A European Symphony of Jazz, Blues, Improvisation and Musical Discovery at Autumn – Winter Jazz – Blues Season 2026: Photos

1. James Carter — Teatro Metropolitan, Catania

Catania, Sicily, Italy! The appearance of James Carter brings the commanding energy of American jazz to Sicily. One of the most versatile saxophonists of his generation, Carter is celebrated for his technical brilliance, his mastery of the instrument’s extended possibilities and his ability to move between jazz traditions without losing his individual voice.

At the Teatro Metropolitan, a concert of this kind invites a meeting between the monumental scale of Carter’s musicianship and the warmth of a Mediterranean audience. His approach to the saxophone can encompass a full, muscular tenor sound, the agile brightness of the alto, and the astonishing depth and resonance of the baritone. Circular breathing, growling effects, multiphonics and sudden changes in register can become expressive tools rather than mere demonstrations of technique.

What makes Carter compelling is the feeling that his virtuosity always serves a larger musical purpose. The sound can be exuberant, turbulent, humorous or deeply blues-inflected, with phrases that seem to stretch against the boundaries of the instrument before returning to a groove that listeners can immediately recognise. In Catania, his presence represents one of the season’s strongest statements about jazz as both a living tradition and an art of fearless individual expression.

Kjartan Sveinsson, Gyða Valtýsdóttir and Bert Cools — Auditorium San Fedele

Milan, Italy! Milan’s contemporary musical life provides fertile ground for an encounter between Icelandic atmosphere, European experimentalism and the delicate art of collective sound-making.

Multi-instrumentalist Kjartan Sveinsson of Sigur Rós, cellist Gyða Valtýsdóttir, and Belgian guitarist and sound artist Bert Cools bring together sensibilities that resist the boundaries between jazz, ambient music, contemporary composition and the avant-garde.

The cello is particularly suited to this meeting. Its warm, human resonance can suggest a voice without words, while the guitar can create both delicate melodic lines and spacious electronic textures. Sveinsson’s musical imagination adds an atmospheric dimension, allowing sounds to breathe and evolve rather than forcing them into a conventional verse-and-chorus structure.

At the Auditorium San Fedele, this kind of music encourages attentive listening. A single sustained tone may become as significant as a virtuosic passage; silence may be as expressive as sound. Gradually changing textures, overlapping musical gestures and the interplay of acoustic and electronic colours can create the impression of a landscape unfolding in slow motion.

The reported Milan programme also included Lithuanian kanklės player and vocalist Indrė Jurgelevičiūtė, whose presence further strengthens the meeting between Baltic folk traditions and experimental sound. The concert therefore belongs to a wider European conversation in which heritage is not treated as a museum object but as a living source of creative possibility.

Norma Winstone & Glauco Venier — Teatro Lirico

Milan, Italy! The collaboration between British vocal jazz legend Norma Winstone and Italian pianist and composer Glauco Venier represents the quieter, more contemplative side of the season.

Winstone’s art is distinguished by a rare combination of precision, freedom and emotional restraint. She can treat the human voice almost as an instrumental line, moving through harmonic spaces with subtle phrasing and an extraordinary sensitivity to the shape of a melody. Her long association with European creative jazz has helped establish a vocal language that is unmistakably personal and never dependent on conventional showmanship.

Venier’s piano offers an ideal counterpart: harmonically rich, attentive to colour and capable of moving from the intimacy of a single chord to the expansive possibilities of contemporary jazz. Together, singer and pianist can create a musical dialogue in which accompaniment is never merely decorative. The piano listens, responds and opens doors; the voice explores them.

At Milan’s Teatro Lirico, the encounter evokes the elegance of chamber music while preserving the improvisational freedom that makes jazz so immediate. This is a concert concept built around nuance, breath and the expressive power of what remains unsaid. Winstone’s MBE recognises a distinguished career, but the deepest tribute lies in the music itself: a lifetime of artistic curiosity distilled into every phrase.

