There are festivals that simply present a succession of concerts, and then there are festivals that gradually transform an entire city into a musical organism. The 12th Travejazz Festival in Lübeck belonged unmistakably to the second category.
From September 3 to 6, the Hanseatic city became a meeting point for jazz, blues, funk, soul, swing, groove, contemporary sounds and youthful musical energy. The festival once again demonstrated that jazz does not have to remain confined to a traditional concert hall: it can live in churches, on open-air stages, in cultural spaces, among families, among young musicians and, above all, in the movement of an audience that is willing to listen, clap, dance and participate.
The opening on Thursday evening immediately established the spirit of the entire festival. At LiveCV Lübeck, The Maestros & Guests delivered an opening concert that was less an introduction than a declaration of intent. The room was packed, the atmosphere was charged and the audience responded with the kind of enthusiasm that every live musician dreams of receiving.
The band had already made a strong impression at the previous year’s open-air concert, and their return gave the opening night a sense of continuation: a musical relationship between performers and audience that had already begun and now had the opportunity to grow.
The Maestros brought a particularly physical dimension to the music. Their sound drew from blues-rock, funk and soul, with the electric guitar occupying a central expressive position. The influence of the great guitar tradition could be felt without the performance becoming merely nostalgic. Instead, the music took those historical elements and pushed them into a contemporary festival environment.
The guitar could roar, bend, sing and attack; the rhythm section supplied the muscular foundation from which the music could rise; and the entire performance possessed an instinctive understanding of dynamics. It was music designed not merely to be heard but to be experienced physically.
That distinction became important throughout Travejazz 2026. The festival’s programme repeatedly asked what happens when jazz leaves the boundaries of conventional jazz presentation and enters the territory of funk, soul, swing, dance music and popular culture. The answer was heard in almost every corner of the festival: jazz becomes larger, more accessible and more unpredictable without losing its artistic identity.
Friday brought another side of this musical philosophy. The programme was built around the meeting of groove, soul and dance. At the centre stood the Hammond-organ virtuosity of Lutz Krajenski and his trio, krajenski.3, joined by the soulful vocalist MOORE. Their music reached back into the great traditions of Hammond-driven soul-jazz, rare groove, funk and boogaloo, but it was presented with contemporary energy. The Hammond B3 is an instrument with enormous historical baggage, yet Krajenski treated it not as a museum piece but as a living, breathing machine.
The organ’s deep resonance, its growling bass register and its ability to shift almost instantly between tenderness and power gave the music an unusually broad emotional spectrum. Against that foundation, MOORE’s voice supplied another dimension.
Soul music depends upon communication, and his performance made that communication immediate. His vocal presence could move from intimacy to theatrical intensity, from smooth phrasing to explosive projection, giving the performance a dramatic quality that made the songs feel larger than their arrangements.
Then came Make a Move, and the entire concept of the evening moved decisively toward the dance floor. Their music exists at the intersection of brass-band energy, funk, rap, electronic dance culture and contemporary groove. The bass and drums generate a physical pulse while the horns can suddenly transform that pulse into melody, colour and celebration. The result is music that does not ask the audience to remain passive.
Make a Move’s great strength is precisely this ability to dissolve the distance between stage and audience. Their performances combine powerful beats with brass melodies, rap and a highly theatrical live presence. The festival itself described the band’s sound as something that moves directly from the ear into the legs, and that is an unusually accurate description of their artistic effect.
By this point, the Travejazz audience was no longer simply attending concerts. It had become part of the rhythm of the festival.
Saturday brought an entirely different atmosphere, beginning with the return of the sun and the restoration of the open-air spirit. Weather had threatened the outdoor programme earlier in the festival, making the appearance of sunlight feel almost like a musical intervention of its own. Suddenly Lübeck could breathe again, and the festival could take its music outside.
One of the most important appearances was that of Sounddrift, the young ensemble presented through the Travejazz connection with the national Jugend jazzt competition. Sounddrift had represented Bavaria at the 2026 Bundesbegegnung Jugend Jazzt in Halle/Saale and received the Travejazz concert prize there. Their appearance in Lübeck therefore represented something larger than another festival booking: it was an affirmation of the future of jazz.
There is something particularly important about hearing young musicians in a festival environment surrounded by experienced artists. They are not presented merely as students waiting for their turn. They are placed directly into the professional musical conversation. Sounddrift’s presence demonstrated that jazz remains a living language precisely because young musicians continue to reinterpret it, question it and make it their own.
The open-air setting amplified that feeling. Instead of the concentrated silence of a concert hall, there was the sound of the city around the music: conversations, footsteps, movement, the harbour atmosphere and the natural reactions of an audience gathering outdoors. Jazz became part of everyday life.
