Cantus 2013

From 2009–2011 there were encounters in five important centres for jazz/ improvised music. Jazzpool NRW performed in Maastricht, London, Glasgow, Krakow and Lisbon, amongst other places.

This concept will be resumed in October and, at the invitation of the Institut Français, Jazzpool NRW will perform with two French improvisational musicians in Berlin. This ongoing presence in a large number of European metropolises allows the Jazzpool to permanently strengthen NRW’s standing as a cultural venue.

The new Cantus project aims to intensify our experience out of previous encounters, and simultaneously distil it into a new programme.

We are going on a musical field research trip, looking for songs in the vocal tradition of the participating countries which act as musical calling cards of the respective cultures. These will predominantly be songs that have originated far from the “Americanisation” of music culture, so they will mainly be folk songs. This makes it all the more appealing to translate these old vocal structures into contemporary musical language which should then be unmistakably recognisable as jazz. Since a song always tells a story as well, we want to launch the CANTUS project with a line-up comprising the jazz ensemble, joined by two vocal soloists.