European Journey Through Jazz, Blues, Soul and World Music Autumn – Winter Jazz & Blues Season 2026: Photos

The European autumn has its own musical language. In October, as the leaves turn gold along the avenues of Munich, the historic streets of Copenhagen grow cool beneath the northern sky, and the lights of Milan illuminate its bustling cultural quarters, concert halls and intimate clubs become meeting places for extraordinary musical voices.

Jazz, blues, soul, acoustic virtuosity and the ancient musical traditions of Africa converge in a season that celebrates not only the diversity of contemporary music, but also its remarkable ability to unite cultures, generations and artistic philosophies.

The 2026 Autumn – Winter Jazz – Blues Season, presented by the EU Jazz and Blues Festival, brings together an exceptionally broad spectrum of international talent. From the intricate, high-voltage guitar language of Al Di Meola to the unmistakable saxophone sound of Jan Garbarek, from the imaginative modern jazz of Emma Rawicz and Bill Frisell to the emotional power of Sari Schorr and the hypnotic desert blues of Imarhan, the programme offers a portrait of a living, evolving musical Europe.

Under the direction and organisation of Olivia Peevas, the season is conceived as a meeting place for different musical histories. Its artistic identity lies in the conversation between tradition and innovation: the blues as a language of lived experience, jazz as an open field for improvisation, soul as an expression of collective feeling, and world music as a bridge between ancestral memory and contemporary life.

Greece — Al Di Meola at Thessaloniki Concert Hall

October 26, 2026 · Thessaloniki, Greece · The Guitarchitect Tour. The Thessaloniki Concert Hall provided the setting for an appearance by one of the most distinctive guitar virtuosos of modern music. Al Di Meola’s concert on October 26 was part of The Guitarchitect Tour: Music, Images & Stories, an experience combining music, multimedia imagery and reflections on a career extending across five decades. The event was listed by the 61st Dimitria Festival, in collaboration with the Municipality of Thessaloniki and the Thessaloniki Concert Hall organisation.

Di Meola’s artistry occupies a fascinating territory between jazz fusion, Latin music, flamenco, classical composition and the intricate rhythmic vocabulary of world music. His playing is immediately recognisable for its extraordinary precision: fast passages unfold with almost architectural clarity, while syncopated accents and changes of metre create the sensation that the music is continually shifting beneath the listener’s feet.

Yet virtuosity is only one part of his achievement. The most compelling dimension of Di Meola’s musical personality is the relationship between speed and lyricism. A cascade of notes can suddenly open into a spacious melodic phrase; an intricate rhythmic figure can become the foundation for a tender, almost meditative passage. His acoustic playing reveals this balance particularly well, allowing the resonance of the instrument and the nuances of his touch to come forward.

Thessaloniki, a city shaped by Greek, Balkan, Mediterranean and wider international influences, was a fitting setting for such a musical language. The concert’s format promised more than a retrospective of celebrated compositions: it offered a view into the ideas, influences and experiences behind Di Meola’s evolving relationship with the guitar.

Within the EU Jazz and Blues Festival’s autumn narrative, this performance represented the virtuoso tradition at its most expressive—a meeting of technical mastery, compositional intelligence and the enduring human desire to make familiar instruments speak in new ways.

Germany — Jan Garbarek Group at the Isarphilharmonie, Munich

October 26, 2026 · Isarphilharmonie, Gasteig HP8 · Munich, Germany. Few saxophonists have developed a sound as instantly identifiable as Jan Garbarek. The Norwegian musician’s distinctive tone, spacious phrasing and ability to make a single sustained note carry an entire emotional landscape have helped define a particular strand of European jazz. His appearance in Munich with Trilok Gurtu brought together two artists whose musical imaginations extend well beyond conventional genre boundaries.

The published programme confirmed a quartet featuring Garbarek on saxophone, Gurtu on percussion, Rainer Brüninghaus on piano and Yuri Daniel on bass. The organisers described their music in terms of meditative calm, expansive soundscapes and haunting melodic lines.

