My review of the 2013 Enjoy Jazz Festival, today at All About Jazz.


It's always a treat to return to Heidelberg for Enjoy Jazz. As a very intended contrast to most jazz festivals, that compress a lot of music into a very short time, Enjoy Jazz's founding premise, when it was first conceived 15 years ago by Festival Director Rainer Kern, was to program only one show a night, but make the festival run for 6-7 weeks, so that the amount of music actually programmed turns out the same.


It's been a winning formula, as Enjoy Jazz has grown into one of the country's largest and mosrt respected of its kind. For six-and-a-half weeks in 2013, jazz fans from the Heidelberg/Mannheim/Ludwigshafen region (all venues no more than 20- 25 minutes drive from each other) have access to a broad cross-section of music, ranging from established artists like Joshua Redman, Uri Caine, Carla Bley and John Scofield to up-and-comers Marius Neset, Arun Ghosh, Michael Wollny and Third Reel. There's a mix of American artists, ranging from Brad Mehldau and the FLY trio, featuring the pianist's rhythm section of Larry Grenadier and Jeff Ballard along with saxophonist Mark Turner, to Peter Evans and Chris Potter, while artists from around the world are represented by everyone from Norway's Jaga Jazzist and Nils Petter Molvaer to Tunisia's Anouar Brahem, Switzerland's Nik Bartsch and South African legend Hugh Masekela, reunited with his duo partner of over 50 years, pianist Larry Willis.


But beyond the opportunity to catch some of today's best artists in the context of one show per night, which allows for a much better opportunity to absorb the music rather than running off to the next show, after which the first show can sometimes seem a distant memory, Enjoy Jazz is, for its second year running, also making inroads into jazz education with another two-day symposium, curated by German sociologist and musicologist, Dr. Christian Broecking. How Jazz Became Art and Attack(ed): A Transatlantic Dialogue brought together a group of academics and other professionals to discuss everything from photographer Arne Reimer's series and, recently, published book—American Jazz Heroes—with the subtitle How German Journalism Pays Tribute to American Culture, to Götz Bühler's flip side of the same idea, European Jazz Legends, both series originally running (European Jazz Legends still running, in fact) in the German Jazzthing magazine. Berndt Ostendorf, professor emeritus of North American Cultural History at the Amerika Institut, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, spoke of growing up in the fifties and the birth of American Studies in Europe, while Canadian-born/American-resident Kurt Ellenberger (currently spending eight months in Germany) spoke of the challenges and opportunities of the digital age, and Sociology Professor at University of California Santa Cruz Herman S. Gray delivered a lecture, Jazz and Value, Jazz as Value.


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