Sullivan Fortner Trio — Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club

Craig Taborn & Peter Evans — Vortex Jazz Club

London, United Kingdom! At the Vortex, London’s long-standing home for adventurous jazz, pianist and keyboardist Craig Taborn meets trumpeter Peter Evans in a musical environment where unpredictability becomes a creative principle.

Taborn’s work often explores the relationship between structure and freedom. His keyboard vocabulary can combine intricate rhythmic patterns, atmospheric harmonies and sharply defined musical fragments, while Evans is known for his remarkable command of the trumpet and his willingness to push the instrument into unfamiliar territory.

Their encounter suggests a performance built around alertness and spontaneous decision-making. A trumpet tone might emerge as a clear melodic statement, then fracture into breath, resonance and unusual articulation. The piano might answer with a tightly organised pattern or a cloud of harmonies that shifts the listener’s sense of space.

In this music, virtuosity is measured not simply by the difficulty of a passage but by the ability to listen, react and invent in real time. The performers must balance freedom with discipline, surprise with coherence, and individual expression with a shared musical direction.

The Vortex is a fitting setting because experimental jazz thrives in spaces where audiences arrive ready to listen without demanding predictable answers. This is the season at its most exploratory: music as a living process rather than a finished object.

Brian Templeton — Musicon

The Hague, Netherlands! The blues arrives in the Netherlands through the unmistakable voice of the harmonica. Brian Templeton represents a tradition in which a small instrument can communicate enormous emotional weight.

The harmonica’s expressive power rests on its ability to imitate the inflections of the human voice. Bent notes, breath-driven phrases, rough-edged attacks and sustained tones can suggest sorrow, humour, longing or defiance. In the hands of a skilled blues performer, these sounds are not ornaments: they are the vocabulary of a musical language built from lived experience.

Musicon’s club-oriented atmosphere offers an appropriate environment for the immediacy of the blues. Here, the relationship between performer and audience matters as much as technical polish. Rhythmic repetition creates anticipation; a vocal phrase invites a response; the harmonica solo becomes a moment in which tension and release are felt physically as well as heard.

This concert brings an important balance to a season rich in experimental jazz. It reminds listeners that musical sophistication can be found in directness, that a simple blues form can sustain endless invention, and that the emotional truth of a performance does not depend on complexity alone.

Jethro Tull — Nijmegen

Nijmegen, Netherlands! The appearance of Jethro Tull introduces a landmark of British progressive rock whose relationship with jazz has always been enriched by rhythmic complexity, instrumental colour and a willingness to challenge conventional song structures.

Led by the unmistakable presence of Ian Anderson, the band has built a distinctive musical identity around flute, electric guitar, rock rhythms and an imaginative fusion of folk, classical and blues influences. Anderson’s flute playing is especially significant: it transforms an instrument often associated with orchestral delicacy into a powerful rock voice, capable of cutting through the ensemble with sharp articulation and remarkable rhythmic agility.

Jethro Tull’s music frequently balances carefully shaped compositions with instrumental episodes that encourage improvisatory freedom. Contrasting moods, unexpected transitions and finely arranged ensemble passages give the repertoire a theatrical dimension without sacrificing musical substance.

Nijmegen, one of the Netherlands’ oldest cities, provides a fitting setting for a band whose career has connected generations of listeners. Within the wider festival season, this performance extends the definition of musical discovery, showing how the creative spirit shared by jazz, blues and progressive rock can transcend genre labels.

The inclusion of Jethro Tull is also a reminder that European musical culture has always developed through cross-pollination. The festival’s artistic breadth allows a rock landmark to stand alongside jazz innovators and blues masters as part of the same larger story.

Elina Duni & Rob Luft — Lausanne

Lausanne, Switzerland! The meeting of Swiss-Albanian vocalist Elina Duni and British guitarist Rob Luft is one of the season’s most poetic musical encounters. Their work draws on contemporary jazz, traditional songs and the emotional geography of the Balkans, creating a repertoire in which memory and modernity can coexist naturally.

Duni’s voice has an expressive clarity that allows a song to retain its emotional centre even when its arrangement becomes sparse. Her phrasing can suggest the intimacy of a folk singer telling a story across a table, yet her jazz sensibility leaves room for ambiguity, silence and subtle changes of emphasis.

