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…
Run N’ Fly is a new music collective under the direction of guitarist Sandro Albert. Helping out with the lyrics is Brazilian artist Manu Lafer and for all those out there studying the liner notes and personnel on all of your records, the group consists of session musicians and singers who have appeared on thousands…
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…
I bought Will Downing‘s first LP in May, 1988. His version of “A Love Supreme” with Stanley Turrentine on sax still resonates. Other cuts like “In My Dreams” or the cover of the Deniece Williams classic “Free” have become soul standards. 20 albums and almost 30 years later, you really can call him a soul…
Danish singer Sinne Eeg opens her new album “Dreams” (her ninth) with the seductive, bluesy, exhilarating “The Bitter End”. The color of her strong voice and her perfect pitch match well with the piano solo by Jacob Christoffersen and the forceful guitar of Larry Koonse. Joey Baron accompanies on drums majestically and Scott Colley’s bass…
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…