When Europe Begins to Sound Like Jazz Again!!!
There is a particular atmosphere at the beginning of an autumn concert season. The light changes, the streets become quieter, and the cultural life of European cities seems to move indoors again—but music does not become smaller. If anything, it becomes more concentrated.
Across Europe, jazz begins to gather around its familiar meeting places: intimate clubs, concert halls, theatres, cultural centres and historic rooms where the distance between musician and listener can almost disappear. In these spaces, the new season is not merely a succession of dates on a calendar. It becomes a musical journey. The recent days have offered precisely that feeling.
From the monumental language of the Paradox Jazz Orchestra in Tilburg, through Henri Texier’s deeply personal and exploratory world at Paris’s legendary New Morning, to the richly rooted voice of Anna Maria Jopek in Poland, the European autumn has once again demonstrated the extraordinary breadth of contemporary jazz.
And behind this movement stands the tireless work of Olivia Peevas, director of the EU Jazz & Blues Festival and its Autumn-Winter concert season, whose vision has transformed a programme into something much larger: a network of musical encounters stretching across European cities.
Tilburg: The Big-Band Spirit Returns to Paradox
The autumn season found one of its most powerful orchestral moments in Tilburg, at PaRaDoX, one of the Netherlands’ important jazz venues.
On 30 September, the Paradox Jazz Orchestra presented The Music of the Kenny Clarke / Francy Boland Big Band, revisiting the extraordinary repertoire associated with one of the most distinctive European-American big-band collaborations of the 1960s. The concert was sold out, and the programme brought together the muscular energy of American hard bop with the sophisticated architecture of European big-band writing. This was music built on contrasts.
Kenny Clarke’s rhythmic imagination and Francy Boland’s compositional and arranging language created an orchestra that never sounded like a conventional imitation of either American or European jazz. Its identity emerged from the encounter itself. The music could swing with immense physical force while remaining harmonically refined, spacious and remarkably detailed. That spirit remains particularly meaningful today.
The Paradox Jazz Orchestra, founded in 2019 by conductor and saxophonist Jasper Staps and trumpeter Teus Nobel, was created precisely to keep important big-band repertoire alive while giving it contemporary energy. The ensemble serves as the house orchestra of PaRaDoX and regularly approaches different chapters of jazz history, including music associated with Duke Ellington, Buddy Rich, Count Basie, Thad Jones/Mel Lewis and Miles Davis.
The Clarke/Boland programme therefore belonged neither entirely to the past nor entirely to the present. It was a conversation with history. The brass and reed sections provide the architecture; the rhythm section gives that architecture movement; and within the carefully constructed arrangements, individual voices emerge as flashes of personality.
That is one of the pleasures of hearing this repertoire live. On a recording, one can admire the arrangement. In a concert hall, one feels its breathing. And this is precisely what a European jazz season should do: not turn history into a museum exhibit, but allow it to become living music again.
Paris: Henri Texier and the Art of Musical Conversation
If Tilburg represented jazz on an orchestral scale, Paris offered its opposite: intimacy, concentration and the almost conversational intensity of a small ensemble.
At New Morning, on Rue des Petites Écuries, Henri Texier returned to one of the great rooms of the Paris jazz landscape. The concert took place on Wednesday, 30 September, with the Henri Texier Trio joined by two exceptional guests, pianist Bojan Z and saxophonist Sylvain Rifflet. The core trio consisted of Henri Texier on double bass and compositions, his son Sébastien Texier on alto saxophone, clarinet and alto clarinet, and Gautier Garrigue on drums. The address itself carries a certain mythology.
New Morning, at 7–9 Rue des Petites Écuries in Paris’s 10th arrondissement, has been a major Parisian jazz club since 1981. Its 452-capacity room has always allowed the music to exist somewhere between the intimacy of a club and the collective energy of a concert stage. For Henri Texier, this environment is particularly appropriate.
Few musicians embody the idea of European jazz as a living language as naturally as Texier. His double bass is never simply a timekeeping instrument. It is a voice, a foundation, a melodic instrument and, often, a narrator. His compositions have long combined lyrical beauty with rhythmic complexity, African and Mediterranean echoes with modern European improvisation, and a deep respect for jazz history with an instinct for continual renewal.
