There are evenings in the European cultural calendar when geography seems to disappear. The distances between cities remain enormous on the map, yet music makes them feel remarkably close. October 7, 2026, was one of those evenings for the EU Jazz and Blues Festival’s Autumn-Winter Jazz – Blues Season.
From Munich to Paris, from Hamburg and Prüm to London, Stockport and Istanbul, the season once again demonstrated its essential idea: European jazz does not live in one capital, one language, one tradition or one aesthetic. It is a conversation between cities, generations, cultures and musical memories.
On this particular Wednesday, the conversation moved through funk, blues, gospel, contemporary European jazz, French chanson, improvisation, modern composition and the spiritual vocabulary of the oud. Eight concerts, spread across several countries, created something larger than eight individual events. Together they formed a kind of musical map of contemporary Europe.
The 2026 Autumn-Winter season runs from September 28 through December 20, with its programming centred particularly on musicians connected with new music and new releases of 2026. The philosophy is ambitious: to let audiences encounter artists in different European cities while allowing the character of each city and venue to become part of the musical experience.
And behind this broad European movement stands Olivia Peevas, director and organizer of the 2026 Autumn-Winter Jazz – Blues Season of the EU Jazz and Blues Festival.
Munich: Fred Wesley — When Jazz Becomes Funk Becomes Celebration
At the Night Club of Hotel Bayerischer Hof, Munich received one of the most historically charged figures on the October 7 programme: Fred Wesley. The official Bayerischer Hof programme identifies the evening as Fred Wesley — “Trombone Funk Legend”, beginning at 20:00. Wesley appeared with Tony Match on drums and Leonardo Corradi on organ, a compact trio whose instrumentation immediately points toward the muscular, rhythmic tradition of organ jazz and funk.
Fred Wesley’s presence gives the evening unusual historical weight. His career is deeply intertwined with the development of modern funk: James Brown, Maceo Parker, the J.B.’s, Count Basie and Ray Charles all belong to the musical universe surrounding his work.
But the significance of Wesley is not simply historical. His trombone remains an instrument of movement. It can bark, swing, punch through a rhythm section, answer the drums, converse with an organ and suddenly open into a lyrical phrase. In the hands of Wesley, the trombone is not merely a horn—it is a rhythmic voice.
The Bayerischer Hof programme describes the project as “Generations,” originally conceived as a tribute to Jimmy Smith but evolving into its own combination of jazz tradition and contemporary influences. Corradi’s organ provides the harmonic engine, while Tony Match brings a rhythmic vocabulary shaped by jazz, African music and electronic music.
This was therefore a particularly appropriate concert for the Autumn-Winter season: music with roots deep in American jazz and funk, but with the freedom to sound alive in the present.
The atmosphere of the Bayerischer Hof Night Club is especially appropriate to Wesley. It is not a distant concert-hall experience. It is a room in which the rhythm can become physical, where the relationship between performer and audience is immediate.
Munich’s October 7 contribution was therefore not simply a concert. It was a celebration of groove itself.
Prüm: Laurent Pierre 5-tet — The Quiet Strength of European Jazz
From Munich’s metropolitan energy, the season moved to the very different environment of Prüm, in Germany’s Eifel region. Here, at the Orpheum Prüm / Haus der Kultur, the Laurent Pierre ensemble appeared at 20:00. One small correction to the shorthand in the programme supplied for this report is important: the official Jazz-Initiative Eifel listing identifies the group as the Laurent Pierre 5-tet, rather than a three-piece trio.
The personnel listed for the concert are: Laurent Pierre — saxophone, Melvin Burger — trumpet, Luca Sales — piano, Marc Demuth — bass, Michel Mootz — drums.
This is a classic small-jazz-group architecture, but the musical story behind it is much deeper. Laurent Pierre has been active in Luxembourg’s jazz community for decades and has played with the Luxembourg Jazz Orchestra since 1995. He also works as a saxophonist, flutist and clarinetist and is a composer registered with SACEM.
