Across the Border. American Jazz Now

America’s “melting pot” has created a new jazz culture, engaged not only with its Afro-American roots, but also Jewish and European influence. In the course of the concert series Across the Border some of the best-known American musicians from both traditions will be invited to Berlin, beginning with the reformers of the current Jazz scene, such as John Zorn, and also Paul Brody and Fred Frith, who have come to embody American jazz in the past few years.

The Klezmer culture of these artists derives predominantly from the Jewish tradition and is closely connected with improvised jazz. This Klezmer culture has strongly influenced improvised jazz over the past decades. This concert series will also present various Berlin musicians who have followed these artistic concepts. Some of the most renowned representatives of African-American Jazz culture will also be visiting Berlin, among them important players such as David Murray’s World Saxophone Quartet, and Jamaala-deen Tacuma’s Coltrane Configuration.

Jazz is a principally transgressive type of music, which was developed by immigrants in America. Later, jazz became the sensual ambassador and generator of an alternative lifestyle in unfamiliar terrain. Later again, it strayed further afield, and brought back new stimuli—for the music and the country. Jazz takes stock and then uses whatever it can apply; this is how it became international. The openness of jazz is meant for the world to see. Jazz is a vital universal language that writes its own history. If it stays home, then it stops moving. Jazz is not meant for museums, even though some of its exponents would like to see it there. But cultures gather dust in museums. Jazz needs freedom, because it has always been a seismograph of the now. That has not changed at all. What else does globalization stand for, if not a myriad of interconnections? To avoid getting lost, jazz needs discourses in a cosmopolitan language. This is a language that jazz speaks well.

The concert series DISCOVER US! aims to question and advance dialog between Americans and Germans. There were times when this dialog seemed to be smoother. Not necessarily within jazz, but generally speaking. Talking about America after 9/11?: “I don’t even want to get started,” says Elliot Sharp, “otherwise your ears would start ringing. New York has been occupied since then. It once was a place where art could grow outside of the margins. Now it is being sold.” Times have changed: optimism everywhere after the election. Sharp has been making utopian, politically charged music for 40 years. He gives 120 concerts per year, ten in the USA, the rest in Asia and Europe. His music growls and fouls, is strident and straight, and is a gigantic abbreviation of black music through and contrary to its history.

Music is capable of bringing stability to the cacophony of today’s life in our so networked information societies. Marc Ribot, too, is a lateral thinker. After 9/11 he founded a rock band. He is one of the most fascinating of contemporary guitarists, likes the rough tornados, and his music drives on relentlessly. He uses punk, son and noise, combining everything he finds. The improvising nomad Fred Frith does something similar, traveling the world and working with all the sounds and tones he encounters. Recently, he has often worked with violinist Carla Kihlstedt. Cleverly and subtly, she arranges particles from Bluegrass, Balkan, alternative Country, Trash, and Schtetl music to form an imaginary folklore. “The gates are wide open on the other side,” she sings with her band “2 foot yard.”

Jazz means going beyond borders. German musicians have learnt and studied in America. American jazzers live in Germany. This creates relaxed opposing models. Paul Brody, for example, has been living here for more than 15 years. He too is a juggler of styles. “Jazz is a collective unforced agreement,” he says. Below the sky over Berlin, and straddling the Atlantic Ocean, he brings together musicians from both countries in a fast and furious Jewish music for the 21st century, in a kind of balancing act of non-nostalgic local history.

The concert series does not aim to be just an inventory. It is a kaleidoscope which enables you to look back into the future. That’s why Coltrane is seen and reinterpreted as the big common denominator by Jamaaladeen Tacuma. And that is the reason why the World Saxophone Quartet will be attending, still an authority in its 33rd year, growing new ideas from old roots. That is why important musicians are being presented in Berlin, where jazz has finally again begun to move in new and vital directions. The concert series aims to support the optimism, the idea that things can be done, by breaking up commercially encrusted structures.

Ulrich Steinmetzger


Besides large concerts every month in babylon:mitte on Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, where the two “pillars” of contemporary American and European jazz culture will come together, there are also weekly film concerts at the UferHallen in Wedding.