetry of an alternative understanding of the world from Werner Heisenberg's uncertainty principle in conjunction with important stations in the physicist's life. He ...
From Gambia to Senegal: Just like the opening concert of the 2022 festival year, the closing concert will also take the audience to West Africa. With Youssou N'dour, a superstar of "global pop," the "Golden Voice of Senegal," a singer, cultural ambassador, businessman, media entrepreneur, politician and activist will be on stage at the BASF Feierabendhaus. His band Super Étoile de Dakar is considered by some to be one of the best live bands around. Youssou ...
THE EVENT WILL TAKE PLACE AT THE NEW KARLSTORBAHNHOF IN SÜDSTADT. Along with the harp, the vibraphone has recently regained emphatic attention in improvised music. Not the only reason, but a weighty one, to be a guest at the Karlstorbahnhof this evening. Vibraphonist and composer Joel Ross, born in Chicago in 1995, studied at Brubeck Jazz College with Stefron ...
Sometime in the autumn of 2018, it was clear to (almost) everyone interested in improvised music that drummer and producer Makaya McCraven, the Paris-born son of a Hungarian folk singer and a US jazz drummer, was the "Man of the Moment" (The Wire). Referring, of course, to the release of the album "Universal Beings", which includes recordings from four different sessions in New York, Los ...
With his debut "Garden Path", released on vinyl in 2022 on the Heidelberg-based independent label MuZi (Musikzimmer), Christof Keller makes his first public appearance as a composer and arranger with an exciting fusion of jazz and electronica. The pieces, carefully curated by editor László Fehér, were arranged by Christof Keller with great attention to detail in a melange of ...
In an interview with Sussex Jazz Magazine, bassist Tal Gamlieli addresses the interesting question of how such an intimate connection between jazz and his native Israel could come about. His answer: Israel is basically a multicultural place, a young country, but with ancient traditions - especially when it comes to music and culture. Jews are ...
When The Comet Is Coming rocked theHaus in Ludwigshafen for the first time in early November 2016, the concert announcement in the program booklet was still about Shabaka Hutchings. At that time, he had established himself as the busy asset of a vital and experimental, but at the same time very popular London scene, which sent interesting to rousing acts across the channel by the dozen, as if to ...
Piano virtuoso and composer, rapper and music school director - the "Chilly Gonzales universe" is as diverse as it is unique. Sometimes he appears in a bathrobe and fine silk slippers, sometimes he jumps from the stage into the audience, drenched in sweat. In a mixture of megalomania and self-irony, the darling of the feuilleton rides permanently on the musical razor's edge, somewhere between radical, ingenious and banal. Without regard for ...
In a short film released by Blue Note Records in 2019 in support of Bill Frisell's label debut Harmony, the Denver, Colorado guitarist recalls his career as an astonishing sequence of incredible encounters with colleagues and idols, in his incomparably accessible and likeable way. Life is one big stroke of luck. Would you like an example? On the cover of the first "Downbeat" magazine, which Frisell published in the 1960s, ...
THE EVENT WILL TAKE PLACE AT THE NEW KARLSTORBAHNHOF IN SÜDSTADT. The exciting thing about retrofuturistic cocktails is, as we all know, the mixing ratio of the ingredients. In the case of Kit Sebastian, a duo set on track in London in 2018, it's a complex composition whose ingredients don't quite seem to fit at first. Here is the recipe for "Anatolian Lo-Fi Samba": First, there are the somewhat obscure ...
Unfortunately, the event has to be cancelled due to illness. We will make every effort to find an alternative date. Tickets already purchased remain valid, but can also be returned at the respective advance booking office. It's a family affair: Of course, Nik Bärtsch does not need to be introduced to the loyal Enjoy Jazz audience. With his daughter Ilva Eigus it is still different - the emphasis is on still. The young ...
