Jazzfest Berlin’s 60th To Celebrate Legends & New Paradigms

By Bill Meyer I Oct. 15, 2024

Multi-instrumentalist Joe McPhee will play on opening night of Jazzfest Berlin with the London organ trio Decoy.
(Photo: Courtesy Joe McPhee/Bandcamp)

Jazzfest Berlin has announced the program for its 60th anniversary edition, which will take place Oct. 31–Nov. 3 at the Berliner Festspiele, A-Trane, Quasimodo and the Kaiser Wilhelm Church.

Originally known as Jazztage Berlin (Berlin Jazz Days), the festival first took place in 1964. While it is deservedly known for forward-facing programming, 60th anniversaries demand some reflection. So, in addition to its usual selection of touring acts, specially commissioned performances and local artists, it has instituted an initiative called Jazzfest Research Lab, for which it opened its archives and invited scholars to take a look at the festival’s history. The University of Hildesheim and the University of the Arts Berlin have both held research seminars, the results of which will be published in the festival’s online magazine. And seven academics, including George Lewis, Ursel Schlicht and DownBeat contributor John Corbett, will give talks that explore the festival’s history from the perspectives of visual presentation, gender, race, politics and the fest’s annual program magazines. Explains artistic director Nadin Deventer, “The idea is really to make it accessible and also to have a critical analysis of what happened. It’s not only to celebrate this year, but also to learn from the past, for future years to come.”

This concern with understanding the past corresponds to a thoughtful orientation towards the present, the future and the community within which the festival exists. The musical programming will include boundary-pushing acts such as Kris Davis’ Diatom Ribbons, Darius Jones fLuXkit Vancouver and the pan-European quartet The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. And beginning on Oct. 28, Jazzfest Berlin will conduct a second initiative called Community Lab Moabit, which will take place in Moabit, a diverse neighborhood near the festival’s venues, to engage in community encounters. Says Deventer, “There will be workshops, there will be concerts, there will be flash mobs, there will be also talking formats because the occasion is an anniversary. This is an enterprise to step out of your comfort zone, step out of your bubble, and an invitation to a lot of participants, children, old people, musicians, non-musicians, it doesn’t matter. We have refugee houses here that are participating, churches, little clubs, theaters, of course choirs and orchestras. We will have 80 kids that will be involved in this, 10 workshop leaders coming from different disciplines, 40 musicians of the Jazzfest lineup of this year. On the final day of the festival, there will be spotlight on Moabit with a grand finale and we will walk through that neighborhood. The Jazzfest has always been funded with public money, and that money is coming from everybody, but not everybody could benefit. For 60 years, we are all in our bubbles; a lot of people don’t come. So, I thought, if they don’t come, we will step out of our theater, our clubs, and go to a community which might not feel addressed by the Jazzfest Berlin, or even not know that it exists. It’s not an audience development project. I think such an anniversary is an occasion to step out of the comfort zone.”

The program spans four days of concerts which will run concurrently at a large concert hall and three smaller venues. It runs the gamut from younger musicians proposing new paradigms to veterans in their 70s and 80s. “As we are celebrating now 60 years, I also want to celebrate legends a bit,” says Deventer. Multi-instrumentalist Joe McPhee, who will turn 85 during the festival weekend, will play on opening night with the London organ trio Decoy. Another octogenarian, German pianist Joachim Kühn, will introduce a new trio featuring drummer Sylvain Darrifourcq and bassist Thibault Cellier, French musicians who performed at last year’s Jazzfest. Joe Lovano will bring his Trio Tapestry, whose pianist, Marilyn Crispell, will also play a solo concert. The Sun Ra Arkestra will return to the festival after 52 years. And the Malacoda String Quartet will honor the recently passed improvising cellist Tristan Honsinger.

International selections will project the festival’s understanding of jazz as an international music. Canadian drummer and composer John Hollenbeck, who taught at Jazz Institute Berlin from 2005 to 2016, will give two concerts. One is by George, his genre-mashing electric quartet; the other is an expanded, multimedia version of The Drum Major Instinct, a program informed by Martin Luther King’s final sermon, which will also incorporate archival Jazzfest Berlin television recordings projected onto multiple screens (for most of its first three decades, the festival was broadcast on German national TV). Sun-Mi Hong, a South Korean drummer-composer who is based in Amsterdam, will lead her BIDA Orchestra, which is a cross-continental sextet. And the burgeoning Swedish music scene will be represented by three ensembles. Trumpeter Goran Kajfeš’ Tropiques, currently a sextet, weds cinematic melodies to lush grooves; the 13-piece Vilhelm Bromander Unfolding Orchestra infuses Don Cherry-informed multiculturalism with an extra dose of Indian dhrupad music; and the 12-piece Anna Högberg Extended Attack commands a range from funereal dirges to free-jazz catharsis. And Japanese guitarist Otomo Yoshihide will lead his Special Big Band, a 17-strong unit that laces boisterous but disciplined horn charts with feedback and sine waves.

Sylvie Courvoisier will present a new project, Poppy Seeds. The quartet extends her long-standing fondness for working with fellow pianists to another set of tuned keys: the vibraphone of Patricia Brennan. Three other quartets — Belgians De Beren Gieren, Brooklyn’s Wrens and saxophonist Lakecia Benjamin’s combo — will present music that deals with contemporary rhythms in intimate club sets. And three trios — Oùat, Devin Gray’s Melt All The Guns and Camila Nebbia/Kit Downes/Andrew Lisle — will represent the broad horizons of Berlin’s local scene. Finally, the devastatingly accomplished vocal/piano duo of Sofia Jernberg and Alexander Hawkins, whose album Musho is one of the year’s best jazz recordings, will subject Ethiopian and Swedish songs to fearless improvisational alchemies. DB