The ninth and tenth days of the EU Jazz & Blues Festival 2026 brought two very different but profoundly connected visions of contemporary jazz to the stage: the extraordinary force and historical consciousness of tenor saxophonist James Carter and his Quartet, followed the next evening by the cross-cultural, rhythmically expansive universe of trumpeter Ibrahim Maalouf and his group. Together, these concerts demonstrated one of the most compelling qualities of jazz itself: its ability to preserve memory while constantly transforming it.
If the preceding days of the festival had already established an impressive musical journey through blues, swing, contemporary jazz and international forms, the arrival of James Carter and Ibrahim Maalouf pushed that journey into another dimension. Here were two artists who understand tradition not as a museum but as a living language.
Both possess an unmistakable personal sound, yet neither is imprisoned by a single definition of jazz. Carter reaches backward into the great African-American continuum of blues, bebop, soul, funk and avant-garde improvisation, while Maalouf opens the music outward toward Arabic musical traditions, European classical language, electronic textures, rock, funk and contemporary global culture.
The ninth evening belonged to James Carter, whose tenor saxophone seemed almost physically capable of changing the temperature of the room. Carter is one of those musicians for whom the word “virtuoso” is insufficient. Virtuosity is certainly present, but it is only the surface of a much deeper artistic personality. His career has been rooted in the Detroit jazz tradition and in an extraordinary knowledge of the saxophone family, and his playing has always carried the energy of someone who knows that jazz history is not a straight line but a vast, interconnected field.
From the first phrases, Carter’s sound carried weight. The tenor could roar, crackle, growl, whisper, bend and suddenly explode into brilliant streams of improvisation. There was a physicality to the performance, but also an extraordinary intellectual command. Carter does not merely improvise over harmony; he seems to enter the architecture of a composition and rearrange it from within.
That quality was particularly powerful in the quartet setting. The quartet format gave Carter enough space to reveal the full range of his musical personality while allowing the rhythm section to become an active participant in the unfolding drama.
The music was not constructed around a hierarchy in which the saxophone simply played the melody and then took a solo. Instead, ideas circulated constantly. Rhythmic figures became launching points. Harmonic fragments were stretched and transformed. A phrase that initially sounded almost traditional could suddenly be pushed toward something rawer and more abstract.
Carter’s greatest strength is perhaps his ability to move between musical worlds without making the transitions feel artificial. His playing can contain the muscular vocabulary of hard bop, the earthy force of the blues, the rhythmic electricity of funk and the freedom of avant-garde improvisation, sometimes within the same performance.
His recording history already demonstrates that breadth: his work has embraced everything from classic jazz repertoire to highly exploratory forms, and his early career placed him in direct contact with figures such as Lester Bowie and the wider tradition of Detroit and New York jazz.
On this evening, that historical consciousness could be heard not as quotation but as instinct. Carter seemed to carry generations of saxophonists inside his tone—yet what emerged was unmistakably his own voice.
There were moments when the tenor became almost vocal. The instrument cried, laughed, growled and spoke. At other moments the sound became enormous, filling the room with a kind of brass-like authority. Then, almost without warning, Carter could retreat into delicacy, producing a line whose fragility made the next eruption even more powerful.
This contrast between power and vulnerability was central to the concert. Carter’s music was never simply about playing loudly or quickly. The real drama came from his ability to control density. He knew when to fill the musical space and when to leave it open. He understood that an explosive phrase has greater meaning when it emerges from silence, and that speed becomes expressive only when it has somewhere emotionally meaningful to go.
The quartet therefore became a conversation rather than a demonstration. The musicians listened intensely to one another, responding to shifts in Carter’s phrasing and allowing the rhythm to breathe rather than merely accompanying the soloist. The performance possessed the feeling of a musical organism constantly adjusting its balance.
There was also something deeply blues-inflected in the emotional character of the evening. Even when the harmony became complex or the improvisation moved toward freer territory, the blues remained underneath it: the idea that a musical phrase can carry human experience, that a note can bend because the feeling itself refuses to remain perfectly straight.
That connection to the blues is crucial to understanding Carter. His music does not treat the history of jazz as a collection of stylistic categories. It treats that history as a vocabulary of emotions. Bebop, hard bop, soul, funk and free jazz become different ways of speaking about urgency, joy, struggle, sensuality, humour, memory and freedom.
And then came the tenth evening, when the atmosphere changed dramatically
Ibrahim Maalouf entered the festival carrying a trumpet that is itself a piece of musical history. His four-valve quarter-tone trumpet, developed from the instrument invented by his father, Nassim Maalouf, allows him to access the microtonal inflections associated with Arabic maqamat while remaining fully connected to the Western trumpet tradition. The additional valve enables pitches between the conventional notes of the Western chromatic system, opening a tonal vocabulary unavailable to the standard three-valve trumpet. But the importance of Maalouf’s performance went far beyond the unusual construction of his instrument.
What makes his music so compelling is that the quarter-tone trumpet is not a gimmick. It is the natural extension of a musical identity built from several cultures. Maalouf’s artistic language exists in the space between Lebanon and France, between classical music and jazz, between Arabic tradition and contemporary European sound, between composition and improvisation.
The result is music that often feels cinematic in scale but remains intimate at its emotional centre
His trumpet possesses a remarkably human voice. The quarter-tone inflections can make a melody sound as though it is bending under emotion, almost like the contours of a human voice singing in a language older than the written page. A phrase can begin within the familiar grammar of Western jazz and then turn toward a microtonal inflection that changes the emotional colour of the entire passage.
