Jazzfest Berlin: Debris from which new things are created

At the end of the Jazzfest Berlin, the stage looked like a shining grave. US pianist Jason Moran set a musical memorial to young British musicians in memory of James Reese Europe and his ragtime band Harlem Hellfighters. As if in prayer, the musicians solemnly joined hands in a circle after their performance. 100 years have passed since the American bandleader landed on the French Mediterranean coast.

The Harlem Hellfighters were black soldiers who fought in French regiments during the First World War because the US wanted to keep their troops white. They brought an early form of jazz to Europe. This should have sounded explosive - like bombs or salvos, music from the trench. And at the same time the music sounded like a greeting from home that could comfort physically disabled and socially excluded soldiers.

"James Reese Europe and the Absence of Ruin" is Jason Moran's audiovisual performance, which also addresses the lack of memorial sites for black cultural achievements. For this, the art filmmaker John Akomfrah has taken black and white pictures. Urban wastelands and trees glow in an over-exposed white, as if they were cotton fields of the south, the scene of plantations and slavery.

The jazz festival has rejuvenated significantly

The appearance of the new Hellfighters around Moran stands for the African-American focus of the Jazzfest Berlin under the new direction of Nadin Deventer, for the repoliticization of this music, for their rediscovered spiritual side. The Jazzfest was always on the flank, but not as good as this year for a long time.

Never seen to this extent at the Jazzfest: young musicians, younger listeners. When Chicago drummer Makaya McCraven invites Berlin musicians to perform on stage for his second set at the Club Prince Charles at 2am on early Sunday morning, things get really cool. African-American groove and free spirit, paired with rugged Berlin edges.

photo gallery

8 pictures

New wind was already evident at the opening of the 55th jazz festival, when curator Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung from Cameroon cited the refreshing thoughts of the theorist Amiri Baraka: White critics, Baraka said in 1960, do not understand the social dimension of jazz and therefore reduce it his virtuosity. And with John Coltrane, Baraka has heard that improvisation is an attempt to learn a new language. These observations led well through the festival: jazz can also be understood as music as utopian art, or as a language after racism. But for some in the hall, such considerations were already a provocation. "Finally play music, jazz is music" , "stop it!".

No loose sequence of holy concerts

But the program of Nadin Deventer did not allow any trench warfare of the generations, but it was too diverse for that. Nevertheless, on the opening night Deventer managed to play the whole house in such a way that the jazz festival looked like a festival rather than a series of latent sacred concerts, as was often the case in earlier years.

From the punkjazzigen trio of the French guitarist Julien Desprez on the side stage many spectators came back with pee in the eyes. Desprez rides the Stratocaster like Hendrix, but breaks down every hurdle. Complex, direct, hypervital. And in the ticket hall, the equally young Swiss trio Heinz Herbert showed that this generation does not care whether hypnotic groove, psychedelic murmur or noise. None of the musicians is called Heinz Herbert, that's a hipster name. As a counterpoint, at the same time in the foyer played the young exceptional guitarist and Mary Halvorson with the trio Thumbscrew.

How the jazz sounds as a language that always wants to be re-learned, if she does not want to die in art-obsessed routine, showed the projects from Chicago again and again. For example, when flutist Nicole Mitchell and her Black Earth Ensemble stand on the big stage, laying out a disturbingly beautiful, completely open improvisation, including a gospel-like finale by singer Avery R. Young.

The best performance came from the trumpeter Jamie Branch. Somewhat crumpled, she entered the stage in a tracksuit, with erratic movements, as if challenged, as if the situation could escalate at any moment. She played short phrases, then drank, probably not just tea, and played again. She just did what she wanted. After half an hour, they all had together, the band worked. Then the leader destroyed everything in the encore.

These are the ruins from which new things are created. Jazz as a ritual that tells of violence - with peaceful intent.