So many graduates of the Jazz Institute at the Munich University of Music and Theater now populate and dominate the local scene – some also national and international – that it’s easy to forget how young this institution still is. It was created just 15 years ago when the jazz department of the Richard Strauss Conservatory was taken over. It was there that accordionist, big band leader, teacher and entrepreneur Kurt Maas founded the academic jazz education in Munich in 1991. Previously there had only been private institutions such as Joe Haider’s “Jazz School”.
The Jazz Institute erected an early monument to the doyen of jazz teaching who died in 2011. Ten years ago, the “Kurt Maas Jazz Award” was offered for the first time, an internal competition that takes place every two years, “in which the students can question themselves”, as the new university president Lydia Grün puts it. The sponsor is Camilo Dornier, pianist, former student of Kurt Maas and Berklee graduate, who was drawn to the family business instead of being a musician, but who always remained true to his passion for jazz: “The idea for the award came from Maas’ Funeral. It’s a matter close to my heart.”
Dornier was also the most impulsive speaker at the press reception that the Jazz Institute recently gave on the occasion of the two anniversaries. He, university president Grün, institute director Claus Reichstaller and bassist Martin Zenker, who has just been given a part-time position for internationalization, offered a review and outlook. A lot is changing, not only in the training itself, which has to deal with a radical reinterpretation and stylistic expansion of the concept of jazz as well as with strong internationalization.
Others are literally on the move. You just have to set yourself up at the new location, in house G of the Gasteig HP8, which you moved into after the old Gasteig closed. For the 30 teachers and more than 80 students, “there are fewer rooms here, but they are larger,” as Reichstaller states. A bigger problem is that instead of four, only two halls are available for the institute’s concert program: the huge Isarphilharmonie and Hall X, “in which there isn’t even a cloakroom or an instrument room.”
Visiting students have been sent to Boston since 2013
This school of improvisation will also be able to cope with that. And continue to grow as before. To this end, international exchange was sought from the outset. For the Berklee graduate Reichstaller, this obviously meant a cooperation with the world’s largest jazz cadre in Boston. Guest students have been sent to the USA since 2013, and in return, celebrities such as Abraham Laboriel, Patti Austin and Tia Fuller gave workshops in Munich.
The university partnership with the Mongolian State Conservatory in Ulan Bator, which was officially expanded in 2018, developed more fruitfully than could ever have been hoped for. There are also hopes for the following year’s collaboration with the Jerusalem Academy of Music. And now South America is coming along. After a long research and a visit, exchange programs will soon start with the somewhat exotic, socio-cultural EMESP Tom Jobim Music School and the Faculdade de Musica Souza Lima, both in São Paulo, Brazil. Further cooperations and projects with South Africa and Australia are being planned.
All of this leads back to the “Kurt Maas Jazz Award”: Ever since the first edition, the winner of the first prize has been allowed to travel to the summer school at the Berklee College of Music. The trumpeter Matthias Lindermayr, pianist Leo Betzl, saxophonist Moritz Stahl as well as the pianists Svetlana Marinchenko and most recently Shuteen Erdenebaatar (also a result of the cooperation with Mongolia) have enjoyed this training trip so far. If you look at their invariably brilliant careers, they certainly shouldn’t have done any harm.
And so one can rightly assume that future jazz summiteers will be in the field of five that is now on February 8th in Hall X of the Gasteig HP8 for the public finale of the “Kurt Maas Jazz Awards” 2023. Saxophonist Tom Förster, trumpeters Nico Weber and Lukas Tutert, drummer Minchan Kim and guitarist Elias Prinz compete with their bands for the Berklee trip, a performance in the Bayerischer Hof nightclub (2nd prize) and participation in an individual Master class (3rd prize). And this year also to take part in a special prizewinners’ concert: On July 12th, the three winners can present themselves in the Isarphilharmonie, together with a legendary guest of honour, the singer and creator of countless standards of Musica Populeira Brasiliana Ivan Lins. In the role of the ambassador of the new Brazilian partnership, so to speak.
Final Kurt Maas Jazz Award 2023, Wed., Feb. 8, 1 p.m., Hall X; Prizewinners’ Concert, Wed., July 12, 6 p.m., Isarphilharmonie, Hans-Preißinger-Straße 8