Luft’s guitar is a sensitive partner rather than a conventional accompanist. His lines can shimmer around the voice, offer a counter-melody or open a harmonic space that allows a traditional tune to reveal unexpected dimensions. Their partnership thrives on restraint: a few notes may communicate more than a dense arrangement, and a pause may hold the emotional weight of an entire verse.

Lausanne’s setting is especially appropriate for music that crosses cultural boundaries without losing its sense of home. Balkan rhythms and melodic inflections meet the open harmonic language of modern jazz, while the duo’s interplay creates a sound that feels both intimate and international.

The result is a vision of European jazz grounded in listening, cultural memory and the belief that music can travel far without abandoning the stories from which it began.

Simone Kopmajer Quartet — Obere Mühle

Dübendorf, Switzerland! Austrian vocalist Simone Kopmajer brings a warm, melodic approach to vocal jazz, combining an appreciation of the Great American Songbook with a contemporary sense of phrasing and atmosphere.

The quartet format allows her voice to remain at the centre while leaving ample room for instrumental conversation. A relaxed swing groove can give a standard new life; a ballad can reveal its emotional subtleties through carefully controlled dynamics; a more rhythmically adventurous arrangement can bring out the flexibility of a singer comfortable with both tradition and modern expression.

The Obere Mühle, a cultural and meeting centre in Dübendorf, lends the occasion an intimate community character. Rather than relying on the grandeur of a large hall, the concert’s appeal lies in proximity: the small details of diction, breath, accompaniment and rhythmic placement become part of the experience.

Kopmajer’s international profile gives the event a wider significance, but the essence of vocal jazz remains beautifully direct. A good melody, interpreted with sincerity and supported by a responsive ensemble, can create a musical connection that transcends language and nationality.

Justin Adams & Cherifa Kersit — Philharmonie Luxembourg

Luxembourg City, Luxembourg! Few collaborations express the transnational spirit of this festival as clearly as the meeting of British guitarist and producer Justin Adams with Moroccan vocalist Cherifa Kersit. Their programme, presented under the name Tamazight Blues, brings together the guitar’s electric and rhythmic vocabulary with the rich Amazigh musical heritage of North Africa.

Adams has long explored the connections between blues, desert music and North African traditions, including his work with Robert Plant and his association with Tinariwen. Kersit’s vocal artistry brings a cultural depth that cannot be reduced to a stylistic influence: the songs carry their own language, memory and identity.

In this meeting, rhythm becomes a bridge. Repeated guitar figures can establish a hypnotic foundation, while vocal phrases rise above the pulse with an expressive freedom shaped by Amazigh tradition. The resulting music can feel at once earthy and expansive, drawing on the physical force of the blues while creating an atmosphere of trance and reflection.

The Philharmonie Luxembourg, a major European concert venue, offers an especially compelling context for this encounter. A sophisticated architectural environment becomes the setting for music that reaches beyond conventional borders and asks listeners to hear connections rather than divisions.

This is not simply a fusion of two styles. It is a meeting between artists whose distinct identities remain audible within a shared creative space. The result exemplifies the festival’s most important principle: international collaboration is strongest when it honours difference rather than smoothing it away.

Anthony Braxton Septet & Alexander Hawkins — Haus der Berliner Festspiele

Berlin, Germany! The appearance of Anthony Braxton represents one of the most intellectually ambitious moments in the entire season. A towering figure in experimental jazz, a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and an uncompromising composer, Braxton has spent decades exploring the relationship between improvisation, composition, notation, timbre and the organisation of musical time.

His music asks performers to think beyond the conventional division between a written score and a spontaneous solo. Musical gestures may emerge from intricate systems, unusual instrumental combinations or sudden changes of direction. Yet the resulting experience need not be understood as an intellectual exercise alone. At its most compelling, Braxton’s music is intensely physical: breath, attack, resonance and collective movement become the raw materials of an evolving sound world.