Garbarek’s approach often begins with space. Rather than filling every moment, he allows silence to become an active element of the composition. His melodies may emerge gradually, suspended above a subtle harmonic foundation, then develop into lines of extraordinary intensity. The saxophone’s clear, almost vocal quality gives the music a sense of direct communication: the sound seems less like an instrument demonstrating its possibilities than a human voice searching for the most meaningful phrase.

Gurtu brings another dimension to this landscape. His percussion practice draws on Indian rhythmic traditions, the modern drum set and an unusually broad range of timbres. The resulting dialogue can be delicate or explosive, with patterns that seem to circle around the melody rather than simply accompany it. Daniel’s bass provides depth and grounding, while Brüninghaus contributes harmonic colour and a keen awareness of the music’s changing architecture.

Munich’s Isarphilharmonie, with its emphasis on attentive listening and carefully balanced acoustics, offered a compelling environment for this interplay. Here, jazz becomes less a sequence of solos than a shared act of musical discovery. A rhythm can suggest a distant landscape; a piano chord can alter the emotional temperature; a saxophone phrase can transform an entire passage into something contemplative and luminous.

For the festival’s autumn programme, the Garbarek Group stands as a reminder that European jazz is not merely a collection of national styles. It is an ongoing conversation between cultures, instruments and sensibilities—a music capable of sounding ancient and contemporary at the same time.

Germany — Emma Rawicz and Chroma in Krefeld

Krefeld, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany · Chroma. Emma Rawicz represents a generation of British jazz musicians for whom stylistic openness is not an exception but a natural starting point. As a saxophonist and composer, she combines a strong instrumental voice with an interest in colour, rhythmic momentum and ensemble interaction.

Her Chroma project is an especially appropriate choice for an autumn festival concerned with the meeting of musical worlds. The title evokes colour, and that idea offers a useful way of understanding the music: themes can be viewed as musical shades, with different instrumental voices changing their intensity, transparency and emotional character as the arrangement develops.

Rawicz’s saxophone work is notable for its combination of fluency and purpose. Technical passages are not simply displays of dexterity; they can drive a composition forward, respond to a rhythmic shift or reveal an unexpected melodic possibility. The strongest contemporary jazz writing balances these individual freedoms with a convincing overall structure, allowing improvisation to become part of a larger compositional argument.

Krefeld, an industrial and cultural centre in western Germany, gives this music a different geographical context from Munich’s major philharmonic stage. The supplied programme identifies Theaterplatz as the performance location. I could not independently confirm the exact concert listing there, so the venue and performance details should be checked against the festival’s own records before publication.

Artistically, however, Rawicz belongs at the centre of a European jazz season that looks forward rather than backward. Her work reflects a musical generation comfortable with complexity, energetic ensemble playing and the search for a personal voice. The significance of Chroma lies in this very openness: a willingness to treat contemporary jazz as a living language, still acquiring new colours and new meanings.

United Kingdom — Paulus Schäfer and Olli Soikkeli at PizzaExpress Live Holborn, London

PizzaExpress Live Holborn · London, United Kingdom. The meeting of Paulus Schäfer and Olli Soikkeli brings the acoustic guitar into the spotlight as an instrument of both dazzling agility and extraordinary rhythmic subtlety. Their shared musical territory includes the tradition of Django Reinhardt, the swing language of European Manouche jazz and the continuing evolution of acoustic improvisation.

Gypsy jazz is sometimes described through its speed and virtuosity, but its deepest appeal lies in the relationship between pulse, melody and collective momentum. The rhythm guitar establishes a spring-like foundation, with clipped chordal accents creating a buoyant sense of forward movement. Above it, the lead guitar can leap through arpeggios, chromatic runs and intricate melodic variations without losing the dance-like quality that makes the style so compelling.

A meeting between two accomplished guitarists introduces an additional pleasure: the conversation between different instrumental personalities. One musician’s melodic statement can become the other’s invitation to answer, reshape or challenge the idea. A familiar theme can pass through several variations, becoming more elaborate while remaining recognisable.

