Kurt Rosenwinkel, Melissa Aldana and Theo Croker bring hip sounds to Nuremberg‘s NUEJAZZ Festival

The year could hardly have gone much better for NUEJAZZ. Following its tenth anniversary in 2023, the ambitious festival not only won the City of Nuremberg's Culture Prize, but also the German Jazz Prize as “Festival of the Year”. Okay, a significant festival sponsorship received in recent years has fallen away in this successful year of all years, but fortunately the two festival founders and creators Frank Wuppinger and Marco Kühnl are not discouraged by this and instead offered a varied and exciting festival program in 2024.

For example, with US guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel and his reactivated project “The Next Step”, in which Ben Wendel played saxophone in Nuremberg instead of the regular Mark Turner. Otherwise, the line-up remains the same with bassist Ben Street and the famous Jeff Ballard on drums. What has also remained is the exciting music of the close-knit quartet, full of the art of improvisation and diverse shades ranging from quiet poetry to cool, casual and yet warm-sounding, bopping intensity.

By his own admission, he doesn't like the word jazz at all. It puts off many people who could be my listeners, says Theo Croker (pictured above). And he is absolutely right. Because his listeners can actually be anyone. Jazz fans, but also the cool young kids who are likely to be attracted by the modern sound mix of the US trumpeter and his quartet. Or the drummer's blaring drum beats. Or the sprawling runs on the Fender Rhodes and keyboard of his pianist, who also plays the grand piano. And then, of course, Croker's casual, cool yet intense trumpet playing, which sometimes penetrates the band's sounds clearly and like a beam, and sometimes generates completely different soundscapes enriched with reverb. Between jazz, funk, soul, fusion, hip-hop, Afrofuturism, club electronics and a dash of spirituality and with sampled voices from Jill Scott or Estelle, Croker creates furious, stylish Black American music in Nuremberg with a strong pull. How different Melissa Aldana's quartet sounded immediately beforehand. The Chilean tenor saxophonist (pictured below) has a much purer approach to jazz, but showed her full class at NUEJAZZ with self-composed acoustic gems without any clichés, but with expressive, haunting saxophone playing, great improvisational skills and a dense sound with her trio led by pianist Glenn Zaleski.

Alfa Mist is also one of the currently hyped jazz musicians with his lounge aesthetic, contemporary jazz with pop appeal and hip-hop beats. In the large Z-Bau, a former Nazi barracks and festival venue for two evenings, the Brit attracted a large audience and above all a lot of young people to his stand-up concert. However, his music, at least when played live, sounds a little too accessible, too well-tempered, too predictable and too pleasing, and somehow a little boring over the course of the concert. The Dutch band Gallowstreet, on the other hand, don't even entertain the thought of boredom with their danceable good mood brass power music. Seven brass and woodwind instruments, plus a drummer with a good head of steam - that's all the eight guys from Amsterdam need to immediately create a party atmosphere, including singing along to the melodies. The atmosphere in the large hall boils over thanks to the groovy and sweat-inducing music, which stylistically doesn't just draw on jazz and is only dimmed down briefly in between to calm things down.

The second night in the Z-Bau also had a cheerful club and party atmosphere, which was once again due to the program. DJs warmed things up, and Senegal's legendary Orchestra Baobab, founded back in 1970 and reunited with fresh faces after disbanding at the end of the 1980s at the beginning of the 2000s, quickly got the once again large audience dancing, or at least encouraged them to make gentle movements with Caribbean-Cuban influenced, jazz-scented world music. A singer, two saxophonists, two electric guitarists, bass and plenty of percussion create a colorful, soft mixture of sounds with repetitive rhythms that are easy to swing along to. The British nine-piece Nubiyan Twist with their strong-voiced singer Aziza Kaye and their global grooves between jazz, funk, hip-hop, afrobeat, dance music and soul continued this seamlessly.