Kick-off Jazzfest Berlin

The space for international musical encounters has become scarcer: The pandemic initially made travelling and personal encounters problematic and then temporarily restricted almost everything international, musical and spatial to living rooms, converting it into bits and bytes. In order to plan a veritable festival and music experience under these circumstances, we have been falling back for months on one of the core competences of jazz: Improvisation. We have been building temporary bridges, searching for creative loopholes in the interstices between the analogue and digital worlds, short-circuiting the ether with the cloud and, following Sun Ra's example, sending musical signals into space to cosmic crossings with other arts and previously unknown cultures.

Participants: Thomas Oberender, Georg Schütky, Laura Winkler, Max Andrzejewski, Johannes Schleiermacher, Işıl Karataş, Jim Staley (via Zoom), Joel Ross (via Zoom), Jim Black, Peter Margasak, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Heidi Heidelberg, Mauricio Velasierra, Siska and Joel Grip (in order of appearance)

Nadin Deventer (moderation)