London’s PizzaExpress Live Holborn, with its intimate club atmosphere, is particularly suited to such music. In a close setting, the audience can hear details that are easily lost in larger rooms: the articulation of a pick, the warmth of a chord, the rhythmic lift created by a small variation in attack.

For the EU Jazz and Blues Festival, this concert represents the importance of preserving acoustic traditions without turning them into museum pieces. Manouche jazz continues to evolve because its central principles—swing, melodic invention, virtuosity and musical conversation—remain fertile ground for new interpretations.

United Kingdom — St. Paul and the Broken Bones in Edinburgh and Liverpool

Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh · Grand Central Hall, Liverpool · United Kingdom. The inclusion of St. Paul and the Broken Bones adds a vital dose of Southern American soul to the season. Emerging from Birmingham, Alabama, the group has built its identity around a powerful blend of gospel intensity, vintage soul, brass-driven arrangements and contemporary rock energy.

At the centre is vocalist Paul Janeway, whose expressive style draws on the dramatic tradition of gospel and classic soul. His voice can move from a fragile, almost conversational phrase to a full-bodied cry of release. This dynamic range gives the band’s music a theatrical quality, but the emotion remains grounded in the physical language of rhythm: a firm backbeat, sharply placed horns, a bass line that holds the centre and instrumental passages that build towards collective release.

The band’s sound is especially suited to concert spaces where audiences can experience the energy of a full ensemble. Edinburgh’s Queen’s Hall, a historic venue with a strong musical identity, offers a different atmosphere from Liverpool’s Grand Central Hall, whose grand architecture provides a striking setting for large-scale live performance.

The two cities also bring different cultural associations to the festival. Edinburgh’s musical life exists within a city celebrated for its historic streets and performance traditions; Liverpool’s musical identity is inseparable from its long history of popular music and its international cultural connections. Southern soul, with its own history of gospel, rhythm and blues, and communal performance, finds a natural home in both.

A performance by St. Paul and the Broken Bones can be understood as a celebration of the body as much as the voice. The rhythm section establishes a powerful physical pulse; the horns punctuate the arrangement with bold gestures; and Janeway’s singing gives each song the emotional arc of a short dramatic scene.

The supplied programme names both venues, but I could not independently verify the dates of the two engagements. The report therefore treats them as festival-listed appearances rather than a confirmed account of completed concerts.

Germany — Connor Selby at Music Star, Norderstedt

October 26, 2026 · Music Star, Norderstedt, Germany. The British blues scene continues to produce musicians who understand that authenticity is not a matter of reproducing the past, but of making its language speak honestly in the present. Connor Selby belongs to this tradition. His music draws on the expressive vocabulary of blues and classic rock while retaining a personal, reflective quality.

Selby’s guitar playing is grounded in expressive phrasing rather than technical display for its own sake. The bend of a note, the pause before a response and the contrast between a restrained verse and a more forceful solo are all central to blues storytelling. The instrument becomes a second voice, extending the meaning of the lyric without merely repeating it.

His vocal approach belongs to the same expressive tradition. Rather than treating blues as an exercise in stylistic imitation, the strongest performances use its established vocabulary to communicate uncertainty, resilience, longing and hard-won perspective. A guitar phrase can sound like a question; a repeated refrain can become a statement of resolve.

Norderstedt, near Hamburg, offered a setting removed from the grand concert-hall tradition. Smaller venues are essential to the life of blues because they place the music close to its listeners. The audience can feel the rhythmic weight of the band, hear the interplay between guitar and rhythm section, and recognise the spontaneous shifts that distinguish a live performance from a carefully polished studio recording.

Within the wider festival, Selby’s appearance provides an important counterpoint to the large-scale instrumental projects elsewhere in the programme. Here, the emphasis is directness, songcraft and emotional clarity: the enduring essentials of the blues.

