In the organizer's words:

Open Air

12:30 Urban Community Music - Sounds of Buchheim (& special guests)

The Open Jazz House School (OJHS) was founded in 1980 as the educational pillar of the Cologne Jazz House initiative. From the very beginning, however, the OJHS saw itself not only as a music school with a focus on jazz, but also as a socio-cultural center that sees cultural education work as part of its mission. For example, the network project "Sounds Of Buchheim - Urban Community Music", which was launched in 2008 in the Buchheim district of Cologne on the right bank of the Rhine and has been continuously developed ever since. Since then, people of all ages with different cultural, social and educational backgrounds, with and without previous musical knowledge, have taken advantage of various opportunities to make music together in different band projects with professional support and free of charge. With an inclusive and artistic approach, the aim is to meet the needs, interests, starting points and development potential of each individual with the greatest possible openness. And all of this works exclusively under the aspect of "do it yourself": from composing the music to writing the lyrics to organizing the concerts.

15:30 Kuhn Fu

The band name is "martial arts" in the best sense of the word: Kuhn Fu is the name Berlin guitarist Christian Achim Kühn has given his multinational band, with which he has also been causing a sensation in the truest sense of the word on the stages of clubs and festivals since it was founded in 2012. With four woodwinds, a rhythm section and himself on the Telecaster and as a singer, Kühn plays a ludicrous puzzle game with the audience when he performs his mix of jazz and punk, cabaret and cabaret. Kühn and Kuhn Fu do not even stop at a fairy tale such as "The Fisherman and His Wife", which was popularized by the Brothers Grimm. They quickly transfer the plot from the North Sea coast to London, the fisherman becomes the horn player Marcel De Champignon, the fish is called Bruno, the architect, and the woman's name only appears in the name of the website ilsebill.com. The whole performance seems refreshingly crude and absurd, it has a lot of the anarchy of Dadaism and Surrealism, while the music is raw and mangy, shaggy and unbrushed. But that's also what jazz has to be today: cheeky, cheeky, nosey.

Christian Achim Kühn - gtr/comp
Frank Gratkowski - sax/fl/cl
John Dikeman - sax
Sofia Salvo - sax
Ziv Taubenfeld - bcl
Esat Ekincioglu - b
George Hadow - dr

17:00 KUU!

A few years ago, singer and actress Jelena Kuljić, born in 1976 in Zrenanjin, Serbia, performed in theater productions with Berlin-based Finnish guitarist Kalle Kalima. During the breaks, the two experimented with all kinds of new music, rock and jazz - and realized that the proverbial chemistry between them was right. This rather accidental duo would soon take on a broader framework as KUU! Kuljić and Kalima brought in aesthetically adequate partners in guitarist Frank Möbus and drummer Christian Lillinger, who are indeed capable of spanning a wide stylistic range with them on an ad hoc basis. KUU! is now a collectively organized and stylistically eclectic band that unabashedly takes up controversial political themes in its lyrics and processes them in a sometimes loudly rocking, sometimes harshly grooving and often tonally varied ambience.

Jelena Kuljić - voc
Kalle Kalima - gtr/b
Frank Möbus - gtr
Christian Lillinger - dr

//

Hall

14:30 Jens Düppe & Simin Tander

In 2023, Jens Düppe was asked to expand his solo percussion program "ego_D" into a duo for the "Romanischer Sommer" and perform it in the Cologne church of St. Maria im Kapitol. The special thing about this program is that Düppe plays drums, piano and synthesizer at the same time. His keyboard instruments, which he usually plays with his left hand and left foot, are positioned at a 90 degree angle to his drum set. In a way, this creates a limitation, but it becomes the impulse for the peculiar flow of the music. The archaic-mystical, the spiritual-ritual is then given its very own twist by the vocals of German-Afghan Simin Tander, who has been playing in a duo with Düppe in Cologne since this "Romanische Nacht". She circles around the patterns with her melismatic vocal garlands, and mysteriously heterogeneous atmospheres develop in the harmony between her dark-colored alto voice and the rhythms of the drums. The hybrid is emphasized even more because Tander sings in English as well as in Pashtu, the native language of her Afghan father, a journalist and poet, and also improvises with language per se.

Jens Düppe - dr/p/efx
Simin Tander - voc

17:30 Sebastian Gramss - Meteors

A meteorite is a cosmic solid body that has passed through the earth's atmosphere and crashed to earth. The majority of these meteorites will land on the Cologne Jazzzweek stage when bass virtuoso Sebastian Gramss, who lives and teaches in Cologne, presents his album "MessageT Outer Space", released in 2023, with his septet of the same name. Meteors is a kind of chamber music core that he spun off from his large-scale formation States Of Play in 2022. The inscribed information from the universe may help to somehow save the terrestrial age of the Anthropocene. Gramss sees his spectrally unfolding soundscapes as a "cinematic sound event": sounds that become film images, between improvisation, composed surfaces and experimental explorations. Australian trombonist Shannon Barnett, who teaches as a professor in Cologne and, like Gramss, was awarded the German Jazz Prize in 2022, will also be taking part.

Sebastian Gramss - b/comp
Shannon Barnett - trb/voc
Leonhard Huhn - sax
Philip Zoubek - p/synth
Christian Lorenzen - key/synth
Dominik Mahnig - dr/perc
Stephan Vester - efx

More info on jazzweek.de