The quintet itself has an unusually long history. Its first concert dates to 2011, and its first album, Time to Relax, arrived in 2022—more than a decade after the group’s beginnings. That is significant because the ensemble’s musical identity has been formed by years of playing together rather than constructed merely around the release of a recording.
The Prüm programme concentrated primarily on original compositions alongside newly arranged jazz standards. That combination is central to the appeal of European jazz. Tradition is not treated as a museum. A standard becomes raw material: something to be rearranged, rephrased, stretched, harmonically reconsidered and made personal.
The Orpheum setting adds another dimension. The music arrives not in a giant metropolitan auditorium but in an intimate cultural environment, allowing the individual voices of saxophone, trumpet, piano, bass and drums to remain clearly defined.
Prüm represented another side of the season: jazz as conversation, craftsmanship and continuity.
Hamburg: Sydney Ellis — Blues, Gospel and Jazz with a Human Voice
In Hamburg, the Autumn-Winter season entered the intimate world of NICA Jazz Club, where Sydney Ellis appeared on October 7. NICA’s own programme introduces Ellis as “The grand Lady of Blues, Gospel and Jazz.” The published lineup was: Sydney Ellis — vocals, Kevin Post — bass, Wolfgang Schulz — saxophone.
The setting is particularly appropriate. NICA describes itself as a club devoted to jazz, funk, blues, soul and world music, with an intimate atmosphere and a view toward Hamburg’s waterways. Ellis brings to such a room something that cannot be reduced to genre terminology. Her repertoire reaches through Dinah Washington, Nina Simone, Billie Holiday, Bessie Smith, John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, Louis Armstrong and many others. Since beginning her live career in 1995, she has performed more than 1,200 concerts in 27 countries, according to NICA’s presentation.
Her music is fundamentally about communication. The blues requires truthfulness. Gospel requires emotional generosity. Jazz requires the willingness to listen and respond. Ellis’s art brings those three qualities together.
With bass and saxophone surrounding her voice, the Hamburg performance had the potential for an especially direct sound: space around the vocal line, rhythmic flexibility underneath it, and enough harmonic freedom for the music to breathe.
The photograph found online of Ellis performing captures precisely this quality: the singer leaning toward the microphone, smiling, entirely connected to the moment. It is not merely an image of a performer—it is an image of someone communicating.
Hamburg gave the October 7 programme its blues heart.
Paris: Natalie Dessay Sings Claude Nougaro — Poetry, Jazz and the French Art of the Song
If Munich belonged to funk and Hamburg to the blues, Paris belonged to words. At Le Bal Blomet, Natalie Dessay presented Natalie Dessay chante Nougaro, a programme dedicated to the extraordinary French singer, poet and songwriter Claude Nougaro.
The performance began at 20:00, and the venue presented it as a collaboration between Natalie Dessay and Yvan Cassar, described as an evening in which “jazz, words and life” revive the spirit of Nougaro.
The published concert lineup gives: Natalie Dessay — voice, Yvan Cassar — musical director / piano, Nicolas Montazaud — drums, Sylvain Gontard — trumpet, Benoît Dunoyer de Segonzac — double bass.
This is a fascinating artistic meeting. Dessay’s background is rooted in the international world of opera, but her later work has increasingly explored chanson, musical theatre and popular song. Her collaboration with Michel Legrand helped open this different vocal territory for her.
Nougaro, meanwhile, was one of the great French artists for whom the boundary between chanson and jazz was almost meaningless. His songs could carry poetry, swing, rhythm, sensuality, humour and existential melancholy in the same breath. And Le Bal Blomet is almost impossibly appropriate for such a programme.
Founded in 1924, the venue describes itself as a historic Montparnasse cabaret and jazz club and as the oldest jazz club in Europe still operating. It reopened under its original name in 2017 after restoration.
So there is a beautiful historical circle here: a singer with an extraordinary classical past interpreting one of France’s great jazz-inflected chanson artists inside one of Paris’s oldest jazz rooms.
