Mar 30, 2026 10:30 PM
Flea Finds His Jazz Thing
In the relatively small pantheon of certifiable rock stars venturing into the intersection of pop music and jazz, the…
Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania will jointly serve as the partner country for next year’s edition of jazzahead!
(Photo: Jennifer Ruban-Gentile/DownBeat)An international get-together for people on the business side of the jazz community, jazzahead! is a combined trade show, conference and festival showcase that takes over a wing of the massive convention center in Bremen, Germany, each April (in this year’s case, April 23–25). The musicians who are present — and there are legions of them — come for business meetings, networking and to ply their trade for the crowd of presenters, publicists, managers, record-label owners, broadcasters and journalists that fill the halls.
If you find yourself represented in the above list of professionals, you probably have an incentive to spend a long weekend at jazzahead! There are few global gatherings of this type within the jazz community, and fewer still that aren’t thoroughly dominated by the U.S. sector of the industry. This is an important consideration, as publicist, keen jazz observer and 2026 jazzahead! attendee Matt Merewitz noted in a Substack post that went viral within the jazz world: America created and developed jazz, but at this point it is only one player in a very large international league, and that reality requires us to cede the floor to the rest of the globe.
Inside-baseball though it is, jazzahead! therefore becomes a kind of UN General Assembly, or Davos Economic Forum, for those who make their living in jazz. Germany tends to have the largest presence there, simply because of the location; at this year’s event, though, it wasn’t uncommon to find that the booths run by Sweden (jazzahead!’s 2026 partner country, i.e., its featured participant in exhibitions and showcases), or Quebec, or the Luxembourgish label Jojo Records had suddenly become hubs for musicians and professionals from around the world. This writer was rather touched to see Ukraine, literally embattled and far from an ideal spot for jazz to succeed, maintaining a steady stream of curious info-seekers.
The networking, in other words, can’t be beat. At one poetic moment during an event sponsored by the southwest German festival Enjoy Jazz, I found myself deep in a kind of roundtable conversation with a Belgian-Israeli, a Peruvian-Irish, an Iranian-German, a Mozambican-German and a native-born German, sharing artichokes and perspectives on the state of the music business. Talk about jazz on the international stage!
Then there’s the music, no small part of the jazzahead! program. The showcase performances included 38 concerts across three stages — one of which, perhaps just for the sake of a unique atmosphere, is the repurposed water tower of a 150-year-old slaughterhouse. The artists varied widely in terms of nation (of course), style and, frankly, quality. But there were some wonderful discoveries to be made. Actually, one of the best (performing on Friday, April 24) wasn’t a new discovery at all: Nabou, the quartet led by Belgian trombonist Nabou Claerhout (whose January 2026 album Indigo received a four-star review in DownBeat’s March issue), played a meditative, atmospheric but also rhythmically forthright and inventive set at Messe Bremen.
The spotlight-stealing showcase, though, was that of Sweden’s Hederosgruppen, also performing on the 24th. The quintet is named for its founder and pianist, Martin Hederos, but it’s really a cooperative unit, and the band made that point by fitting in a composition by each of the members. They’re a spirited lot, too, with Hederos, bassist Josef Kallerdahl and drummer Konrad Agnas hitting the complex and often odd rhythms hard and making trumpeter Emil Strandberg and saxophonist Andreas Sjögren dance in place. (Sjögren also cheekily conducted the audience in clapping on Strandberg’s groover “Molnstoden.”)
However, no showcase artist, and indeed perhaps nothing that transpired at Jazzahead 2026, got a more ecstatic reception than the announcement on the evening of April 25 that the Baltic region — Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania — would jointly serve as the partner country for the 2027 edition. The three nations have long collaborated in building an audience and industry for jazz in their region, and the ceremony announcing their partnership felt very much like a warm acknowledgment of this. (It was a big enough deal that both the Latvian and Lithuanian ambassadors to Germany were on hand for Sweden to ceremonially pass the baton.)
The jazz world is getting smaller. In 2026, jazzahead! remained the best vantage point for watching it shrink. DB
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