Denmark — Guy Davis at The Culture Yard, Helsingør

The Culture Yard · Helsingør, Denmark. Guy Davis brings a deeply rooted and storytelling-centred approach to the blues. A singer, guitarist, songwriter and actor, he has developed a musical identity in which traditional country blues meets the immediacy of theatre and the narrative craft of folk music. His Grammy nominations have helped bring recognition to a body of work built on musical continuity, character and expressive detail.

The Culture Yard, known in Danish as Kulturværftet, stands on Helsingør’s waterfront, in a city whose maritime history has long connected Denmark with the wider world. This setting provides a fitting backdrop for Davis’s intimate musical language: songs that feel like journeys, inhabited by characters, memories and the traces of places.

In solo performance, the smallest musical gestures become important. A guitar pattern may establish a steady walking rhythm; a change in vocal inflection can introduce a new character; a pause may allow a lyric’s meaning to settle before the next verse begins. Davis’s work draws strength from precisely this economy of means.

The blues is often described as a musical form, but in Davis’s hands it also becomes a method of storytelling. Its repeated structures allow the narrative to develop gradually, while rhythmic variations and melodic inflections make each verse feel freshly spoken. The tradition’s emotional range includes sorrow and humour, hardship and defiance, but it is never limited to a single mood.

An intimate programme in Helsingør is therefore a natural fit. Rather than relying on volume or spectacle, this kind of performance invites listeners into a shared space of attention. The guitar’s resonance, the grain of the voice and the details of the stories become the principal events of the evening.

For the festival, Davis represents the blues as living cultural memory: a tradition carried forward not by imitation alone, but by artists who understand its stories and continue to find new ways to tell them.

Denmark — Sari Schorr presents Running Wild at Mojo Blues Bar, Copenhagen

October 27, 2026 · Mojo Blues Bar · Copenhagen, Denmark. Copenhagen’s Mojo Blues Bar is a natural home for an artist whose performances thrive on proximity, emotional intensity and the spontaneous electricity of live music. Sari Schorr, the New York-based blues-rock vocalist, arrives with Running Wild, a project that brings together the raw power of blues, the expansive energy of classic rock and the emotional vocabulary of soul.

Schorr’s vocal style is defined by dramatic contrast. She can begin with a restrained phrase, allowing the lyric to emerge with almost conversational intimacy, before expanding into a powerful, full-throated declaration. The force of the performance is not simply a matter of volume; it comes from the ability to shape a line, hold tension and release it at exactly the right moment.

Blues-rock depends on the balance between voice and instrumental force. The guitar can answer the singer with a cutting phrase, the bass can reinforce the weight of a refrain, and the drums can transform a measured passage into an urgent rhythmic surge. When these elements work together, a song acquires the momentum of a dramatic narrative.

Running Wild provides the evening with a clear artistic focus. Rather than functioning as a collection of disconnected songs, an album presentation allows the audience to encounter an artist’s current musical concerns as a coherent statement. Older influences remain present, but they are filtered through the experiences and creative choices of the performer today.

Mojo’s intimate setting suits that approach. The room’s club atmosphere brings the singer and audience into close proximity, preserving the rough edges, dynamic shifts and human unpredictability that make blues-rock most compelling in person.

This concert also provides a valuable reminder of the blues’s continuing evolution. Its vocabulary remains recognisable, but its emotional reach is not fixed in the past. Through Schorr’s voice, the genre continues to express independence, vulnerability and the refusal to surrender one’s own identity.

Denmark — Imarhan celebrates 20 years at ALICE, Copenhagen

October 27, 2026 · ALICE · Copenhagen, Denmark. Among the most distinctive cultural encounters of the festival is the appearance of Imarhan, the Algerian Tuareg band whose music draws on the desert blues tradition while embracing the sounds of contemporary rock, soul and Algerian raï.

