The Jazzfest Berlin took place in 7 cities from 5 to 8 November 2020.
Jazzfest Berlin goes online and employs artistic work commissions, video statements, and interviews as extensions of the festival into space and time. It builds creative bridges into the city, into Europe and across the Atlantic, leaving behind conventional concert stages in order to listen out for the dissonances in the world ‘out there’.
The videos of this focus of the 2020 Jazzfest Berlin are available in the BerlinerFestspiele Media Library.
In response to the COVID-19 crisis and its devastating impact on the live music sector, Jazzfest Berlin 2020 has not only created a comprehensive live and streaming programme, it has also commissioned artists with video works and audio-visual statements. This way the festival expands in space and time, builds creative bridges into the city and across the Atlantic and leaves the stage behind to listen out for the dissonances in the world ‘out there’.
The Berlin-based KIM Collective has created a series of video productions artistically documenting the events or the ghostly absence of any events at Berlin locations affected by the crisis – for example in the closed Hotel HENRI. TRAINING, the Berlin duo of drummer Max Andrzejewski and reedist and synthesist Johannes Schleiermacher, produced a series of music videos with the American guitarist John Dieterich (Deerhoof) and the Vienna-based visual artist Işıl Karataş, employing an accretive back-and-forth process using looped 2-5 second audiovisual field recordings each musician made in their cities as a starting point. Musicians from the recent Jazzfest community and influential American multi-media artists Jason Moran, Camae Ayewa (aka Moor Mother) and Matana Roberts were commissioned by Jazzfest Berlin to create open-ended video works in response to the roiling social upheaval in the US this year. The videos will be published regularly on the festival website beginning on 2 October on Jazzfest Berlin Off Stage, leading up to the festival, when all of the videos will be shown at silent green on the final evening of the festival.