Fresh talents from North-Rhine Westphalia and old master David Murray hold hands to heat up Cologne’s Stadtgarten venue

Aside from NYC, Germany is where the 2025 festival scene began, as the Stadtgarten venue’s Winterjazz showcase of Cologne talent always acts as the tiny offspring of the Brooklyn/Manhattan Winter Jazzfest, presenting the rising stars of the North-Rhine Westphalia region. It’s a free-entrance event, leading to long queues and packed spaces, but this has the effect of sizzling up the electrical atmosphere, even if we can’t always espie the bands. As it happened, the hit acts of this 14th edition’s long evening weren’t housed on the main Stadtgarten stage, but in its basement Jaki den and Club Zimmermanns across the street.

In similar fashion to the marked development of Australian trombonist Shannon Barnett, the Iranian clarinet player Shabnam Parvaresh has started to form a significant presence on the Köln scene, already making her mark in the Kind combo led by alto saxophonist and composer Jan Klare. On this night she played bass clarinet flanked by guitarist Ula Martyn-Ellis and drummer Philipp Buck, crafting an organically rich soundscape of inter-reacting sensitivity, as Sheen Trio.

Also in Jaki, approaching the midnight hour, there was humour in jazz, as well as adventure, with saxophonist/keyboardist Sean Payne joining the Shreefpunk foursome, who are led by capering Alp-ish trumpeter/multi-instrumentalist Matthias Schriefl. Their balance was just right, between smiles, gritted-teeth and funksome head-nodding.

In Zimmerman’s, there was PC Energetic, a guitar trio led by Philip Czarnecki, filling in at very short notice, and providing a potent blend of rock, blues, jazz and grind, heavy on the bottleneck riffs, without relinquishing the detail.

A key observation this year is that much of the selection was infected by an injection of bands featuring neo-soul or pop-styled vocalists, or bands that were heavy on the crowd-pleasing circus antics. Customarily, Winterjazz has been known for its focus on the more razored edge of the music, and Cologne, while not as wigged-out as Berlin, still has an abundance of audio extremists dwelling locally.

The preceding evening held a similar format of overlapping multi-stages, although stretching across a few blocks to the Christuskirche as an additional venue. This was devoted to musicians supported by the NICA artist development initiative, named after one of jazz music’s renowned supporters Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter, who saved Thelonious Monk’s bebop bacon on a regular basis.

On the main Stadtgarten stage, Dutch flautist Jorik Bergman (Cologne resident since 2020) presented an invocation of ‘Stay On It’, one of recently re-acknowledged composer Julius Eastman’s finest works. As a kind of peripheral minimalist (sometimes), Eastman’s repetitions and build-ups differ from those of Reich and Glass due to their tougher textures, lusty delivery and apparent nods to chance. This long piece was played relatively closely to other versions heard, but the group still sounded relaxed into their own individualities. Loose chanting, insistent percussion and joyous upward curving were all compatible with the jazz zone, as interpreted by this line-up of voices, saxophones, trombone, oboe, piano, vibraphone and drums.

Down the Jaki steps, saxophonist Fabian Dudek led a trio that also included bassist Ruth Goller and drummer Kate Gentile, an impressive pair of sidekicks. Dudek led the chase on flute, scampering around the abstract electric bass manoeuvres, cohering untethered streams of goop, drums thundering in Paul Motian-activated style. Dudek employed tenor harshness over the long haul breathing-issuance cycling, catching hold of a rhythm to blow, feeding curlicues of tough thought. Goller suddenly sang choir-girl, halting her partners in their tracks, then stroking echo-strings as Gentile ranged around the bells and gongs. Soon, fuzz and feedback entered the game, but Dudek also became more melodic, using higher-toned phrases for the closing of this curtly 20 minute set.

L-R: Pianist Marlies Debacker, bassist Stefan Schönegg and drummer Etienne Nilssen
(above) at Winterjazz 2025 – Photo © Niclas Weber

Both Dudek and Bergman returned soon after as part of pianist Felix Hauptmann’s Serpentine sextet, so there is clearly space for cross-pollination between the NICA players, who are potentially supported for a total of three years.

For the final set selection it eventually became clear that this was an ultimate choice, and that all activity in Stadtgarten would have concluded by the time this church meditation was done. Nevertheless, your scribe made a wise choice, as the 30 (or even 20) gathered acolytes savoured a Christuskirche ambience far removed from the crushed buzz of the main venue. Here, bassist Stefan Schönegg governed shimmering sonic gestures at their most sparsely restrained, in an extended ponderment of introspection and low-level evolution. Belgian pianist Marlies Debacker gave the impression of considerable input towards the whole, operating within highly selective realms of expressive stasis. Third member Etienne Nilssen limited himself to a single snare drum, softly rubbed. Amongst our plastic pews, silence was celestial in its lonesomeness.

Overall, the NICA sequence of sets was far superior to the next night’s mixed-results Winterjazz bustle…

And on the third evening, set beginning at 6pm, we were cast back into the cauldron of hardcore jazz bubbling. The David Murray Quartet now savours a reinvigorated roster that ranges from piano melodicist Marta Sanchez to freedom upstart bassist Luke Stewart, topped off by versatile drummer Russell Carter. It’s a multi-generational and multi-stylistic outfit, breathing a different life into Murray’s always agile navigations. The leader is, of course, always out front, seeking the tenor’s high note peaks or musing deeply on bass clarinet. He also has a ‘solos-for-all’ policy to highlight the quartet, and even though Murray often sits to the side of the stage, it doesn’t seem like he’s conserving energies, but rather that he’s stretching out the numbers to accommodate the voices of his cohorts. There’s certainly no shortage of Murray’s own thorough solo investigations. Carter taking a meaty drum solo on the opening number was a positive omen.

There’s a Verve LP on the way, so much of this material was unfamiliar. Both of the two sets were around an hour long, so this was a substantial gig, but still without any useless flab. Perhaps Sanchez is the least inspiring contributor, with little blues bite to her playing, to match the soulful expression of her bandmates, although she did shine on the new ‘Blackbird’ tune, which has a more abstract, freer nature. Stewart then took the chance to head for the outer reaches, with an unaccompanied solo sequence that harked back to Murray’s early, more gristled days, hiked up in volume and percussively delineated, graduating to a bowed groan. By this time, the drums were rattlesnaking, coiled with power. The encore seemed like a genuinely spontaneous addition, with Murray intoning an Amiri Baraka poem to wounding, intense effect, old youthful passion transformed into senior searing.