Analogue Swing brought another colour to the Saturday programme. Their music possessed the elegance, rhythmic lightness and visual imagination of a French street café, yet beneath the charm was a sophisticated understanding of swing. The performance encouraged audiences to tap their feet almost instinctively. Here, swing was not presented as an historical style preserved behind glass; it became a social language once again.
That is one of the great strengths of swing music. It carries rhythm as invitation. It creates a space between performer and listener in which movement becomes part of listening. With Analogue Swing, the audience did not have to be persuaded to participate. The rhythm itself did the persuading.
The Saturday programme also showed how seriously Travejazz takes the idea of reaching audiences beyond traditional jazz circles. The festival’s family concert, Lieder der Sesamstraße, brought the Hamburg Art Ensemble into St. Jakobi Church, one of Lübeck’s most historically resonant musical spaces.
The concert transformed familiar Sesame Street songs into a jazz-based family experience, allowing children and adults to encounter improvisation, ensemble playing, rhythm and musical interaction through material they already knew. This was not simply a children’s entertainment programme. It was an artistic act of translation.
The musicians took familiar melodies and opened them up to a different musical language. A song associated with television and childhood could suddenly acquire new harmonic colours, rhythmic variations and instrumental textures. For young listeners, this creates a first encounter with the basic idea at the heart of jazz: a melody is not a fixed object. It can be reshaped, answered, interrupted, transformed and reinvented.
The choice of St. Jakobi was equally meaningful. A church deeply associated with Lübeck’s musical, pilgrimage and maritime history provided an acoustic and symbolic environment in which the concert could take on an almost timeless quality. Generations of listeners gathered beneath the historic architecture, and music once again became a bridge between ages.
This sense of musical continuity was one of the defining qualities of the 12th Travejazz Festival. The festival did not place tradition and innovation in opposition. Instead, it allowed them to exist side by side.
Young musicians could stand beside established artists. Swing could exist beside electronic dance influences. Hammond soul could meet rap and funk. Children’s songs could become jazz arrangements. Open-air concerts could sit naturally alongside performances in historic churches. And through all of it, Lübeck itself remained an essential participant.
The Friday night programme and Saturday’s outdoor concerts also revealed another important aspect of contemporary jazz culture: audiences increasingly want to experience music with their entire bodies. Listening remains fundamental, but so are movement, atmosphere, community and spontaneity. The distinction between jazz concert and dance event is becoming increasingly fluid, and Travejazz understood this very well.
What makes the festival particularly attractive is precisely this diversity. The official programme included The Maestros & Guests, krajenski.3 feat. MOORE, Make a Move, Sounddrift, Analogue Swing, the Hamburg Art Ensemble, the Jakob Bänsch Quartett, Peace, Baltic Unity Experience and the Lübecker Jazzpreis presentation to bassist and composer Marla Stier. Such programming creates a festival that refuses to define jazz too narrowly.
Jazz here is not only about the traditional language of bebop, swing or hard bop. It is an attitude toward sound: curiosity, improvisation, rhythmic freedom, communication and the willingness to cross boundaries. Funk becomes jazz. Soul becomes jazz. Swing becomes jazz. Contemporary popular music can become jazz. A children’s song can become jazz. And a young competition-winning ensemble can enter the same artistic landscape as seasoned professionals.
That is why the 12th Travejazz Festival felt larger than its individual concerts. It was a celebration of musical coexistence. The weather itself seemed to become part of the narrative. After rain threatened the outdoor programme, the return of sunshine allowed the Saturday concerts to breathe beneath the open sky. The festival audience responded with the same enthusiasm that had marked the opening night. The difference was that now the music had room to spread outward, across the waterfront and into the city.
And perhaps this is where the true success of Travejazz can be found: in its ability to make jazz feel at home in Lübeck. The city possesses centuries of history, architecture and cultural memory, but during these four days the past did not become an obstacle to the present. Instead, historic spaces became resonating chambers for new musical ideas. St. Jakobi could host a family jazz concert; LiveCV could explode with blues-rock and funk; the open-air stage could introduce young German jazz musicians and elegant swing ensembles; Schuppen 6 could become a meeting point between soul, Hammond groove, brass, rap and dance.
The 12th Travejazz Festival therefore offered much more than a sequence of performances. It created a musical landscape in which different generations, styles and audiences could meet.
From The Maestros’ powerful opening to the youthful confidence of Sounddrift, from the street-café charm of Analogue Swing to the family imagination of the Hamburg Art Ensemble, from Krajenski’s Hammond-driven soul-jazz to the explosive dance energy of Make a Move, the festival demonstrated how broad the contemporary jazz experience can be.
And above all, it reminded us of something fundamental: jazz is not a style that stands still. Jazz moves. It swings. It grooves. It sings. It dances. It remembers. It reinvents itself. And for four September days in 2026, the 12th Travejazz Festival made Lübeck move with it.
By Lauren Wulff