The presence of British pianist Alexander Hawkins adds another important dimension. Hawkins is a pianist deeply engaged with the history of creative and avant-garde jazz, capable of balancing structural clarity with daring harmonic exploration. His contribution to a programme associated with Braxton creates the possibility of a dialogue between carefully considered musical architecture and spontaneous invention.

The Erosão Percussion Trio further expands the sonic vocabulary. Percussion can establish pulses, interrupt them, create layers of resonance or transform the ensemble’s sense of motion. In a septet context, the relationship between individual voices and collective structure becomes especially fascinating: each musician contributes a distinct musical identity while participating in a larger, continually evolving design.

Haus der Berliner Festspiele, with its place in Berlin’s ambitious performing-arts culture, is an appropriate home for such a programme. This concert embodies the intellectual courage of contemporary jazz and reminds us that musical freedom is not the absence of structure, but the possibility of discovering new structures.

Michael Wollny & Émile Parisien — St. Martinskirche

Hanover, Germany! German pianist Michael Wollny and French soprano saxophonist Émile Parisien represent two particularly distinctive strands of contemporary European jazz. Their encounter places the piano’s broad harmonic and percussive resources alongside the soprano saxophone’s bright, penetrating voice.

Wollny is known for an adventurous musical imagination that moves freely between jazz, contemporary composition and unexpected sonic associations. His piano can create a dense, almost orchestral field of sound before retreating into an exposed melody or a handful of carefully placed notes. Parisien, meanwhile, brings an expressive and agile approach to the soprano saxophone, capable of moving from lyrical delicacy to sharply articulated bursts of rhythmic energy.

Their pairing suggests a dialogue built on contrast. The piano may establish a harmonic landscape only for the saxophone to question its direction; a melodic fragment may return in a different register or rhythm, transformed by the partner’s response. Rather than simply accompanying one another, the musicians can reshape the music through continuous exchange.

St. Martinskirche adds a distinctive architectural and acoustic dimension. A church setting can lend sustained notes and quiet passages a special resonance, encouraging music to unfold with a sense of space. The juxtaposition of a historic sacred interior and modern improvisation offers a striking image of European culture: tradition not as a constraint, but as an environment in which new art can flourish.

Sheryl Youngblood — Teatro Principal de Alicante

Alicante, Spain! Chicago blues comes to the Mediterranean through the commanding presence of Sheryl Youngblood. A vocalist, drummer, songwriter and bandleader, Youngblood brings together the expressive traditions of blues, gospel and soul in a performance style rooted in rhythmic authority and emotional directness.

Her musical identity reflects the close relationship between the church, the blues club and the broader African-American musical tradition. Gospel contributes a sense of uplift and spiritual intensity; the blues provides a vocabulary of struggle, resilience and personal testimony; soul brings warmth, melodic immediacy and a powerful sense of connection with the audience.

The Teatro Principal de Alicante, with its historic theatrical atmosphere, offers a compelling contrast to the informal surroundings of a traditional blues club. Within this setting, the emotional force of Youngblood’s music can be experienced as both an intimate confession and a shared celebration.

Her announced ensemble includes guitarist José Luis Pardo, harmonica player Tota Blues and keyboardist Víctor Puertas, alongside Youngblood on voice and drums. That combination gives the programme a particularly rich palette: guitar lines can sharpen the rhythmic edge, harmonica can answer the vocal with blues-inflected commentary, and Hammond organ or piano can deepen the harmonic foundation.

The significance of this appearance lies in the blues’s extraordinary capacity to communicate across borders. The musical language may have deep roots in American history, but its emotional vocabulary—heartbreak, hope, determination and joy—is universally recognisable.

Champian Fulton Scandinavian Quartet — Nivågård’s Malerisamling

Nivå, Denmark! New York-based pianist and vocalist Champian Fulton brings the vitality of American swing to a Danish cultural setting, joined by Swedish saxophonist Klas Lindquist.

Fulton’s musical personality is rooted in a deep affection for the jazz piano and vocal traditions associated with swing. Her approach places melody, rhythmic buoyancy and the pleasure of musical communication at the centre. The piano can provide an energetic rhythmic foundation, trace elegant melodic variations or open a space for a relaxed vocal interpretation.

