Drawing on Tradition, Jazzfest Berlin Looks to the Future

By DownBeat I Oct. 24, 2023

A trio featuring reedist Ingrid Laubrock, drummer Tom Rainey and bassist Brandon Lopez will deliver rigorous free-jazz explorations at this year’s edition of Jazzfest Berlin.
(Photo: Courtesy of Artists)

Jazzfest Berlin has announced the complete program for this year’s festival, scheduled for Nov. 2–5 in Berlin, Germany.

The 60th edition of Jazzfest Berlin will bring together multiple generations in 36 projects. Before the festival opens, the Jazzfest ImproCamp will offer children an interdisciplinary approach to improvisation from the beginning of the second week of the autumn holidays and during the festival. And two children’s choirs from Berlin will perform in the opening of the concert program at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele in the commissioned production Apparitions, which has been adapted for this context by the French musicians Antonin-Tri Hoang and Romain Clerc-Renaud — just one of the many world and German premieres planned for the festival.

“Jazzfest Berlin’s 60th edition launches the coming anniversary year of 2024,” said Nadin Deventer, artistic director of Jazzfest Berlin. “Instead of taking a nostalgic look back, we have chosen to draw on the spirit of the musical tradition that the festival has always represented and look at the here and now, to the future. As well as presenting the great virtuosos who have constantly redefined the rules of music for six decades, we will therefore also turn our attention to the coming generations and listen to the real experts on the intuitive and the playful among us: our children.”

The program of established artists from a variety of different improvised music traditions includes composer, saxophonist and flutist Henry Threadgill with a commissioned composition for his ensemble Zooid and the Berlin line-up Potsa Lotsa XL led by saxophonist Silke Eberhard. This year’s invitation maintains the long series of artistic collaborations with leading figures from Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), which has been a regular feature of recent editions of the festival. Together with six other international co-operations involving Berlin artists, the project also epitomizes Jazzfest Berlin’s identity as a platform for artistic encounters between international greats and the avant garde of the Berlin jazz scene.

Free improvisation pioneer Fred Frith will appear on stage for the first time in an intergenerational trio with the trumpeter Susana Santos Silva and percussionist Mariá Portugal. Alexander von Schlippenbach and Aki Takase will draw on the creative storehouse of free-jazz history. And Andrew Cyrille, who made his first appearance at the Berliner Jazztagen more than 50 years ago with the legendary pianist Cécil Taylor and now presents the European premiere of his duo with Bill McHenry, will share the closing night with two other icons: this year’s Albert-Mangelsdorff-Prize winner, Conny Bauer, who will revive some long-standing connections between the U.S. and Berlin avant garde scenes in a trio with Hamid Drake and William Parker; and Joyce Moreno, one of the forerunners of the progressive tradition in creative Brazilian popular music, who will present a live performance of previously unpublished songs from the 1970s that she has recently released as the album Natureza.

Female voices will be featured as well at Jazzfest Berlin, notably in a work by Nancy Mounir dedicated to female vocalists in the liberal Egypt of the1920s. The vast range of the human voice can be heard in 10 different projects from all around the world. In addition to Joyce Moreno and Nancy Mounir, the composer and singer Ellen Arkbro presents a deeply melancholy side of herself in her latest collaborative project with pianist Johan Graden, and the Netherlands-based composer, singer and bassist Fuensanta brings contemporary echoes of the traditional sounds of her Mexican homeland together with her Ensamble Grande.

There is also a clear female influence in the broad spectrum of musical voices from the younger generation in this year’s program, including trumpeter and avant garde jazz musician Steph Richards, the collective Irreversible Entanglements featuring the spoken word artist Camae Ayewa (aka Moor Mother), guitarist Mary Halvorson with pianist and composer Sylvie Courvoisier and the Natural Information Society initiated by Joshua Abrams in the special Chicago feature “Sonic Dreams: Chicago” with, among others, Mike Reed’s The Separatist Party and Bitchin Bajas.

Also represented are two of the most interesting up-and-coming free-jazz saxophonists, Zoh Amba and Camila Nebbia, as well as three of Europe’s most exciting freely improvising pianists, each with their own projects: Marta Warelis, Marlies Debacker and Kaja Draksler with the German premiere of her new project “matter 100.” A trio featuring reedist Ingrid Laubrock, drummer Tom Rainey and bassist Brandon Lopez will deliver rigorous free-jazz explorations. The French pianist Eve Risser presents the result of an intense exploration of music from West Africa with her Red Desert Orchestra. And the creative energy of a new generation of Norwegian musicians is represented by saxophonist Marthe Lea and clarinetist Andreas Røysum, who will perform the closing concert of this year’s festival at Quasimodo.

The program extends beyond the Haus der Berliner Festspiele to include the nearby venues Quasimodo and A-Trane, and the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, which will open its doors for the project “Ghosted” by the Australian-Swedish trio led by Oren Ambarchi.

Artists’ talks and film presentations, as well as the digitally published “Stories” including essays, interviews and videos, offer insights into the stories behind the festival.

In addition to the Jazzfest ImproCamp, which is produced by Jazzfest Berlin in collaboration with the German Jazz Union’s Jazz Pilots, an exchange with musicians from Jazzfest Berlin 2023 will be offered to students of the Hanns Eisler School of Music Berlin and the University of the Arts, especially the joint Jazz Institute Berlin, as part of the seminar “Artistic Leadership.”

Jazzfest Berlin 2023 concerts will be recorded by ARD and Deutschlandradio and either broadcast live or with a time delay. Once again, the ARD JazzNacht will extend from Saturday to Sunday of the festival, with live broadcasts of festival events and concert recordings and interviews from earlier in the festival.

Click HERE for more information on this year’s edition of Jazzfest Berlin. DB