No more festival, why. In Berlin, the jazz scene lives all year round. Therefore, the “7 Days of Jazz, Improvised Music and Discourse”, as the IG Jazz is celebrating with its jazz week for the fourth time in the city, is primarily self-advertising. It draws attention to what is happening anyway. Fan out, Berliners, and go on an adventure trip between the Charlottenburg A-Trane and the b-flat in Mitte, the Kreuzberg exploratory and the Weißenseer Kühlspot Social Club! You don’t even know what you have in us.
The Greek drummer Yorgos Dimitriadis teams up with the American sound artist Andrea Parkins to form a duo that electronically alienates both the large percussion apparatus and the small shakers and bells.
Born in Banja Luka, Yugoslavia, Dejan Terzic drums up a dense network of harsh rhythms, drones and flickering lines with guitarist Ronny Graupe from Karl-Marx-Stadt. And in his electro-acoustic project Skultura, the American double bass player Nick Dunston plunges into a maelstrom of micro-events together with the Russian clarinettist Eldar Tsalikov, the Turkish live electronic musician Korhan Erhel and his compatriot, the singer Ayse Cansu Tanrikulu.
As far as this kind of music is concerned, you don’t have to look enviously at Brooklyn – it’s been playing on the Spree for a long time. No less precarious than in New York, especially after the Corona lockdowns, but at (even) lower rents. And with the support of a cultural policy that, compared to institutionalized classical music, is still stingy with grants, but at least offers a minimum of support structures that one can only hope will lead to a center that will one day be the improvising scene giving it the visibility it deserves. In Klaus Lederer, who spoke a greeting, she has a sincere friend.
Discursive in the devil’s kitchen
It is one of the tasks of IG Jazz not to get tired of demanding. But she would be in hell’s kitchen if she joined in a polemic against high culture, as heard with chilling simplicity on the opening panel. Moderated by Shelly Kupferberg, the German-Iranian singer and composer Cymin Samawatie, who will receive the Berlin 2022 Jazz Prize, which is worth 15,000 euros, at an rbb concert this week, made practical suggestions – including improving jazz education in schools. The thrashing of the bad boy neoliberalism, in which the communication scientist Aljoscha Paulus liked, helps in the analysis of the complex misery as little as the suspicion of a destructive classism. Jazz has survived the worst excesses of racism and sexism.
The cultural anthropologist and anti-discrimination trainer Francis Seeck seemed intent on denigrating “highly subsidized culture”, especially opera, as if it were a mere instrument of bourgeois distinction. A free society would not get any further if it sacrificed Beethoven’s string quartets and wanted to save Andrea Berg’s hits with reference to the taste of an imaginary working class. As Seeck pointed out, there is no question that the independent art production in this country ultimately rests on the shoulders of wealthy heirs.
The contempt for high culture harms jazz simply through a lack of ear training. Aesthetic because he has been building bridges to contemporary music for decades. Economically, because the institutions are opening up, albeit slowly, too slowly. Outdated ideologemes, no matter how polished, run the business of the other side.
Until July 10th; field-notes.berlin