Based in Tamanrasset in southern Algeria, Imarhan belongs to a generation of musicians carrying Tuareg musical traditions into an international setting. Their sound is rooted in the cultural life of the Sahara, where music has long served as a vehicle for memory, identity and collective expression. Yet the band’s approach is not confined to preserving a historical form. It reshapes that inheritance through modern electric instrumentation and a more expansive rhythmic language.

The hypnotic quality of desert blues comes from repetition that never feels entirely static. A guitar figure returns again and again, but subtle variations in phrasing, tone and emphasis gradually alter its meaning. The rhythm becomes a current, carrying the listener into a musical space where movement and meditation coexist.

Imarhan’s arrangements combine interlocking guitars, grounded bass lines and percussion that establishes a steady, communal pulse. The effect is simultaneously intimate and expansive. A compact melodic phrase can suggest the immense openness of the desert, while the band’s collective sound evokes the importance of shared musical experience.

ALICE, Copenhagen’s venue for adventurous music from across the world, provides a particularly appropriate setting. The concert brings together a northern European audience and musicians whose artistic roots lie far to the south, creating a meeting that is not about geographical difference alone, but about the ways music travels, adapts and remains meaningful.

The anniversary dimension gives the event an additional resonance. Twenty years of musical development represent a continuing conversation between the band’s origins and its present identity. The performance celebrates not simply longevity, but the capacity of a tradition to remain alive through change.

Within the EU Jazz and Blues Festival, Imarhan expands the very definition of the blues. The music’s emotional foundation—repetition, improvisation, longing and collective expression—can be heard in a Saharan language as compelling as any familiar American blues form.

Switzerland — Bill Frisell Trio at AMR @ Alhambra, Geneva

October 27, 2026 · Alhambra · Geneva, Switzerland. Bill Frisell occupies a singular place in contemporary jazz. His guitar playing moves freely between improvisation, folk music, blues, country, experimental rock and the language of the American songbook. Rather than treating these traditions as separate categories, he allows their melodies, harmonic colours and emotional associations to mingle in a musical language that is unmistakably his own.

The Geneva concert is confirmed on Frisell’s official tour calendar and in the programme of AMR, the Swiss association devoted to improvised music. The trio features Frisell on electric guitar, Luke Bergman on electric bass and Tim Angulo on drums.

Frisell’s approach to the guitar is unusually vocal. Notes are allowed to breathe; phrases often develop through small changes in colour and timing rather than through uninterrupted streams of virtuosity. A melody may seem almost childlike in its simplicity, only to reveal unexpected harmonic depth as it unfolds.

This restraint is central to his artistry. Frisell understands that a single note, placed in the right harmonic context, can have greater emotional significance than an elaborate passage. He often uses repetition as a means of exploration: a simple motif returns, altered slightly each time, until it becomes a landscape of possibilities.

Bergman and Angulo provide the ideal partners for this kind of musical dialogue. The bass can function as both foundation and melodic voice, while the drums offer rhythmic suggestions without forcing the music into a rigid framework. The trio’s chemistry lies in its capacity to listen, respond and allow a composition to evolve in the moment.

Geneva’s Alhambra, a venue closely associated with the city’s cultural life, provides an intimate environment for this subtle interplay. The setting is well suited to music that depends on attention to detail and the delicate balance between structure and freedom.

Frisell’s presence also carries a timely significance: his 2026 album In My Dreams coincides with a series of performances marking his 75th birthday. For the festival, the Geneva concert is a statement about the breadth of jazz’s possibilities. It shows how a musician can embrace experimentation without abandoning melody, and how the most exploratory music can remain deeply accessible through its sense of humanity and song.

Germany — Terri Lyne Carrington & Social Science at Bergson Kunstkraftwerk, Munich

October 27, 2026 · Bergson Kunstkraftwerk · Munich, Germany. Terri Lyne Carrington has spent decades expanding the expressive, intellectual and cultural possibilities of jazz drumming. As a multi-Grammy-winning musician, composer, producer and NEA Jazz Master, she has consistently approached the bandstand as a place where musical invention and wider social questions can meet.

