“Jazz East-West” and “Voices Catching” – when it comes to jazz festivals, Nuremberg has a long tradition. With “NewJazz” Since 2013 you have one that has been assigned the attributes “young”, “fresh” and “innovative” right from the start. The guitarist Frank Wuppinger and the bassist Marco Kühl with theirs Nuremberg Jazz Musicians Association launched the whole thing with the declared intention of gaining a larger and younger audience for jazz and to make Nuremberg an international location in the festival landscape again. That is why cross-genre diversity and young, experimental actors are part of the program. Or, as Wuppinger describes the ideal new jazz act: “Multifaceted and not what you can hear everywhere anyway.” In fact, musicians like Andreas Schaerer, David Helbock or Omer Klein played here before everyone was talking about their names. And trends such as the strong Israeli scene, which has meanwhile also arrived in New York, were picked up and presented here early on.
These programming qualities will finally be fully exploited again this year from October 26th to 31st – after a planned relaunch break in 2019 and an unplanned, Corona-compliant “Digital Edition” without an audience last year, which was based on a broadcast by Bayerischer Rundfunk transferred festival day with five bands. Now there is even enough for a lavish supporting program: an exhibition by the design faculty of the Technical University of Nuremberg, the Bruno Rother Prize Winner Concert at the start on Tuesday and the Jazzino circus-Children’s concert at the end on Sunday. The big serve comes on Wednesday with a star that hardly anyone in this country knows as such: the Canadian saxophonist (and bassoonist!) Ben Wendel, who has socialized in California and New York. His successful band Kneebody covered his name for a long time, but in the meantime Wendel has not only played with almost all the popular US jazz musicians, but also with pop stars like Prince and Snoop Dogg. In Nuremberg he presents his “High Heart Project”, a new sextet made up of cracks like Lage Lund and Shai Maestro.
There are also exciting American acts
And from Thursday to Saturday things really get going, with up to six concerts each evening. There is plenty to discover: hot local numbers like the Munich avant-garde pop women’s collective SiEA, the Hamburg quartet Toy toy, the 90s electro-techno of the legendary duo that has just dissolved Daft punk “rejazzed”, the live encounter of Phillipp Roth’s DJ project (brought together exclusively for Nuejazz) Red On with the audiovisual experimenter Sabrina Zeltner alias Subrihanna and the saxophonist Michael Binder, the future pop of the duo Etna, the Berlin jazz of the trio Bobby Rausch or the prog and hard rock TMTxplosiveTrio of the three big band leaders Monika Roscher, Tom Jahn and Tilmann Herpichböhm. Up-and-coming from the young European scenes like the duo The Breath with their hybrid Manchester music, the new British quartet of the Swiss singer Lucia Cadotsch with Kit Downes, Phil Donkin and James Maddren, the Norwegian jazz rocker Hedvig Mollestad or the trumpeter Yazz Ahmed, who, alongside Shabaka Hutchings and Nubya Garcia, is one of the spearheads of the Londoners ” Jazz Movements “is.
And even exciting American acts are finally back, like the soul-jazz-R’nB ‘collective Butcher Brown from the D’Angelo town of Richmond or (in a solo performance) the drummer Kassa Overall, who is one of the new assets of the West Coast scene alongside the currently hyped trumpeter Theo Croker. The range of new jazz can also be seen in the prominent highlights, from the highly virtuoso emotional world jazz of the Armenian star pianist Tigran Hamasyan to the trance rock of the Franco-Canadian trio Suuns enough.
However, you should plan in advance what you really want to see, because for the first time the festival is spread over two stages, “in order to be able to offer more people great concerts under the current hygiene regulations”, as the organizers explain: once on the already traditional culture workshop Auf AEG in the west almost near Fürth, and then again on the Z-Bau – house for contemporary culture in the southeast. After all, all concerts will be broadcast live on the net in excerpts, so the visitors to the two venues (as well as those who stayed at home) can to some extent follow what is happening at the other venue.
NueJazz, Tuesday to Sunday, October 26th to 31st, on AEG and Z-Bau Nuremberg, www.nuejazz.de