The New Morning encounter promised—and delivered—the kind of musical situation in which those qualities could expand.
A Trio With Two Unexpected Windows
Sébastien Texier brings a distinctive colour to his father’s music. His alto saxophone can be warm and singing, while his clarinet and alto clarinet introduce a more fragile, woodwind-like dimension. His presence makes the music feel less like a conventional bass-led trio with a saxophonist placed above it and more like a family musical language that has developed over decades.
Gautier Garrigue provides the rhythmic counterpart: alert, flexible and capable of shifting the centre of gravity without breaking the continuity of the music. And then there are the guests.
Bojan Z is a pianist whose sound has always resisted easy categorisation. His playing can be percussive and harmonically provocative one moment, lyrical and almost chamber-like the next. His relationship with Texier’s music is especially interesting because both musicians understand that European jazz does not need to choose between tradition and experimentation.
Sylvain Rifflet adds another dimension. His saxophone language can move from delicacy to intensity without sacrificing clarity. The combination of Rifflet’s sound with Sébastien Texier’s woodwind palette creates an especially rich upper register, while Bojan Z and Texier provide an equally flexible harmonic and rhythmic foundation.
The result is less a fixed musical formula than a field of possibilities. The concert programme was presented as a meeting of Texier’s trio with “two stylistes d’exception,” with Bojan Z returning to Texier’s musical world and Rifflet continuing a fruitful association with the bassist-composer. And that is perhaps the most revealing description of the evening.
A Henri Texier concert is rarely about demonstrating how well a group can reproduce a finished composition. It is about discovering what the composition can become when musicians listen to one another closely.
Henri Texier: The Double Bass as a Singing Voice
There is something profoundly European about Texier’s conception of the double bass. The instrument is enormous, physical and resonant, yet in his hands it can become almost weightless. A phrase can emerge from the lowest register and rise like a human voice. A rhythmic figure can suddenly become a melody. A sustained note can seem to contain an entire landscape. Texier’s music is also inseparable from memory. But memory, in his work, is not nostalgia. It is material.
African traditions, American jazz, European chamber music, Mediterranean colour and the history of improvisation can coexist without needing to be separated into categories. The music remembers where it came from while continuing to move forward.
That quality made the New Morning concert particularly appropriate for the beginning of an autumn season. It represented jazz not as a finished vocabulary but as a language that remains capable of surprise.
Poland: Anna Maria Jopek and the Memory of Folk Music
While Paris offered the intimate freedom of improvisation, Poland brought another essential dimension of European jazz into focus: the relationship between jazz and cultural memory.
Anna Maria Jopek occupies a singular position in Polish music. She grew up as the daughter of two soloists from the celebrated Polish folk ensemble Mazowsze, and the musical world of her childhood became one of the foundations of her artistic imagination. Her connection with folk music is therefore not an aesthetic decision made from a distance. It is something inherited, experienced and absorbed.
Yet Jopek’s artistry has never been confined to folklore. Her musical identity exists at the intersection of three powerful traditions: the folk sensibility inherited from home, her classical musical education—including piano studies at the Fryderyk Chopin University of Music—and her profound love of jazz. The Polish Jazz Festival describes this combination as central to the stylistic breadth of her work, which extends from early modern pop through autonomous original compositions to what is often described as contemporary eclectic jazz.
That combination is one of the reasons her concerts are so difficult to place inside a single genre. There may be a Polish folk melody hidden inside a jazz phrase. There may be the discipline of classical music inside an improvisation. There may be silence where another singer would choose ornamentation. And there may be rhythm that feels less like a conventional jazz pulse than a memory of dance.
A Voice Between Worlds
Jopek’s vocal style has always been distinguished by its sensitivity to space. She does not need to fill every silence. Instead, her singing often seems to float around the musicians, allowing the instrumental language to become part of the narrative. Her voice can be intimate and almost whispered, then suddenly open into a larger emotional landscape.
This is especially important when considering her long list of collaborations. Her work has brought her into dialogue with some of the most important musicians in Polish music and with internationally acclaimed jazz artists including Pat Metheny, Branford Marsalis, Gonzalo Rubalcaba, Makoto Ozone and Richard Bona.