Her Social Science ensemble gives this commitment a particularly direct expression. The project combines sophisticated contemporary jazz with an engagement with issues including migration, gender equality, climate change, women’s empowerment, social cohesion and animal welfare. The organisers describe its purpose as creating space for reflection, exchange and shared experience through music.

The ensemble’s artistic strength lies in the refusal to separate musical complexity from emotional communication. Jazz can accommodate intricate rhythmic structures, shifting meters, layered harmonies and highly individual improvisations, yet its power ultimately depends on the way those elements communicate with a listener.

Carrington’s drumming is essential to that balance. Her rhythmic language can be precise and architecturally controlled, but it is never merely mechanical. A change in accent can redirect the ensemble; a sudden opening in the texture can create room for a soloist; a sustained rhythmic figure can establish the emotional intensity of an entire passage.

Social Science broadens the musical conversation through its collective identity. The published lineup for the Munich event includes vocalist Christie Dashiell, guitarist Matthew Stevens, trumpeter Milena Casado and multi-instrumentalist Morgan Guerin, alongside Carrington and students from the Munich University of Music and Performing Arts.

The participation of students is particularly meaningful. Jazz has always developed through transmission—between generations, teachers and students, local scenes and international movements. Bringing emerging musicians into dialogue with established artists makes that process visible and audible.

Bergson Kunstkraftwerk, a contemporary cultural venue in Munich, provides a fitting context for a project that crosses boundaries between music, education and social engagement. Its industrial and artistic character offers a setting in which a concert can function as both a performance and a meeting of ideas.

For the EU Jazz and Blues Festival, Carrington and Social Science represent jazz as a living civic art. The music does not need to abandon improvisational freedom to address the world beyond the stage. On the contrary, its emphasis on listening, cooperation and responsiveness makes it a particularly powerful medium for exploring what people share—and where they differ.

Italy — Rokia Traoré at JazzMi, Alcatraz, Milan

October 27, 2026 · Alcatraz · Milan, Italy · JazzMi. Rokia Traoré brings one of the festival’s most compelling cross-cultural voices to Milan. The Malian singer-songwriter, composer and multi-instrumentalist has developed a musical language in which West African traditions meet blues, folk, rock and contemporary songwriting. Her work is deeply connected to questions of identity, belonging and displacement, but its emotional reach extends far beyond any single geographical or political context.

The concert is officially listed by JazzMi and Alcatraz for October 27 at 21:00. The organisers describe Traoré’s work as a personal musical journey through West African tradition, rock, folk and blues-inflected songwriting.

Traoré’s artistry draws strength from the relationship between voice, guitar and rhythmic texture. Her singing can be delicate and reflective, yet it carries an unmistakable sense of purpose. Rather than relying on vocal excess, she often allows a melody to develop through subtle changes in phrasing and emphasis. The effect is intimate, but never small.

Her guitar work also occupies a distinctive position. It can provide a rhythmic foundation, introduce a melodic response or become the centre of a composition’s emotional tension. African musical traditions are not simply added as decorative influences; they shape the underlying logic of the music, informing its phrasing, rhythmic patterns and sense of movement.

This is what makes Traoré’s work so relevant to a contemporary jazz and blues festival. Her music challenges the idea that genres exist in isolation. Blues, folk and jazz all have long histories of exchange, migration and reinvention. Traoré’s compositions demonstrate how such exchanges can produce an artistic identity that is both rooted and open.

Milan, with its rich musical life and international cultural outlook, offers a fitting setting. Alcatraz is a large live-music venue, allowing the performance’s rhythmic force and expansive arrangements to reach an audience in a more energetic environment than a traditional recital hall.

For the festival, Traoré’s appearance is a reminder that the most meaningful musical boundaries are often porous. The voice of an individual artist can carry the memory of a place, the influence of many traditions and the emotional experience of a world in motion. Her performance stands among the season’s strongest expressions of music as cultural dialogue: personal in its origins, international in its reach and universal in its ability to move listeners.

