Jazzfest Berin 2026, Part 2

  

This is the second part of our Jazzfest Berlin 2026 coverage, see part 1 here. 

  

Saturday  

 

By Weiyi Zhao

Christian Lillinger’s Open Form For Society II. Photo, Weiyi Zhao

Christian Lillinger’s Open Form For Society II resembled a system of contemporary chamber music realised by improvisers. With five keyboard instruments, three double basses, vibraphone, drums and electronics arranged around Lillinger, the ensemble unfolded according to a distinctly Lillinger-like sense of time: highly precise, yet never unified in any conventional way. Rhythmic displacements, layered pulses and abrupt ruptures remained firmly under compositional control, while sharp, granular attacks and the weight of the basses gave the largely acoustic instrumentation an almost electronic quality. The unusual setup also contained several of Lillinger’s long-term working relationships: DLW with Christopher Dell and Jonas Westergaard, Punkt.Vrt.Plastik with Kaja Draksler and Petter Eldh, and his long-running duo with Elias Stemeseder. Open Form For Society thus functioned both as an extension of these smaller groups and as a space in which their musical logics collided. 

Tomeka Reid Quartet. Photo, Weiyi Zhao

The second set, by the Tomeka Reid Quartet, moved almost in the opposite direction. Reid began with melody, swing, blues inflection and clear jazz forms, then allowed a working band of more than a decade to open those structures from within. The cello-guitar-bass-and-drums lineup produced bright, singing melodies and a light, chamber-like transparency, with short repeated motifs, passages of free improvisation and occasional electronic effects woven into the music. The four voices were tightly interlocked without ever becoming rigid. Mary Halvorson’s highly individual language still had ample room to breathe, while Jason Roebke and Tomas Fujiwara moved effortlessly between establishing groove and expanding the ensemble’s sonic possibilities. This is what a working band with more than a decade of shared history can sound like at its best: a reminder that the avant-garde can still swing, and that being contemporary does not require abandoning history. It felt unmistakably Chicagoan. 

Chicago Underground Duo. Photo, Weiyi Zhao

The main-stage programme closed with Chicago Underground Duo, Rob Mazurek and Chad Taylor. After nearly three decades of playing together, the boundaries between composition and improvisation, groove and timbre have become almost impossible to separate. Drawing largely on Hyperglyph (2025), their first new album in eleven years and the eighth under the Duo name, they moved freely between avant-garde and free jazz, electronic music, indie rock and post-rock without ever sounding like a catalogue of influences. Taylor’s elastic, propulsive rhythms combined with Mazurek’s synthesizer loops and his raw, unvarnished trumpet and pocket-trumpet playing, voice and percussion until the duo began to feel like an organism capable of constantly reshaping itself. Mazurek roamed the stage almost like a DJ—shouting, moving between instruments and electronics, and stirring up the audience—while the visual projections transformed the usually formal main stage into something much closer to a party. Chicago Underground Duo showed how music can absorb an extraordinary range of styles while remaining radically free and unmistakably sincere.

Sunday

 

By Paul Acquaro

Graewe, Jones and Drake.Berliner Festspiele, Photo Camille Blake

The final evening of the festival began with the all-star piano trio of Georg Graewe, bassist Brad Jones and Drummer Hamid Drake. Pianist Graewe has been a leading figure in European Free-Jazz since the 1970s when he released several LPs for the West Berlin label FMP (home to Schlippenbach as well). Bassist Jones and drummer Drake, are of course, well-known American musician, steeped in experimental and improvisational music … all the necessary ingredients for an exciting set of free jazz and the trio, which had first played a few years ago at the legendary Konfrontationen festival in Nickelsdorf, Austria, did not disappoint. After a gentle start led by Graewe, Drake and Jones qicly joined and slipped into a consistent and insistent gear for the next forty minutes. A short piece followed that switched out the tight, spiraling passages of the first with mysterious, open ended arpeggios and unresolved lines.

ganyava. Berliner Festspiele, Photo Camille Blake

The American singer ganyava, whom we had been briefly introduced to two nights before, took the stage exuding calm. Having recently given birth to a daughter, she invited the audience to share the feelings of new motherhood, drawing the vast auditorium close to her on stage. Her group, harpist Miriam Adefris and bassist Sebastian Singwald used their spare instrumentation to cradle and support the singers expressive voice. The music, much like ElSaffar from Friday, drew heavily on the singer’s ethnic background, in this case, the Carnatic and devotional traditions of Tamil Nadu from southern India. The performance was an unexpected, but welcome, contrast between the propulsive music that proceeded and the explosive sounds that would soon follow.

Globe Unity Orchestra. Berliner Festspiele, Photo Camille Blake

The Globe Unity Orchestra, embodying history, experimentation and cultural interconnectedness (all-in-all, there were seven nationalities represented onstage: German, Japanese, British, American, Norwegian, Austrian and Polish), took up the majority of the stage in the final concert of the festival. Celebrating 60 years since their first incarnation on the Berlin Jazzfestival stage in 1966 (albeit on the stage of the Philharmonic a few kilometers away), and marking what may be the last incarnation of the orchestra (leader Alexander von Schlippenbach is 88 and has stated as much), the orchestra on stage may also have represented its most sweeping version. Spanning the sixty years, was trumpeter Manfred Schoof, whose own group was a part of the very first configuration and the other members, including saxophonist Evan Parker and drummer Paul Lytton, trombonist George Lewis, woodwindist Rudi Mahall and drummer Dag Magnus Narvessen - to name just a few - were are all members of Schlippenbach's groups past and present. Most importantly, joining him at the bench and sharing piano duties, was Aki Takase, his wife and musical partner of many years. 

 

Schlippenbach had titled the piece Apokalyptische Nabelschau roughly translating to “apocalyptic navel-gazing,” and it unfolded as you’d hope from players with this much shared history: stretches of full-group improvisation broken open by solos from the band’s veterans. It began slowly. Evan Parker took the first solo, a stream of circular-breathing multiphonics, and from there Schlippenbach and Takase bridged the solo turns of Lewis, Schoof, Lytton and others with interludes played both on the keys and inside the piano. The turning point came when trombonist Gerhard Gschlößl locked in with Rudi Mahall during the reed players effervescent solo, and the orchestra burst into full bloom.

After nearly an hour, the piece came to a roaring conclusion and the audience leapt to their feet, showering the group with applause and whistles, fully knowing that they had just shared in a part of history.