The music could therefore be heard not simply as tribute, but as a meeting of generations of French musical expression. The found photograph from an earlier Dessay appearance at the Bal Blomet is also revealing: the brick wall, the small stage, the closeness of the audience. It suggests the kind of intimacy in which Nougaro’s words can become almost conversational.
Paris transformed the October 7 season into theatre, poetry and song.
London: Tom Ridout & Marta Gornitzka Quintet — A New London Jazz Language
Across the Channel, London offered another important dimension of contemporary European jazz. The Clissold Arms in Muswell Hill hosted Jazz Wednesdays with Tom Ridout / Marta Gornitzka Quintet on October 7, from 20:00 to 23:00. The published listing describes it as a contemporary/nu-jazz evening led by saxophonist Tom Ridout and vocalist Marta Gornitzka, with piano, bass and drums completing the quintet.
The Clissold Arms itself has a remarkable musical history. Established in 1850, it is also associated with the early history of The Kinks, whose Ray and Dave Davies performed there in their youth. Today it operates as a community-oriented gastropub and live-entertainment venue.
That makes the October 7 jazz evening particularly interesting: a venue carrying the memory of British popular music becomes a meeting place for a younger generation of contemporary jazz musicians. Tom Ridout is a Royal Academy of Music graduate, saxophonist, recorder player, composer and bandleader. His career has already included recognition such as the Help Musicians Peter Whittingham Jazz Award and the Lancaster Jazz Festival Youth Commission.
Marta Gornitzka brings a different but complementary musical background. Her work connects jazz with folk, rock and blues and draws strongly on both Eastern European musical roots and the Great American Songbook. Their collaboration therefore embodies something particularly characteristic of London’s contemporary jazz scene: tradition without conservatism. There is respect for the vocabulary of jazz, but also a desire to rearrange it—to make it conversational, contemporary and open to other musical languages.
London offered the season a glimpse of jazz’s future: restless, hybrid and imaginative.
Stockport: Jazz Night at The Moor Club — The Local Room, the Universal Language
The October 7 programme also travelled beyond central London to Greater Manchester, where The Moor Club in Stockport hosted a Jazz Night. The club’s own listing describes an evening built around live musicians, melody, rhythm and the immediacy of performance.
This event may appear modest beside major international names such as Fred Wesley, Natalie Dessay or Dhafer Youssef, but artistically it represents something essential. Jazz was never meant only for grand concert halls. It belongs in neighbourhood rooms.
It belongs where listeners sit close to the band, where musicians can experiment, where a drummer’s dynamics can change the temperature of a room, where a bassist can make a melody feel physically present and where a pianist can suddenly turn a familiar harmonic sequence into something new.
Images of The Moor Club show precisely this intimate character: a small ensemble performing in a warmly lit room, with the audience close to the musicians. This is an important part of the European jazz ecology. International festivals depend upon local scenes; major artists emerge from small rooms; musical traditions remain alive because people continue to gather on ordinary evenings to hear live musicians.
Stockport supplied the season with something fundamental: jazz at human scale.
Munich Again: David Helbock & Julia Hofer — Two Musicians, a Whole Sound World
Munich experienced a second and very different jazz event on the same evening. At Bergson Kunstkraftwerk, the BR Club Concert presented David Helbock & Julia Hofer. The official Bergson listing gives the performance as October 7, 19:00–22:00, with the duo appearing as part of the BR Club Concert series.
The contrast with Fred Wesley could hardly be more striking. Where Wesley’s trio builds from funk’s physical groove, Helbock and Hofer explore texture, space, electronics, chamber-like sensitivity and rhythmic experimentation.
Helbock is one of Austria’s most prominent contemporary jazz pianists, with awards including prizes from the Montreux Jazz Piano Solo Competition and the Austrian government’s Outstanding Artist Award.
Julia Hofer is a versatile electric bassist and cellist from Vienna. Her musical career has crossed into pop and television, while her current collaboration with Helbock moves increasingly toward jazz. Their shared album Faces of Night, released in 2025, combines dreamy original pieces with grooving jazz compositions and imaginative effects. This instrumentation creates extraordinary possibilities.