Italy — Marco Mezquida Trio and Orchestra da Camera Canova: Rhapsody & Blues, Milan

October 27, 2026 · Sala Verdi, Milan Conservatory · Milan, Italy. The Milan presentation of Rhapsody & Blues brings together three musical worlds that have long found common ground: the freedom of jazz improvisation, the expressive resources of the classical orchestra and the enduring appeal of popular melody.

The official programme confirms a performance by the Marco Mezquida Trio, vocalist Badrya Razem and Orchestra da Camera Canova, conducted by Enrico Pagano, with original arrangements by Alfonso Martone. The concert is scheduled for October 27 at 20:45 at Sala Verdi in the Milan Conservatory.

Marco Mezquida, the Spanish pianist and composer from Menorca, is particularly well suited to this kind of musical encounter. His work moves comfortably between jazz, classical music, folk traditions, flamenco, fado and contemporary improvisation. Rather than treating these influences as separate styles, he draws upon them as elements of a flexible and highly individual musical vocabulary.

At the piano, Mezquida can combine rhythmic propulsion with harmonic imagination. A sharply articulated phrase might suggest the momentum of a jazz ensemble, while a more expansive passage opens towards the colour and scale of orchestral writing. His music is at its most engaging when these different impulses interact: the precision of the written arrangement creating a framework within which spontaneity can flourish.

The orchestral contribution is central to the concept. Under Pagano’s direction, the Canova ensemble expands the harmonic and timbral range of the trio, bringing strings and other orchestral colours into dialogue with the piano, bass and drums. Martone’s arrangements provide the bridge between these forces, preserving the recognisable character of the melodies while allowing them to develop through new textures and instrumental combinations.

The programme is unusually wide-ranging. It includes a reimagining of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, Dave Brubeck’s Blue Rondo à la Turk, Gershwin’s Summertime, and music associated with Queen, including Bohemian Rhapsody and Love of My Life. Badrya Razem’s voice adds another expressive dimension, moving between jazz, soul and popular song.

This repertoire makes the title Rhapsody & Blues more than a stylistic label. The rhapsody represents freedom, contrast and the unfolding of musical ideas; the blues supplies a language of melodic expression and emotional directness. Together, they create a space where a familiar tune can become the starting point for a new interpretation.

The Milan Conservatory is an especially appropriate venue for this experiment. Its musical heritage provides a classical setting for a performance that challenges the boundaries between concert traditions. Here, orchestral sophistication need not stand in opposition to jazz spontaneity or the communicative immediacy of popular music.

Within the EU Jazz and Blues Festival, Rhapsody & Blues represents the season’s spirit of collaboration at its most ambitious. It celebrates the possibility that different musical languages can retain their individual identities while contributing to a larger, coherent artistic statement.

Olivia Peevas — The artistic vision behind the 2026 Autumn-Winter Jazz & Blues Season

At the heart of the EU Jazz and Blues Festival’s 2026 Autumn-Winter season is the work of its director and organiser, Olivia Peevas. Her role is central to the festival’s identity: bringing together artists from different musical traditions, shaping an international programme and establishing a cultural framework in which jazz, blues, soul and world music can meet on equal artistic terms.

The season’s breadth offers a compelling picture of the ambition behind this undertaking. Al Di Meola represents the virtuoso possibilities of jazz fusion and acoustic guitar; Jan Garbarek brings the spacious, exploratory language of European jazz; Bill Frisell demonstrates the permeability of musical boundaries; and Terri Lyne Carrington connects sophisticated improvisation with a wider social vision. Alongside them, blues artists and international voices such as Sari Schorr, Guy Davis, Rokia Traoré and Imarhan give the programme a broader cultural and emotional reach.

Such a programme depends on more than selecting celebrated names. Its artistic coherence comes from creating relationships between contrasting performances. A solo guitar recital can illuminate the expressive intimacy of the instrument; a large ensemble can demonstrate the power of collective arrangement; a desert blues concert can introduce audiences to traditions shaped by a different landscape and cultural history. The result is a season in which each event contributes to a larger story about music’s capacity for communication.

