Jazzfest Berlin Meets a Global Crisis with Equanimity

By Nate Chinen I Nov. 11, 2025

Marc Ribot delivered a transfixing set at the historic club Quasimodo during this year’s JazzFest Berlin.
(Photo: Fabian Schelhorn)

Marc Ribot sang barely above a murmur, fingerpicking a drift of arpeggios on acoustic guitar, as he stated the official theme of Jazzfest Berlin 2025: “Where will you run when the world’s on fire?” It’s the opening lyric from a tune on his recent solo album — a tune adapted, as he explained, from a God-fearing folksong recorded by The Carter Family in 1930. Hearing it repurposed almost a century later, during Ribot’s transfixing set at the historic club Quasimodo, felt bracing and momentous.

Jazzfest Berlin is no stranger to this charged feeling: Its inaugural edition in 1964 famously featured a program book essay by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who was finally about to see the passage of civil rights legislation in the United States. “Jazz speaks for life,” he wrote in that keynote, and it’s clear that Nadin Deventer, Jazzfest Berlin’s artistic director since 2018, has taken his declaration to heart. Her stewardship of the festival hews to an ideal of pluralistic exchange and an ethos of creative freedom. As expressed in a program she assembled with extensive curatorial input from the Berlin-based American critic (and DB contributor) Peter Margasak, those intentions found a dazzling range of musical expression.

One afternoon in the central Berlin district Moabit, home to a diverse migrant population, Deventer observed a film shoot involving several musicians and a gaggle of local children; they were in the process of creating a sci-fi short as part of Jazzfest Community Week. “In response to what’s happening in our societies, in the world, in the music community and in the places we are living in,” she said, “we as creators and artists must find a way of building bridges again, and enlarge our field of activities.” An ensemble called Moabit Imaginarium, convened under the festival’s auspices, further manifested this ideal. With West African djembe, Korean gayageum and other instruments in the mix, it persuasively suggested a musical Babel, with improvisation as a universal tongue.

Most of the programming for this year’s Jazzfest Berlin, which ran Oct. 30–Nov. 2, reflected a more familiar standard of excellence. Nearly 6,000 concertgoers attended, selling out the thousand-seat Berliner Festspiele and packing Quasimodo and the A-Trane club. Transcendent highlights came from elders and youngbloods alike, representing multiple locales. At the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church on a Sunday afternoon, French saxophonist Sakina Abdou filled the sanctuary with her sound, apparently sans amplification; she cycled from whispery incantation to bellowing catharsis, and moved slowly down the center aisle, turning a recital into a processional. The Handover, a trio inspired by Arabic classical and Egyptian shaabi music, followed her with a hypnotically unbroken desert trance that felt rooted in antiquity as it gestured toward the eternal.

At the Festspiele, British pianist Pat Thomas, who at 65 has reached new levels of notoriety with the band أحمد [Ahmed], offered a mesmerizing solo concert full of rumbling atonality, jaunty carnival rhythm, frictive scraping, and flickers of pellucid harmony (as in a thoughtfully redrawn “Prelude to a Kiss”). On another night, drummer Makaya McCraven delivered an expansive and deep-grooving set, unpacking material from his new album, Off the Record. And the octogenarian American trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith, on what he has called his last European tour, played a potent concert with pianist Vijay Iyer — drawing from their 2025 release, Defiant Life, with a morphing grace that called to mind the inexorable pull of dream logic. The German alto saxophonist Angelika Niescier, a regular visitor to the States, played a stunning trio concert with cellist Tomeka Reid and drummer Eliza Salem, teetering between chaos and control. Contemporary geopolitics have made it ever more prohibitive for European artists to secure visas for American tours, so it was rewarding to hear some younger acts on the bill, like Oslo-based Danish saxophonist Amalie Dahl, with a supersize version of her extraordinary Dafnie band; and the German bassist Felix Henkelhausen, with another elastic large ensemble, which he calls Deranged Particles. The London Jazz Composers Orchestra, led by bassist Barry Guy, presented another rare opportunity — but the world premiere of his Double Trouble III, featuring the fearless American pianists Marilyn Crispell and Angelica Sanchez, too often sounded like an undifferentiated mass, energetic but lacking focus.

This was hardly an issue for the groups preceding and following: guitarist Mary Halvorson’s Amaryllis, which stirred in a few heraldic new compositions, and the Patricia Brennan Septet, dropping depth charges from Breaking Stretch, which DB and others anointed 2024 Album of the Year. Brennan, whose kinetic vibraphonics formed one tether from Halvorson’s group to her own, brought a pulse-racing intensity to every solo, a standard met by each of her band mates (including Dan Weiss, subbing in on drums).

A pair of exploratory saxophonists in their early ’70s, David Murray and Tim Berne, each put an agile combo through its paces: Berne’s trio Capotosta, with drummer Tom Rainey and guitarist Greg Belisle-Chi, and the quartet heard on Murray’s most recent album, Birdly Serenade, featuring a stellar Marta Sánchez on piano. Another galvanizing tenor saxophonist, James Brandon Lewis, led his quartet in a festival-capping set at Quasimodo, with combustible urgency.

A different order of urgency governed a majestic concert by the 18-piece Fire! Orchestra, led by Swedish saxophonist Mats Gustafsson and featuring dynamic collaborators like Danish saxophonist Mette Rasmussen and British pianist Kit Downes. In the world premiere of Words, the group featured transporting vocals by Brazilian drummer Mariá Portugal as well as Swedish singer Sofia Jernberg. The latter brought the performance to its peak with a musical remix of an oration by then-teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg: “We have run out of excuses and we are running out of time. We have come here to let you know that change is coming, whether you like it or not. The real power belongs to the people.”

That rousing conviction had a rougher-drawn echo in a late-night set by Amirtha Kidambi’s Elder Ones, in the ticketing hall of the Festspiele. The band, featuring a saxophone tandem of Matt Nelson and Alfredo Colón, with Lester St. Louis on bass and Jason Nazary on drums, knocked around some blistering protest songs due to appear on a forthcoming album. One of them — “Loot The Future,” an indictment of tech billionaires and other captains of capitalism — involved a passing rhetorical coincidentally a lot like Ribot’s. “Our world is burning,” Kidambi intoned, over the drone of her harmonium. “Where will you run to?” DB