The 19th Cape Town International Jazz Festival, produced by espafrika, will be held on March 23rd and 24th in this beautiful capital of the Western Cape of South Africa. The International Convention Centre will once again be the host venue and now, the first artists for 2018 have been announced, with the second half to…
Singer Sheila Jordan posted a comment on Facebook after the death of the legendary Jon Hendricks, saying that “Jon was the first rapper on the scene.” And of course he was one of the very few who could set lyrics to difficult melodies (and it always matched) and he could perform them so gracefully and…
Those were his words describing his band and what was going on on stage. “insane, out there, weird, spacy”. Indeed, the opening number was an atmospheric track right out of space, with a heavy and thick keyboard curtain from his Korg Kronos. It was the first time that I saw the keyboard maestro with his…
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…