Jazz à Liège lights up with beautiful venues and a colourful line-up

Four days of concerts in the most beautiful venues in Liège - this is how Jazz à Liège is advertised on the cover of the printed festival brochure. And when you end up in the Trocadéro on the first evening, this beautiful, 100-year-old cabaret theatre in the heart of Liège's old town, which is filled to the last seat for the concert with the trio of Liège pianist Johan Dupont, then you immediately believe the hype about these beautiful concert halls. And in such a place, you can enjoy the beautiful and rich jazz melodies, sometimes with a Latin flavour, that the trio plays with great passion. 

The Forum near the cathedral, in the heart of downtown Liège, is also an old venue steeped in history and also over 100 years old. For this reason alone, a visit to this beautiful, large Art Deco theatre is somehow a must. Two concerts took place there as part of the festival, the first with Snarky Puppy, the Grammy-winning, multi-talented US music collective led by bassist and founder Michael League. And there you are, sitting comfortably on soft chairs in one of the side boxes on the second floor, listening to the groovy, head-nodding, sometimes funky, fusion-jazz songs and wondering after 20 minutes what is so special about this band... So out of the Forum and off to the Reflektor, a cool, narrow club with standing concerts, where the young trumpeter Ife Ogunjobi is playing. Born in London to Nigerian parents and a member of the UK’s Ezra Collective, Ogunjobi can certainly score points with his own band and his fusions of Afrobeat and hip jazz. One day later, flutist and saxophonist Ed Cawthorne aka Tenderlonious and his excellent trio present themselves even more convincingly at the same venue with intense, gripping music that is rooted in the spiritual jazz of the 1960s and 1970s but also draws inspiration from raga in Liège.

For the first time, the Hôtel de Clercx and its Regina Club room will be the venue for the festival. The former 18th century hotel offers DJ sets and concerts with young, fresh artists, all free of charge. French saxophonist Léon Phal, who lives in Geneva, Switzerland, and his quintet make a lot of fun with their groovy, hip, club-ready jazz. And the London-based Israeli keyboardist Yoni Mayraz also presents absolutely cool jazz sounds in a free show with his band. Sometimes he plays on the acoustic piano, then on the Moog synthesizer which creates a nice mix of modern, grooving, driving music. 

The performance by the Daniel García Trio (above) will be an absolute highlight of the 33rd edition of Jazz à Liège. The Spanish pianist and his two Cuban colleagues Michael Olivera on drums and Reinier Elizarde ‘El Negrón’ on double bass play dramaturgically sophisticated songs that are allowed to develop slowly. These featured singable melodies and complex rhythms that combine jazz with flamenco, without forgetting the folk music tradition of García's home town of Salamanca. All these ingredients created pieces with a truly mesmerising effect. With dancing rhythms and melodies, an ingenious interplay of piano and drums, and the double bass placed visually in the centre of the two colleagues, which perfectly combined the bubbling ideas of García and Olivera with its sonorous playing.

Jazz à Liège inspires with its range. And with the Brussels-based Tunisian Wajdi Riahi and his trio, the festival presents an exciting pianist who is a rising star in Belgium with his very personal-sounding playing, which is also fuelled by his Tunisian heritage. And this year, Liège presents Maїna from Senegal and Adja, who lives in Brussels, two young singers worth listening to, whose musical roots are not even in jazz. But that doesn't seem to matter to the delightfully young audience at this festival anyway, as almost all the concerts were very well attended. And what better way to round off the four days of music in Liège than with John Coltrane's masterpiece ‘A Love Supreme’, which US saxophonist Lakecia Benjamin plays with bursting energy as the very last number on Sunday evening