The online music magazine Pitchfork speaks of a "ghostly intensity" that permeates the album "Murmurations". Corona Year 2021 began the collaboration between avant-garde musician Lea Betucci and electronic musician Ben Vida, both of whom have been part of New York's experimental scene for many years. Bertucci's saxophones and flutes meet Vida's synthesizer-generated, droning soundscapes. "Murmurations" - murmurs and hisses - are the ...
At first there wasn't necessarily jazz. In the life of Shirley Tetteh, born in Great Britain in 1990, whose parents once came to the island from Ghana, other guitar heroes played a role. Eric Clapton, for example. Or Jimmy Page. Not to forget Jeff Beck. Perhaps not the worst teachers if you want to find out what you can do with a guitar. But...
As already emphasized here several times, the pianist and composer Tania Giannouli attaches great importance to always having several different arrows in her quiver. Also, or perhaps because of this, she is open to spontaneous artistic encounters and "conversations" with other musicians. For example, with the Korean-born drummer Sun-Mi Hong, who has been living in Amsterdam since 2011. ...
That has to come first! In your early 20s, you dare to perform idiosyncratic cover versions of "Dreams" (Stevie Nicks) and "Crazy" (Seal) and to bring new facets to these world-famous songs. But that is by far not all. Actually coming from the folk corner, London-born Rosie Frater-Taylor released self-produced demos with DIY verve that caused a sensation. She was 16 at the time. ...
He glides through the music with a great sense of security - never loud, never distorted, never angry, but always unpredictable. That's what the Jazz Times wrote about the Grenoble-born guitarist Romain Pilon. Is it possible to pay a more beautiful compliment to an instrumentalist? To this eulogy one could add that Pilon is expressive, technically sophisticated, but never hardened - his ...
Sometimes the label is the lifeline when it comes to assigning an album its appropriate place in the record collection. After all, you want to be able to find what you've sorted out at some point. In this case, the label is called "International Anthem". So: jazz? In May 2018, the cornetist and multi-instrumentalist Ben LaMar Gay surprised the interested public with his album "Downtown Castles Can Never Block The Sun". ...
It doesn't happen all that often: A young man trains as a classical concert pianist, goes quite far, plays with various symphony orchestras - and then more or less suddenly decides to turn off in a completely different direction. Harold López-Nussa, born in 1983 in Havana to a family of musicians, is such a case. In his mid-20s ...
Practice early if you want to become a finger-snapping great: Chris Thile elicited his first delicate notes from the mandolin at the age of five; at eight, the band Nickle Creek was formed as an ambitious family project; at 13, he recorded his first solo album, and in the following years there were a wide variety of collaborations that moved between bluegrass, roots music and folk, between Charlie Parker and ...
The Carsten Lindholm Trio plays self-composed songs on an equal footing with interpretations of pop songs. Whether it's "King Of Pain" by The Police, "La la la" by Sam Smith or interpretations of music penned by Coldplay, Alanis Morrissette or Sting: the Carsten Lindholm Trio always finds an elegant way to put their jazz stamp on these world hits. A stamp that comes less from improvisations ...
Formerly known as SEED Ensemble, Seed. is a Mercury Award nominated ten piece band led by alto saxophonist and composer Cassie Kinoshi. The band showcases an outstanding line-up of some of London's most up-and-coming young jazz musicians. West African and Caribbean influenced groove, Seed. explores a blend of genres through original compositions and improvisation. Their debut release Driftglass (Jazz Re:freshed, 2019) features the ...
Think big! Ever since Erwin Ditzner received a verbal commitment from festival director Rainer Kern for an annual carte blanche after an inspiring concert at Heidelberg's Karlstorbahnhof in 2008, the busy drummer has not let himself be left behind. Every year he surprises with exciting constellations that take place without rehearsals or agreements. Sometimes they only got to know each other in the evening ...
Wow! Now we have praised in several texts the outrageous versatility and willingness to take risks of Tania Giannouli, who precisely for this reason is the festival's Artist in Residence this year alongside Nik Bärtsch, but nevertheless (almost) neglected another of her fields of work: the field of audiovisual media. The reliable film database IMDb characterizes Giannouli in connection with her work in the field of ...