These collaborations are not simply prestigious names attached to a biography. They reveal something fundamental about Jopek’s artistic philosophy: music becomes richer when different traditions are allowed to meet without one attempting to erase the other.
Her concerts consequently feel like chapters in a continuing journey. There is no final destination. Every performance can alter the balance between folk, jazz, classical music, improvisation and song. That sense of evolution is one of the defining characteristics of Jopek’s career. Her official concert programme continues to place her in varied settings, from the Polish Jazz Festival’s London opening gala to forthcoming collaborations with trumpeter Piotr Wojtasik and her own trio projects in Poland.
From Mazowsze to Contemporary Jazz
The connection to Mazowsze is especially significant because it helps explain why Jopek’s relationship with Polish musical heritage feels so organic. Folk music in her world is not simply a collection of melodies waiting to be rearranged.
It is a way of hearing. It is an understanding of rhythm, accent, breath and collective memory. The result is a musical language in which national identity does not become a limitation. Instead, it becomes a point of departure. This is perhaps why Jopek can move naturally toward musicians from entirely different musical cultures. Her artistry begins with roots, but it does not remain rooted in place. It travels.
One European Season, Many Musical Languages
Placed beside one another, the concerts in Tilburg, Paris and Poland tell a larger story. The Paradox Jazz Orchestra looks backwards to the Kenny Clarke/Francy Boland tradition and discovers that its arrangements still possess enormous contemporary vitality.
Henri Texier takes the history of European and American jazz and turns it into an open conversation between double bass, saxophones, clarinet, piano and drums. Anna Maria Jopek reaches back toward Polish folk culture and carries that inheritance into a contemporary musical language capable of meeting jazz musicians from around the world. Three approaches. Three countries. Three very different musical environments. And yet the same principle runs through all of them: jazz remains alive because musicians continue to transform what they inherit.
Olivia Peevas and the Architecture of the Season
Behind this extraordinary movement across European cities stands the organisational and artistic vision of Olivia Peevas, director of the EU Jazz & Blues Festival and the Autumn-Winter concert season.
It is easy, when sitting in a concert hall, to think only about what happens on stage. But a European concert season of this scale does not happen by itself. It requires imagination, persistence, relationships with artists and venues, careful programming, travel, communication and the ability to understand that European audiences are not a single audience. Each city has its own history, its own habits and its own musical memory.
Peevas’s work is therefore not simply about putting artists on stages. It is about creating connections. Paris speaks to Tilburg. Poland speaks to the rest of Europe. The great traditions of American jazz meet European interpretations. Established masters appear beside contemporary voices. And audiences are invited to move through this landscape with the music. This is the deeper value of the EU Jazz & Blues Festival and its Autumn-Winter season: it creates a European geography of listening.
The Autumn Continues
The season is only beginning. That is perhaps the most exciting thought. The opening concerts have already demonstrated the extraordinary range of what European jazz can contain: orchestral swing, hard bop heritage, contemporary improvisation, folk memory, vocal intimacy and cross-cultural collaboration.
There is no single European jazz sound. There never was. Instead, there is a conversation—sometimes quiet, sometimes explosive, sometimes rooted in history and sometimes impatient to escape it.
In Tilburg, the big band reminded us that arrangements can still swing with astonishing force.
In Paris, Henri Texier showed how a double bass can become both foundation and storyteller.
In Poland, Anna Maria Jopek continued to demonstrate how a voice can carry family memory, folk tradition, classical discipline and jazz freedom into the same musical space. And throughout this European journey, Olivia Peevas continues to build the bridges that allow these encounters to happen.
Perhaps that is what a concert season should ultimately be. Not merely a calendar. Not merely a collection of performances. But a living map of Europe, drawn in sound.
As autumn deepens and the nights grow longer, the stages of Europe begin to glow more brightly. Jazz enters those rooms carrying its history, but it does not stay there. It listens, it changes, it travels, and it discovers another voice. The season has begun. And Europe is listening.
By Akrile Betrricean, Stiven Berger, Gene Kandelaki
