It’s Thanksgiving week and we were supposed to be in New York right now. But Airberlin unfortunately had other plans. So we’re going to prepare a turkey ourselves here. And it is also the start of the holiday music season. This year again, a few interesting Christmas albums have been released. Smokey Robinson has come…
It was an interesting coincidence to open her act with “Got To Love”, a song about gentrification and about her old Brooklyn neighborhood being transformed over the years, in a new boutique hotel right in the middle of Kreuzberg’s Oranienstrasse (yes, the same street where we ended up partying all night long in the early…
After the wise and successful move to Kreuzberg’s Lido for the first two nights of this year’s festival, the remaining four days were staged at the traditional, main venue, the Haus Der Berliner Festspiele (and various club/church locations again). Friday night was the most difficult one for me. It turned out that the concert…
After the very fitting move to Kreuzberg’s Lido on the first two days, Jazzfest Berlin moved to its home location at Haus der Berliner Festspiele for the first of four concerts of artist-in-residence Tyshawn Sorey. The multi-instrumentalist is not really using a regular drum set, but rather a gigantic smorgasbord of various percussion instruments plus…
The music of singer and composer Amirtha Kidambi can best be compared to the mythical, experimental, cosmic oeuvre of Alice Coltrane. Not that Amirtha or any of her band members plays the harp, but watching her sitting behind her harmonium which played both the role of a bass and of an exotic backdrop and listening…
The extended 2017 edition of Berlin’s Jazzfest is also the third and final one for artistic director Richard Williams who has opened up the program to a much younger audience by taking its first four acts into Kreuzberg’s Lido club which isn’t necessarily known for live jazz, but if there’s some jazz action going on…
It was during his first encore, a long solo piece incorporating various tunes from his vast catalogue, when he set an exclamation mark after one of his signature tunes, “This Is Not America”, and proved that it is currently at least as valid as back in 1985 when it was originally released. For over two…
Saint Petersburg is not only the host city of the 2018 International Jazz Day, celebrated annually on April 30th in more than 190 countries, but also hosts the first international jazz forum and festival in Russia. Jazz Across Borders (JAB) will be held on November 17th and 18th in the State Academic Capella. JAB will…
It is now the most important Jazzfest in New York and for its 14th edition, the Winter Jazzfest extends a bit and will run January 10th to 17th. The main ingredient will be the Marathon weekend again, to be held on numerous stages throughout downtown Manhattan, mainly in the Village. I have seen tons of…
It was during the set of Charlottas Burnin’ Trio when I thought that I was at a hard rock concert. Electric guitarist Charlotta Andersson from Sweden led her psychedelic trio with a lot of long, unwinding psycho solos where rock was king and jazz just an aide. Earlier that night during the official opening of…