That is where Maalouf’s music becomes particularly fascinating
He does not present Arabic music and jazz as two separate blocks that must somehow be combined. Instead, he allows them to interact naturally. Rhythmic patterns, melodic modes, brass sonorities and improvisational gestures become part of a larger musical ecosystem.
His music can suddenly become celebratory, almost communal. Percussion and rhythmic ostinatos create a pulse that seems to come from somewhere far beyond the traditional jazz club. The trumpet rises above it, sometimes lyrical and almost weightless, sometimes powerful and ceremonial. At other moments the groove moves toward funk, rock or contemporary electronic music.
This breadth is characteristic of Maalouf’s career. He has consistently crossed boundaries between jazz, classical music, world music, contemporary composition and popular forms, collaborating with artists from very different musical worlds. His artistic vocabulary is therefore less about genre than about connection.
What was especially striking about the tenth evening was the sense of movement. The music seemed to travel geographically and emotionally. One could hear Paris and Beirut, the concert hall and the street, the disciplined architecture of classical music and the spontaneous freedom of jazz improvisation.
There was also a strong sense of collective celebration
Maalouf understands that rhythm can unite an audience before anyone has consciously analysed the music. A repeated figure, a handclap, a swelling brass phrase or a sudden rhythmic acceleration can create a shared physical response. This is one reason his performances can reach audiences far beyond the traditional jazz community. His music invites people into the experience before asking them to understand its vocabulary.
Yet beneath that accessibility is considerable compositional sophistication
Maalouf’s melodies often appear simple at first hearing, but their emotional effectiveness comes from carefully controlled repetition, rhythmic development, orchestral layering and the gradual transformation of motifs. The trumpet becomes both narrator and protagonist, while the ensemble creates the changing landscapes through which that narrative travels.
Placed beside James Carter’s performance the previous evening, Maalouf’s concert revealed a fascinating contrast
Carter seemed to excavate jazz from within. He carried the history of African-American music in his breath, bringing blues, bebop, soul, funk and free improvisation into the present. Maalouf, by contrast, seemed to expand jazz outward, allowing it to encounter another ancient musical civilization and discover new possibilities in the meeting.
Carter’s tenor was a river with deep American roots. Maalouf’s trumpet was a bridge. And yet both musicians arrived at the same essential principle: jazz is an art of listening
Neither artist treats improvisation as an opportunity for individual display alone. Improvisation becomes communication. A phrase becomes a question; another musician answers. Rhythm becomes a suggestion rather than a command. Silence becomes part of the composition. The written score, where it exists, is not the destination but the beginning of the journey.
That is why these two consecutive evenings were so important within the larger structure of the EU Jazz & Blues Festival 2026. They demonstrated that the contemporary jazz landscape is not defined by one sound, one geography or one tradition. It is defined by relationships.
James Carter reminded the audience that the roots of jazz remain inexhaustibly fertile. Ibrahim Maalouf demonstrated that those roots can grow in unexpected directions, reaching toward other cultures without losing their identity.
One evening was earthy, muscular, deeply connected to the blues and to the African-American history of improvisation. The other was luminous, cross-cultural and expansive, drawing Arabic musical heritage into a contemporary European and global framework.
Together they created a remarkable musical dialogue
The ninth and tenth days therefore felt less like two isolated concerts than two chapters in a single story about the freedom of jazz. Carter’s saxophone spoke with the authority of history; Maalouf’s trumpet answered with the imagination of the future. Between them was the enormous space where jazz continues to reinvent itself.
And perhaps that is the most beautiful achievement of these evenings: neither musician appeared to be trying to prove what jazz is. They simply demonstrated what jazz can become.
Olivia Peevas and the Art of Building a Festival
Behind such an ambitious musical dialogue stands the indispensable role of Olivia Peevas, Director and Artistic Director of the EU Jazz & Blues Festival.
A festival of this magnitude is not created merely by bringing distinguished musicians to a stage. Its true identity emerges from the relationships between the artists, from the contrasts and continuities within the programme, and from the decision to place particular musical voices beside one another. The programming itself becomes a form of composition.
Peevas’s artistic direction has given the EU Jazz & Blues Festival precisely this sense of musical architecture. The festival’s programme moves between generations, traditions, countries and aesthetics, creating not a simple succession of concerts but an evolving European musical narrative. The progression from blues and swing toward contemporary jazz, experimental expression and international cross-cultural music reveals a willingness to embrace both the foundations of the tradition and its future.
The pairing of James Carter and Ibrahim Maalouf is a particularly eloquent example of that vision. Carter represents an extraordinary continuation of the African-American jazz tradition, while Maalouf embodies the possibilities that emerge when jazz enters into dialogue with Arabic musical heritage and contemporary global culture.
That juxtaposition is not accidental. It is curatorial thinking
Peevas understands that a festival can educate without becoming academic, can be adventurous without becoming inaccessible, and can honour tradition without becoming nostalgic. Her role is therefore not simply organisational. It is fundamentally artistic: she creates the circumstances in which different musical languages can encounter one another and in which audiences can experience those encounters as part of a larger cultural journey.
Under her direction, the EU Jazz & Blues Festival becomes more than a collection of performances. It becomes a meeting place between histories, cultures and generations—a living conversation in which the music of yesterday and the possibilities of tomorrow are allowed to exist on the same stage.
The ninth and tenth evenings made that philosophy especially clear. James Carter brought the fire of jazz history. Ibrahim Maalouf brought the sound of cultural convergence. And Olivia Peevas created the space in which those two visions could speak to one another.
That is the deeper achievement of the EU Jazz & Blues Festival 2026: not simply presenting great musicians, but constructing an artistic landscape in which every concert changes the meaning of the concert that came before it—and opens the ears of the audience to what comes next.
By Lauren Wulff