In 2017, ECM released a chamber-music trio album that did subtle justice to the musical ideas of guitarist Ferenc Snétberger and at the same time gave the other two protagonists - Anders Jormin on bass and Joey Baron on drums - enough room for their own creative impulses. "Titok" was Snétberger's second album for ECM; he put an exclamation mark on it and also gave his ...
Concerts in sacred buildings have a special charm: There is a sublime silence there in which the music can claim space and gain a greater aura. Nik Bärtsch is one of the important artists who has been shaping the Enjoy Jazz Festival for years. His various performances - solo, with Ronin or Mobile - have shown time and again how much music is linked to spiritual experiences ...
On October 29, the show "Who am I anyway? And why at all?" will premiere in experimenta's Science Dome. In the interactive format, Clarissa Corrêa da Silva and Simone Müller explore with the audience the questions of what makes people tick and what shapes them. Currently, around 40 percent of students in Germany have an immigrant background. Which ...
Lukas DeRungs, born in Freiburg in 1990 and living in Mannheim, is one of the most interesting young talents on the local jazz scene. He already won several competitions during his piano studies in Mannheim and London, and with his quintet he proved on several stages how virtuosically he can translate the most diverse influences - from classical music to hip hop - into his jazz language. No one ...
The great fascination of the young British jazz community clearly has to do with its variety, multi-perspectivity and diversity: without the musicians who draw from their different migrant realities and incorporate diverse traditions from the countries of their parents or grandparents into their work, the English jazz renaissance would be inconceivable and only half as interesting. London is the powerhouse of this ...
People like to tell such stories as a bildungsroman. A hip-hop and grime producer with an immigrant background discovers jazz and global pop while searching for interesting samples. He becomes a fan of Miles Davis' music and then teaches himself to play the piano. In 2017, after two EPs, the debut album "Antiphon" was released, which sat between all chairs with verve. ...
When Pierre Boulez came to Strasbourg in 1959 to perform his composition "Le Visage Nuptial," he needed a larger number of percussionists for it, who were eventually recruited from two symphony orchestras. The six instrumentalists selected at that time got along splendidly - and decided to stay together. In 1962, they founded Les Percussions de Strasbourg, an ensemble that continues to this day and has become known for its ...
Over the past 15 years, the Pablo Held Trio has earned a reputation as one of the most exciting, because most daring, piano trios on at least the European scene. In order not to get caught up in routines, the three musicians developed a fine strategy for expeditions into the surprising: The renunciation of preparatory arrangements or a set list structuring the concert, trusting in a constantly growing ...
Usually it is simple coincidences that lead to sensible constellations: Pianist Dominic J. Marshall, bassist Mulele Matando and drummer Sam Gardner met at the Leeds College of Music when all three enrolled in the African Ensemble there. At the end of their studies, however, the three instrumentalists parted ways - for the time being. Marshall founded his ...
The good old drum battle, as Buddie Rich or Gene Krupa, Curt Cress and Pete York used to do, has gone out of fashion a bit in the last decades. With good reason, because for all its virtuosity, this format seems somewhat adolescent and rather uncool from today's perspective. What Ingar Zach and Michele Rabbia cultivate when they play as Drum & ...
"Playing in this band is such a release for me, and I want it to be not only a release for us in the band, but also for the people we play for to experience that kind of catharsis. Like a weight is lifted off them," Buffalo-born Amirtha Kidambi once said in 1985. "When ...
In Greek mythology, Hemera is the personification of day, perhaps the daughter of Nyx, the night. Opinions differ somewhat on this. But Hemera is also the name of the trio project that Tania Giannouli has put together especially for this occasion as "Artist in Residence" of the 2022 festival year, after performing with her own longstanding trio last year. Hemera ...