Cello can sound like a human voice. Electric bass can become percussion, harmony or atmosphere. Piano can supply architecture—or fragment it. Electronics can make acoustic instruments appear to move through different spaces. The result is music that can be intimate one moment and rhythmically explosive the next.
The BR presentation emphasised that Helbock and Hofer are highly experienced performers and unusually well matched on stage. The October 7 concert also had a special broadcast dimension: Helbock’s schedule identifies the Munich performance as a BR Clubnacht / radio live recording.
So Munich, remarkably, hosted two entirely different visions of jazz on the same night:
Fred Wesley — groove, funk, history and physical rhythm. David Helbock & Julia Hofer — colour, texture, experimentation and contemporary sound. That juxtaposition says much about the breadth of the Autumn-Winter season.
Istanbul: Dhafer Youssef — From the Sufi Tradition to the Contemporary World
And then, as the European musical map stretches toward the Bosphorus, the October 7 programme reaches Istanbul. At Zorlu PSM’s Turkcell Platinum Stage, Dhafer Youssef appeared as part of the 36th Akbank Jazz Festival, in the festival’s ACT Night collaboration with ACT Music.
The band was: Dhafer Youssef — oud, vocals, Daniel García — piano, Mario Rom — trumpet, Swaeli Mbappé — bass guitar, Tao Ehrlich — drums.
The programme centred on Shiraz, Youssef’s deeply personal 2025 album. This is perhaps the most geographically and spiritually expansive concert of the October 7 series. Youssef’s music begins in the musical and spiritual traditions of Tunisia and Sufi culture, but it does not remain there. It moves into contemporary jazz, improvisation, chamber-like textures and modern sound design. His oud is treated not merely as a traditional instrument but as an extraordinarily flexible voice.
Shiraz was dedicated to his wife, Shiraz Fradi, and explores love, gratitude, light, shadow and the complexity of shared life. The album’s ensemble includes precisely the younger musicians heard in Istanbul: Daniel García, Mario Rom, Swaeli Mbappé and Tao Ehrlich, with guitarist Nguyên Lê also participating on the recording.
The artistic idea behind Youssef’s music is particularly relevant to a European festival. His music does not ask East and West to become identical. It asks them to listen to one another. The oud can converse with trumpet. Arabic melodic language can meet European harmonic thinking. A Sufi-inflected vocal line can float over a modern rhythm section. Silence can be as important as sound.
The official Akbank presentation itself describes Youssef’s work as a meeting point between Arabic musical traditions, jazz, world music and spiritual exploration. And so Istanbul provided the October 7 programme with perhaps its most profound final statement: music as a bridge between traditions rather than a border between them.
Eight Concerts, One European Musical Landscape
What makes October 7 so compelling is not simply the quality of the individual artists. It is the range. Consider the musical journey:
Munich — Fred Wesley: funk and the physical power of groove.
Prüm — Laurent Pierre 5-tet: European composition and small-group jazz.
Hamburg — Sydney Ellis: blues, gospel, soul and jazz tradition.
Paris — Natalie Dessay: French poetry, chanson and jazz.
London — Tom Ridout & Marta Gornitzka: contemporary, hybrid London jazz.
Stockport — Jazz Night: the vitality of the local club scene.
Munich — David Helbock & Julia Hofer: experimental contemporary jazz and sonic colour.
Istanbul — Dhafer Youssef: Arabic musical heritage, Sufi spirituality and modern jazz.
This is exactly why the idea of a pan-European Autumn-Winter concert season is so powerful. It does not attempt to make every city sound the same. Quite the opposite. It allows Munich to be Munich, Paris to be Paris, Hamburg to be Hamburg, London to be London, Stockport to be Stockport, Prüm to be Prüm and Istanbul to be Istanbul—while connecting them through the universal language of live music.