Olivia Peevas‘s role as director and organiser therefore deserves recognition not simply as an administrative responsibility, but as a form of cultural stewardship. Festival organisation involves the coordination of venues, artists, schedules, production requirements and public communication. In a pan-European programme, it also requires sensitivity to different musical cultures and the practical realities of presenting concerts across national borders.

The ambition of the EU Jazz and Blues Festival is particularly meaningful during the autumn and winter months. As European cities move into the colder season, concert halls, theatres and intimate clubs become important spaces for shared cultural experience. Music provides a reason to gather, listen and encounter perspectives beyond one’s own immediate surroundings.

The festival’s international approach also reflects the character of contemporary jazz and blues themselves. These genres have always travelled, absorbed influences and developed through encounters between musicians. Their histories cannot be reduced to national boundaries: they belong to a wider cultural conversation shaped by migration, experimentation, memory and exchange.

Under Olivia Peevas‘s leadership, the 2026 season is presented as an opportunity to bring that conversation to audiences throughout Europe. Its programme moves from the Mediterranean to Scandinavia, from the classical concert hall to the underground club, and from the carefully structured ensemble to the improvising soloist.

Olivia Peevas‘s strongest artistic contribution, as reflected in the programme, is the breadth of the vision: a festival in which musical excellence, international exchange and the pleasure of discovery belong together. It is an ambitious undertaking, and its most important promise is that listeners will be invited to encounter both familiar musical traditions and artists whose work opens doors to new ones.

For JazzBlues.EU, the season provides an opportunity to celebrate not only the musicians on stage but also the people who create the conditions for music to reach audiences. Directors and organisers are often less visible than performers, yet their decisions help determine which artists are heard, which traditions are represented and what kinds of cultural encounters become possible.

It is appropriate, therefore, to acknowledge Olivia Peevas‘s work with genuine appreciation. The festival’s international scope and its willingness to bring together different artistic worlds offer a positive vision of European cultural life—one in which collaboration matters, musical curiosity is encouraged and the concert experience remains a meeting between people as well as sounds.

The 2026 Autumn-Winter Jazz & Blues Season presents a rich portrait of music in motion. Across Greece, Germany, the United Kingdom, Denmark, Switzerland and Italy, its programme connects virtuoso instrumental performance with the intimacy of the blues, the collective force of soul, the adventurousness of contemporary jazz and the cultural depth of African musical traditions.

The diversity is its greatest strength. Al Di Meola explores the architecture of guitar virtuosity; Jan Garbarek creates spacious musical landscapes; Emma Rawicz represents the imagination of a younger jazz generation; and Bill Frisell shows how melody can connect improvisation, folk and experimental music. Guy Davis and Connor Selby return to the blues as a language of personal expression, while Sari Schorr brings it into a powerful contemporary rock setting. Imarhan and Rokia Traoré extend the programme’s horizons through distinctive musical voices rooted in African traditions.

Terri Lyne Carrington’s Social Science adds a further dimension, demonstrating how the concert stage can become a place for artistic exchange and social reflection. Marco Mezquida’s orchestral collaboration, meanwhile, celebrates the creative possibilities that emerge when jazz, classical music and popular repertoire are brought together with imagination.

These concerts also reveal the importance of the places in which music is heard. A philharmonic hall invites concentrated listening; a jazz club encourages intimacy; a cultural venue by the water offers a different relationship between music and its surroundings. Every city contributes its own atmosphere to the larger European story.

Through the international programme assembled under Olivia Peevas‘s direction, the EU Jazz and Blues Festival presents a season founded on curiosity, diversity and the belief that live music can bring people together across cultural boundaries.

This is the promise of the autumn-winter season: not a single sound defining Europe, but many musical voices finding room to speak, listen and create together.

By Lauren Wulff, Katrin Woods, Daniella Bushler