This duo has something extremely permeable, floating, almost delicate. When the vibraphone creates fragile, repetitive, rhythmic and at the same time harmonic patterns in the space, the soprano saxophone meanders almost filigree between the individual notes, sometimes awakening flute-like associations with Persian music, sometimes radiating something dance-like folkloristic. Being on stage as a duo offers freedom, and this is used to go far beyond ...
At a concert by John Kameel Farah, one is hurled through the centuries and catapulted back and forth between continents: The Canadian, born in 1983, belongs to a generation of pianists who do not feel at home between their love of Bach and electronic frickel sounds, improvisation and notated music, but rather blossom in this tension. The son of Palestinian parents studied composition at the Conservatory of ...
The world of jazz remains trapped in mourning mode. On August 22nd, at the age of just 39, the boundlessly talented, bitingly original trumpeter, singer and composer Jaimie Branch died, possessed of a pleasant self-irony, breaking all the rules in both her playing and her thinking. Enjoy Jazz visitors know only too well: her concerts were intoxicating full-body-soul events. Today, we actually wanted to see stuff from these ...
Bernhard Meyer has held a professorship for electric bass at the Mannheim University of Music and Performing Arts since the summer semester of 2022. Meyer, born in 1983, studied at the Jazz Institute Berlin, where he completed a master's degree in composition with John Hollenbeck. Since his youth, he has pursued joint projects with his brother, the guitarist Peter Meyer. For his inaugural concert, Meyer will bring his ...
If that's not a well-rehearsed team: drummer Erwin Ditzner and saxophonist Lömsch Lehmann, two heroes of the regional scene, have known each other for ages, played together in the Mardi Gras Big Band and in various other constellations. And for years they have also played together as a duo, which reflects the entire range of their musical experience: from free jazz to rockier ...
Just don't fit into the niche! Rather study jazz trumpet, but at the same time explore the possibilities of electronic music. Winning jazz awards, but at the same time working with the Junge Nordeutsche Philharmonie and Samy Deluxe. For creative musicians with a special horizon like Julian Maier-Hauff, the format "Zündeln" was developed at the Alte Feuerwache Mannheim. The idea: a regional artist is given the opportunity to invite a guest to perform at the ...
A long, long time ago, the jazz critic with the exalted-sounding name George O. von Frank once listed some characteristics by which one would recognise a jazz vocalist. At the top of the list is respect for melody and text. This is followed by a feeling for rhythm, intonation and phrasing. Good taste is also necessary in the selection of ...
"I am Charles Mingus, half black man, not even white enough to pass for nothing but black. I am Charles Mingus, a famed jazzman, but not famed enough to make a living in this society". Charles Mingus was the paradox of a suffering inflicter: socially not infrequently uncontrollably uninhibited, compositionally of well-controlled clarity. He himself diagnosed himself as having a triple split ...
And another cooperation with the "Unsound" festival in Kraków, at least halfway. There, too, "Languoria", the joint project of the Danish ambient electronica artist Sofie Birch and the Polish vocalist Antonina Nowacka is on the program. However, only one day after the gig at Enjoy Jazz. The two musicians met at the "Unsound" festival in 2021, when they played an improvised live set. ...
Alessandro Bravo is no stranger to Schwetzingen. Years ago, Manfred Kern from the Schwetzingen Jazz Initiative heard the Italian pianist at a festival in Umbria and got to know and appreciate him. Invitations to the Kurpfalz followed; but now he is coming to the Jazztage for the first time as part of Enjoy Jazz - with a band that has it all. With ...
The transfer of consciousness from the human body to an electronic medium can be viewed as a conversion of purely electrical impulses from the brain, which are merely transferred to another electronic medium, but one that is more easily accessible to others. A familiar question arises: Do we lose any "knowledge" in this conversion process? Or does this process perhaps allow some loss of control over ...
In connection with Tord Gustavsen's work and especially his new trio album "Opening", the term "relaxed" is often mentioned. However, anyone who wants to understand this as a synonym for "thoughtful" or even "harmless" is barking up the wrong tree: relaxed is rather another word for freedom, for the sovereign handling of the available means, for an opening towards the ...
