Jazz & The City: Salzburg grooves
When Corona was still understood as “Kranz” or “Krone”, like a jazz festival of all things, what this pearl on the Salzach has to offer in a very small space – the most knowledgeable among the locals were amazed at the number of old town venues that are suitable for concerts, who just seemed to have been waiting for a display. Before Covid-19 paralyzed the cultural scene, “Jazz & The City” last brought it to four dozen stages and a good hundred free concerts.
Corona framework conditions cannot harm the spirit of the event
“The essence of improvisation is confidence” was the motto on the flyer for 2021 – the pandemic called for new framework conditions, but could not affect the concept, the spirit of the event, which premiered in 2000 as a marketing measure by the Old Town Association . For the anniversary edition, the program was noticeably reduced, and there were only twelve venues. Nevertheless, new stages for jazz are opening up this year too: for example the dreamlike marionette theater or the Toihaus theater.
“Jazz & The City” lives up to its name. Here the city is the star, is noted in destinations like the Residenzplatz – but it is above all those noted in a few travel guides, with enchanted little venues that make jazz strolling through Salzburg so exciting and alluring.
Jazz flat share in the hotel “Blaue Gans”
Since Tina Heine, a well-known networker from Hamburg, took over the program management in 2016, “Jazz & The City” has been more and more about the spirit of jazz, the free, the unpredictable, the communicative. This year she converted parts of the “Blaue Gans” hotel into a “Jazz WG”. In the last few years she set up the “Blind Date” series, in which prominent soloists from the pool of festival musicians could spontaneously look for companions.
International jazz musicians enliven Salzburg’s old town
The Finnish guitarist Kalle Kalima uses the opportunity to mediate subtly, sometimes touchingly, between Americana and jazz in the puppet theater with the English pianist Kit Downes, his compatriot, the bassist Phil Donkin and the German drummer Moritz Baumgärtner.
The Norwegian Gard Nilssen rumbled on his “blind date” at Residenzplatz with Kit Downes (this time organ) and the saxophonist Kjetil Møster so that the Fiaker horses became restless and threatened to run away. What Gard Nilssen delivered with his band “Acoustic Unity” in “Szene” was much more gripping. Everything that makes jazz was included in the performance: primevalness, drive, finesse, irrepressible power, freedom.
Thoroughly tested audience at most gigs quietly and mesmerized
Most of the festival’s concerts were as quiet as a mouse in the well-tested audience: for example, with the gorgeous music of the trumpeter Volker Goetze and the Senegalese griot and kora player Ali Boulo Santo Cissoko in the puppet theater, with the nuanced and stunning trio “Enemy” in the same place, with the duo of the bassist Lukas Kranzelbinder and the drummer Julian Sartorius in the Toihaus Theater.
Or also when the singer and baglama player Derya Yildirim, accompanied by the “Ensemble Resonanz”, brought Anatolian wise and new music together in the “Szene” or the saxophonist Angelika Niescier deconstructed Beethoven string quartets beyond recognition, but highly creatively, in “Jazzit”.
The fact that the free concerts sometimes also attract insensitive night owls who then chatter to death with sensible music by violin virtuoso Théo Ceccaldi, such as in the Stieglkeller, is a programming error or a blemish at a festival like none other in Europe.
