Category: Concerts
(text) and Cristina Marx (photos) The Uferstudios, in Berlin’s Wedding district, sit on the edge of the Panke, a small creek that cuts through the city from north to south. This collection of low red-brick buildings that once housed public transit workshop is now the long-term home of studios and theaters dedicated to dance. However, on a recent m…
By
Paul Acquaro
See part 1
here.
SATURDAY, November 4
The main event of Saturday evening was a concert by AACM founding member and
ever creative composer and saxophonist Henry Threadgill, who had
written a piece specifically for the festival that melded his New York based
Zooid quintet with Berlin’s own ever creati…
It was the last day of the Jazzfest Berlin, a rainy Sunday morning, and I was decked out in rain gear and biking through glistening streets on the way to the Delphi Filmpalast am Zoo – a posh art-deco theater dating from 1927, and also home to the famous Quasimodo music club. As I was dodging the deepest puddles and thickest patches of wet leaves, …
See also Part I and Part IILorenz Widauer (t) ; Yvonne Moriel (s) (Photo by Michael Geißler) Sunday morning I woke to sounds of horns – the hills, it seems, were alive with the sound of music. Indeed, out on the Ritzensee, in a small row boat, saxophonist Yvonne Moriel and trumpeter Lorenz Widauer were welcoming the new day. Along the lake shore, …
See Part I and Part IIIWe Hike Jazz – getting ready (Photo by Michael Geißler)The 7:30 a.m. alarm was a bit brutal and it wasn’t long after that I had joined the group gathered at the base of the mountain where trip organizer and bassist Lukas Kranzelbinder was giving a quick run down of what to expect: we’d be above the tree-line, in the open alp…
See Part II and Part III The weather, I heard, was unusual for the alpine town of Saalfelden, apparently one could expect it to be raining at this point of the summer. At about 80 degrees and with blue bird skies, the only patch of rain encountered so far was on the night of arrival, exactly when the last concert let out. Now, it was early Saturday…
Crowd (above) Roof Deck (below) (photos by Juliane Schuetz
Read part 1 here.Friday, August 11The crowd at the Radialsystem was impressive. On Friday evening, at 7 p.m., the A’LARME! crowd spilled out onto the ample patio space overlooking the the Spree, the river that cuts through the middle of Berlin as well as the side-yard. The bar inside, as …
Thinking back on past editions of A L’ARME!, it has typically been quite hot, and in a summer where extreme heat has reigned over southern Europe and the US, simple reasoning would suggest that the patterns of past years would hold true for mid-August in Berlin; however, how far from it. Seasonably cool and under blue skies with white fluffy clou…
The dimensions of time and space can play a decisive role in the form of a jazz festival. The typical approach is to work with time, like the traditional festival held over a compact
set of dates, a long weekend in one place, a series of shows starting
sometime in the evening of each date. A variation can be overlapping
events at multiple lo…
Magnet Festival Poster
By
Paul AcquaroAt the end of the first night of the Magnet Festival in
Wiesbaden, the young Estonian pianist Kirke Karja was playing a grand piano in
the middle of a graffiti adorned Skatehalle. The room, a large cinderblock and
concrete wareh…
The story of the Peitz jazz festival, a festival that was founded in 1973 in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) town of Peitz, is for good reason, easy to mythologize. Festival founders, Ulli Blobel and Peter “Jimi” Metag, both from the region, got their career start with the festival, and while they took different paths after the festival was sh…
Continued from yesterday.Friday’s line up at the Jazzfest Berlin featured the rich bounty of saxophonist Peter Brötzmann with Hamid Drake and gimbri player Majid Bekkas, along with the fire extinguisher opus “MM schäumend“ from Sven-Åke Johansson, among other highlights; however, other commitments kept me away. So, skipp…