Saxophonist, arranger and poet Alabaster DePlume is one of the most amazing blossoms in the motley portfolio of Chicago hipster jazz label International Anthem. While labelmates like Irreversible Entanglements, Jaimie Branch, Makaya McCraven, Ben LaMar Gay or Angel Bat Dawid inject much-needed fresh energy into improvised music with a wide variety of concepts and strategies, Angus Fairbain, originally from Manchester, understands his music more ...
The concert of Vels Trio on 11.10.22 is unfortunately cancelled. For a long time the (legitimate) media hype about the new wave of Brit-Jazz concentrated on the highly creative London scene around the "Tomorrow's Warriors" music collective, represented by musicians like Shabaka Hutchings, Mose Boyd, Nubya Garcia or Theon Cross. The compilation "Kaleidoscope. New ...
When you see and hear a double bass for the first time at the age of ten, the mighty body of the instrument either intimidates you - or you are gobsmacked and fascinated. In the case of Gabrielle Randrian Koehlhoeffer, the second was the case and the fascination was so strong that she switched from the piano, on which she had already received lessons, to the bass. With a classical ...
This other, Frank Zappa after-glorified sentence is known: "Does humour belong in music?", whereby the question mark is of course only rhetorically set. So, sure, yes, if you don't make it too easy for yourself. The trio that goes by David Helbock's Random/Control has opted for the nice mix of conceptuality, curiosity and playfulness. The source material that is put under the microscope ...
Short excursion into the "Time Tunnel": In March 2012, the Berlin quartet Schneeweiß und Rosenrot won the New German Jazz Award at the Alte Feuerwache with the kind of pop music that only jazz musicians can play. In the spotlight then: singer Lucia Cadotsch and pianist Johanna Borchert. Back then in the background: Swedish bassist Petter Eldh and drummer Marc Lohr. ...
What an amazing line-up! And even more amazing is the story behind the making of this event. The Danish guitarist Jacob Bro, studied, once quite regularly playing jazz with the late Paul Motian, Lee Konitz or Tomasz Stanko, today rather with Palle Mikkelborg, Joe Lovano, Jorge Rossy, Larry Grenadier, Brian Blade, Arve Henriksen, Thomas Morgan or Joey Baron, has ...
For some people - let's rather say for some men - Mirna Funk is an irritating and dangerous contemporary, and if you follow her work a bit, you get the impression that she likes it that way. If you listen to Mirna Funk tell stories, on the radio or on stage, she always seems to be smiling a bit, ah, ...
The pianist, composer and project creator Tania Giannouli's amazing versatility and flair for initiating interdisciplinary projects in ever-changing constellations that create artistic sparks was already praised here when she stopped by Enjoy Jazz 2019 for the first time with the expanded project REWA. It is precisely these qualities of developing and shaping different fields that predestine her to perform in 2022 alongside Nik Bärtsch ...
It's hard to believe! On 4 March 2022, Jan Garbarek, the seemingly ageless man, celebrated his 75th birthday. To mark this occasion, but not only, the year 2022 will be marked by an extensive live presence of the highly popular Jan Garbarek Group, which has been on the road in changing formations since 1979. Inspired by John Coltrane and Dexter Gordon, Garbarek developed a ...
Attention, legend! Alive! One would like to play Hideaki Ishii a.k.a. DJ Krush Tom Liwa's "cover story versus full page ad". The beginning: "Hey dude! Wouldn't have thought ...". Hey dude! Wouldn't have thought that the peculiar mix of hip-hop, trip-hop, jazzy ambient breakbeats that landed you on James Lavelle's mega-hip "Mo' Wax" label in the mid-1990s would carry you into the second decade of the ...
As is well known, the past two pandemic years were a pretty lean and hard time for professional musicians. But also for young talents, especially pupils playing together in bands, it couldn't have gone worse: Not much was possible; lessons and joint rehearsals - like so much else - fell victim to the various Corona waves. All the more pleasing that ...