Olivia Peevas — The Woman Behind the European Musical Journey
At the centre of this ambitious undertaking stands Olivia Peevas, director and organizer of the 2026 Autumn-Winter Jazz – Blues Season of the EU Jazz and Blues Festival. Her role deserves to be understood as considerably more than administrative.
A pan-European concert season of this scale requires an unusual combination of artistic vision, persistence, diplomacy, organizational discipline and genuine love of music. It means thinking simultaneously about artists and audiences, about cities and venues, about travel and timing, about artistic identity and the practical realities of presenting live music across national borders.
It means understanding that a concert in Paris cannot simply be copied into Munich; that an intimate club in Hamburg requires a different artistic relationship from a major performing-arts centre in Istanbul; that a small Eifel venue can be just as culturally significant as a prestigious European capital.
That is where Peevas’s role becomes especially important. The season’s conception connects an extraordinarily wide European geography. The broader 2026 programme has been conceived as an extended musical journey through cities including Brussels, Vilnius, Berlin, Oslo, Munich, Stockholm, Cologne, Helsinki, Bratislava, Tallinn, Amsterdam, Paris, Riga, Warsaw, Burgas, Prague, Krakow, Ljubljana, Madrid, Istanbul, Budapest, Luxembourg, Lisbon, Copenhagen, Chisinau and Valletta, with the Autumn-Winter programme continuing through December 20.
Peevas’s achievement lies in seeing these places not as isolated points on a calendar but as parts of one European cultural landscape. Her work is therefore that of a cultural bridge-builder. She brings together musicians from different traditions and generations, places them in historically meaningful venues, creates opportunities for audiences to encounter unfamiliar artists and gives the European jazz and blues scene a sense of continuity across borders.
There is also something especially admirable in the fact that the season does not define jazz narrowly. Under this artistic umbrella we find funk and soul, blues and gospel, contemporary European composition, French chanson, Arabic musical traditions, experimental sound, chamber-like jazz and the living culture of local clubs.
That breadth requires confidence. It requires an organizer who believes that audiences are capable of curiosity. And it requires someone who understands that jazz is not a museum category but a living artistic language.
Olivia Peevas’s contribution to the 2026 season can therefore be seen on two levels. On the practical level, she is the person helping bring together the artists, venues, cities, dates and audiences that make the season possible. On the artistic level, she is helping articulate a vision of Europe in which music crosses borders naturally. That is a meaningful cultural task.
The most impressive aspect of such work is often invisible. Audiences see the lights come up, the musicians walk onto the stage and the first note begin. They do not necessarily see the enormous network of decisions and human relationships required to make that moment possible.
A successful concert can look effortless. Creating the conditions for that effortlessness is anything but effortless. And this is why Olivia Peevas deserves particularly strong recognition for her dedication to the 2026 Autumn-Winter season.
The Meaning of October 7
By the end of October 7, the European jazz map had become almost poetic. A trombone was speaking in Munich. A saxophone and trumpet were answering one another in Prüm. A blues voice was filling an intimate Hamburg club. French poetry was being rediscovered in Paris. A new generation of London musicians was transforming jazz vocabulary.
A local Stockport room was keeping the tradition of the live club alive. A piano and cello/bass were opening new sonic spaces in Munich. And in Istanbul, an oud was reaching from North Africa and the Sufi tradition toward the contemporary world. Eight concerts. Several countries. Many musical languages. One cultural idea.
Europe listening to itself.
That may ultimately be the most beautiful achievement of the EU Jazz and Blues Festival’s pan-European Autumn-Winter season. It does not simply transport musicians from one city to another. It creates opportunities for European audiences to recognise how much musical diversity can coexist within one cultural space.
And as autumn deepens, as the evenings grow longer and Europe’s streets begin to glow beneath the first colder skies, this season continues to write its story one concert at a time. From the historic rooms of Paris to the clubs of Hamburg and Munich, from the Eifel to Greater Manchester, from London to the Bosphorus, the music keeps travelling.
And Europe keeps listening.
By Sofie Buravan, Akrile Betrricean, Donaled Shotelend, Stiven Berger
