XJAZZ marks the spot with Lady Blackbird, José James, Kit Downes, Shai Maestro and more

This year’s winner of the Deutsche Jazzpreis, the biggest jazz award in the German-speaking region, XJAZZ! Festival is a world-beater. Founded by feted trumpeter, pianist and composer Sebastian Studnitsky in gritty, bohemian Kreuzberg, in venues a (fit person’s) walking distance apart, the four-day XJAZZ! is a riposte to the staid, cis-male German jazz of yore. It’s jazz as a mind-set, a rebel yell (Pussy Riot’s Maria Alyokhina is here, kicking off a charity tour for Ukraine). As living music that absorbs other genres, creating gold in the margins.

With 80 concerts featuring over 250 local and international acts – think Avishai Cohen, Angel Bat Dawid, Nubya Garcia – who to see depended on where in Kreuzberg you were hanging. Inside the acoustics-friendly nave of Emmaus Church, with its vast abstract mural and soaring modernist pipe organ, Israeli-born pianist Shai Maestro delivered a set of exquisite, ECM-appropriate delicacy, placing melodic fragments just so into drum-hooks and velvety bass lines. Over at the Prince Charles, a repurposed swimming pool, Berlin-based rising star singer/bassist (and festival curator) Natalie Greffel (below, photo by Eike Walkenhorst) weaved magic with her fluid mix of jazz and Brazilian MPB. Down at the Lido, an erstwhile cinema, LA-vocalist Lady Blackbird channelled Nina and the great divas with a charismatic despair made otherworldly by the backlights filtering through her peroxided Afro.

At the intimate Privat Club, a hangout for jazz students (Studnitsky is a professor of trumpet in Berlin and Dresden), Brazil’s Marianne Zwarg Sexteto saw its eponymous leader on jazz flute and soprano sax, her kinetic energy lifted by stabbing keys and the glorious out-there scat singing of Mette Nadja. Back at the Lido on Saturday, be-robed Brazilian pianist/burgeoning superstar Amaro Freitas combined spiritual flair and percussive, Monk-like playing in an astounding set that variously saw classical music tropes cut-and-pasted into high intensity carnival rhythms; a slow building call-and-response between keys and drums; Freitas reaching inside his instrument to manipulate its guts and a psychedelic keys/bass/drums wig out that finished with Freitas’s arms in the air like a prize fighter (he plays Jazz Café London Wednesday 12 May).

Upstairs at the 5-star Orania Hotel, Munich-based singer/pianist Alma Naidu sang formulaic originals in a voice blessed with crystalline beauty. Across the canal at Festall Kreuzberg, NYC-based jazz vocalist José James had his hip hop aesthetic buoyed by the UK’s Ashley Henry on keys and upright piano and Richard Spaven on drums, both of whom delivered mesmerising solos between James’s hit ‘Trouble’, some Bill Withers covers and a remarkable bout of freestyling that eventually felt interminable, becoming tangled in its very own Mobius strip.

Sunday’s riches included a (crowded) cruise up the River Spree with the vibing Jakob Manz Project, and a come-through at the outdoor, glitterball-tastic, found-object-strewn Club Aeden, where DJs including London’s Tina Edwards (fronting BBC4’s Jazz UK: Spitting Fire doco that same evening) joined the dots between jazz and club culture in ways fresh and mellow. Back at Emmaus Church, the UK’s Kit Downes sat before the mighty church organ and layered melodies made more sublime by giant black-and-white visuals of what might have been amoebas, a sort of dust-to-dust take as humbling as it was edifying.

XJAZZ!, then. Jazz heaven, right here on earth.

www.xjazz.net