Produced in southern France in February 2020 and released in mid-November 2020, the album "Lost Ships" by Elina Duni caused quite a stir in the feuilleton. 12 songs on the themes of love and exile are interpreted here with chamber music delicacy: a concept album with clearly political undertones - homeland, migration, ecology are mostly melancholically discussed here around moods and emotional states such as loneliness, alienation, ...
It was a celebration: three years ago, Kokoroko performed at Enjoy Jazz for the first time, and the Alte Feuerwache had wisely dispensed with concert seating - no one would have been able to keep their seats. What trumpeter Sheila Maurice-Grey and guitarist Oscar Jerome had in mind when they founded Kokoroko: a completely contemporary form of the music once played by Fela ...
In October 2021, George E. Lewis, Columbia University professor and close friend of author, publicist, musicologist, and sociologist Christian Broecking, delivered the first Christian Broecking Lecture at the Heidelberg Center for American Studies (HCA) as part of the Enjoy Jazz Festival following Broecking's death in February 2021-initiated by festival director Rainer Kern, also a close friend and confidant of Christian Broecking, ...
"If what you're doing isn't spiritual, it's not music!" This is the kind of reference to Pharoah Sanders or Sun Ra that Angel Bat Dawid made when her debut album "The Oracle" caused a sensation in spring 2019. The singer and clarinetist had recorded her peculiarly intimate mix of gospel, hip-hop and spiritual jazz lo-fi with her own cell phone on the one hand, and on the other ...
"Good News from Africa" is a legendary album title of the South African pianist, composer and activist Abdullah Ibrahim, whose name was Adolphe Johannes "Dollar" Brand before his conversion to Islam. Born on 9 October 1934 in Cape Town, Abdullah Ibrahim is probably Africa's most influential jazz musician. Those who may remember the great concerts with Hugh Masekela and Larry ...
Your ticket is at the same time also a ticket for transportation on the mountain railroad to the opening concert. Last descent to the old town is 24 o'clock. Tradition and modernity. In these thoroughly frustrating backlash times, the opening concert of the current festival year sets a decided counterpoint. Sona Jobarteh is West Africa's first female kora player. The kora is a 21-string harp instrument with a long tradition of ...
Artist Talk & DJ Set with Iñaki Bonillas and Maxi Broecking On Saturday, October 1, there will be an artist talk and DJ set with the outstanding Mexican photo artist Iñaki Bonillas, this year's partner of Enjoy Jazz's artist cooperation for the festival poster, at the Heidelberger Kunstverein. The event will be hosted by the director of the Heidelberger Kunstverein Søren Grammel, who together with Enjoy Jazz festival director ...
Just don't fit into the niche! Rather study jazz trumpet, but at the same time explore the possibilities of electronic music. Winning jazz awards, but at the same time working with the Junge Nordeutsche Philharmonie and Samy Deluxe. For creative musicians with a special horizon like Julian Maier-Hauff, the format "Zündeln" was developed at the Alte Feuerwache Mannheim. The idea: a regional artist is given the opportunity to invite a guest to perform at the ...
It is the return of trumpeter Mayquel González with his quartet - no stranger to loyal Enjoy Jazz visitors and lovers of Latin American music. He owes his warm, swinging playing to collaborations with Chucho Valdés or Harold López-Nussa. He has appeared on renowned festival stages and performed in legendary clubs around the world. His album debut as a leader was awarded the prize of the Cubadisco Music Festival 2019, a ...
Emerging from the dynamic Chicago scene, multi-instrumentalist, composer, curator, activist and educator Isaiah Collier has made a name for himself as a saxophonist in particular. Be it with his own projects, as part of Angel Bat Dawid's Brotherhood or alongside artists* like Chance The Rapper, Waddada Leo Smith III, Junius Paul and many others. Cosmic Transitions, Collier's third and ...
