Theo Croker, Nubiyan Twist, Yellowjackets and Jan Garbarek among highlights at Ravensburg’s Trans4JAZZ festival

He adorns the festival poster and also the programme booklet. But Theo Croker also looks too cool in this photo! Squatting on a stool, his shirt open. The trumpet hangs down casually, held by a few fingers only. You could easily mistake him for a hip-hopper and not a jazz musician. But the basis and starting point of the US-American's art is always jazz. This can be felt at every moment of the opening concert of this year's Trans4JAZZ festival. And sometimes his quartet performs completely acoustically like a 'proper' jazz band.

For the most part, however, the four of them serve up a mix on the stage of the sold-out Linse cultural centre in Ravensburg's neighbouring municipality of Weingarten that is not so easy to define with words. Croker is a spiritualist and a politically minded artist and has long since turned his musical gaze towards a crossover culture where jazz, drum beats, reverberating, ethereal trumpet sounds, elements of hip-hop and club electronics, Afrofuturism, sampled voices and ritual tribal chants meet organically and combine to create a gripping, spacey concoction accompanied by visuals.

Music without any hipness factor, which also bears the somewhat tasteless label of fusion jazz - you could have been forgiven for thinking that the Yellowjackets, who have been around since 1981, would have a rather colourless evening. But far from it. The quartet around co-founder and keyboardist Russell Ferrante (pictured above) and saxophonist Bob Mintzer, who has been with the band since 1990, still knows how to inspire with old hits and new tracks and highly musical interplay even after all this time. They still have an unerring instinct for singable, catchy, swinging melodies, well-dosed improvisation, soulful saxophone solos or melodiously grooving, funky electric bass runs.

Trans4JAZZ oscillates between these two poles - hipness and retro. The British band Nubiyan Twist, with their crisp horns, charismatic front woman and singer Aziza Jaye and their danceable mix of jazz, soul, funk and highlife, prove to be the perfect act for Saturday night - and to attract young people to the festival. Daniel Herskedal would also be such an artist for a young audience, with his playing on tuba and bass trumpet. With looped and a few pre-programmed sounds, the Norwegian sound designer enriched his live playing in a church and completed it with very atmospheric, wide and calm, fantastically beautiful soundscapes. Even if, as the concert progressed, the Nordic-style cold slowly drew the legs up in the huge church, which was therefore difficult to heat properly. 

Jan Garbarek (pictured above), on the other hand, once again stands for the jazz establishment. The Norwegian master and his long-standing quartet with keyboardist Rainer Brüninghaus, bassist Yuri Daniel and percussionist Trilok Gurtu closed the festival in the sold-out, beautiful neo-baroque surroundings of the Ravensburg concert hall, which has long been a listed building. What more can be said about the sound aesthete on the saxophones. His sound is still as clear as Norwegian fjord water. The 77-year-old never plays too many notes. His music is also still accessible, his Nordic soul always shines through. But the quartet's two-hour, non-stop performance remained strangely fragmented. Garbarek's accompanists were given endless scope for long solo performances. Trilok Gurtu in particular was allowed to indulge in his rhythmic and sound design fantasies on tablas, cajón and other instruments for ages. But the audience loved it, judging by the never-ending rapturous applause at the end of the concert.