Lindquist’s participation gives the quartet a distinctive Scandinavian dimension. The saxophone can engage in playful exchanges with the piano, contribute warm melodic statements or lead the ensemble into a more expansive improvisational passage. In a well-balanced quartet, the music moves naturally between arranged material and the freedom of the moment.

Nivågård’s Malerisamling, known for its art collections and tranquil surroundings, creates an unusual and attractive context for jazz. The meeting of visual art and live music encourages an experience based on attentive observation and listening. Swing’s rhythmic warmth can animate the refined atmosphere without overwhelming it.

This concert demonstrates that jazz tradition is not sustained by nostalgia alone. It lives through musicians who understand its language, take pleasure in its possibilities and bring it into conversation with audiences of different generations and cultural backgrounds.

Gary Clark Jr. — European Tour

European concert appearance; city and venue not supplied! Gary Clark Jr. occupies a compelling position in contemporary blues and rock. His guitar sound connects the expressive vocabulary of the blues with the weight, volume and rhythmic force of modern electric music. Rather than treating the blues as a fixed historical style, he approaches it as a flexible language that can absorb soul, rock, funk and contemporary influences.

The electric guitar is the centre of his musical identity. A phrase may begin with the familiar shape of a blues line and then expand through distortion, sustain, rhythmic displacement or a sudden burst of improvisation. His playing can be raw and forceful, but it also makes room for space, melodic restraint and the expressive possibilities of tone itself.

In a live setting, that combination can create a powerful sense of physical presence. The groove establishes a common pulse, the rhythm section intensifies the momentum, and the guitar becomes a voice capable of communicating emotion without explanation.

Clark’s place in the EU Jazz and Blues Festival’s wider musical landscape reinforces the continuing relevance of the blues. Alongside traditional harmonica-led performances and more experimental jazz programmes, his work shows how the same underlying musical vocabulary can generate radically different forms of expression.

The exact European city, venue and date for this appearance were not included in the supplied information, so they remain unassigned in this report.

Olivia Peevas — Director and Organiser of the EU Jazz and Blues Festival

At the heart of the 2026 Autumn-Winter Jazz – Blues Season stands Olivia Peevas, whose leadership provides the festival with a clear identity: European in scope, international in outlook and committed to the extraordinary diversity of jazz and blues.

A season extending across cities and musical cultures requires more than the assembly of an impressive list of performers. It requires an artistic vision capable of connecting apparently different musical worlds, a sense of proportion between established masters and emerging voices, and an understanding of how each concert can contribute to a larger narrative. The programme’s movement from American jazz virtuosity to European chamber improvisation, from Chicago blues to North African musical exchange, and from swing to contemporary electronic music offers a vivid picture of that ambition.

The most admirable aspect of such a vision is its openness. Rather than defining jazz narrowly, the season embraces the music’s capacity for reinvention. It recognises that a historic jazz club, a modern cultural centre, a church with a resonant acoustic and a lively urban club each offer different possibilities for artistic communication. The venue is not merely a backdrop; it becomes part of the musical experience.

Olivia’s role as director and organiser can therefore be understood as the work of connecting artists, audiences, institutions and places. A pan-European programme must negotiate different cultural environments and present a coherent identity without erasing the individuality of each city. The artistic reward is a festival that feels expansive yet connected, ambitious yet attentive to the intimate details that make live music memorable.

The season also places European cultural exchange at its centre. British, American, Swiss, Austrian, German, Italian, Moroccan and other musical perspectives meet within a shared programme. The result is a portrait of Europe as a living cultural space—one in which artistic traditions remain distinctive while constantly influencing one another.

Most importantly, Olivia’s festival vision gives equal dignity to different forms of musical expression. The adventurous listener can discover new compositional ideas in Anthony Braxton’s world, the emotional directness of the blues in Sheryl Youngblood’s performance, the elegance of Norma Winstone’s vocal art, or the forward-looking energy of Tempo Futuro. Each represents a different way of understanding music, and each has a place within the season’s broader artistic picture.