The new album „Wawau Adler – Expressions“ took it’s origin in the Internet. There Wawau Adler saw videos of the outstanding Violinist Eva Slongo for the first time and was impressed by her improvisational virtuosity. During Jam-Sessions with Eva on the Festival Django Reinhardt, Samois sur Seine, 2012, both decided to intensify their musical collaboration and team up for future projects. With the perspective of melting the full scope of his musical ideas – the world of Jazz Manouche, the guitar artistry of Django Reinhardt as well as modern elements of Jazz - the album “Expressions” plays an important role for Wawau. Additionally due to the fact, that “Wawau Adler - Expressions” will comprise several of Wawau’s original compositions.

In their second release, celebrated Berlin-based Swiss trombonist’s Euro-American band find common ground between avant jazz and the sophisticated court music of medieval masters Machaut and Dufay. Blaser takes a varied approach to the material, from faithful transcriptions to recompositions that freely adapt formal elements of the originals. The band members, long recognized for their contributions to jazz and beyond, play with a relaxed refinement that occasionally erupts in joyful abandon. Benoît Delbecq’s glowing audiophile production and Blaser’s colorful arrangements establish a continuity of mood and feeling that gives the record broad appeal. Blaser is ranked #7 on the Downbeat Critics Poll this year for trombone (August issue).

In April, 2011 an emotional shock listening 'Gatito', which signs the meeting with Elodie Pasquier and Grégoire Gensse and the beginning of a human adventure with the label Laborie Jazz. The universe of orTie shows slices of life that we all lived, the enjoyment, the surprise, the peace and the internal conflicts. The listener discovers a remarkable intensity in that music, which gets the emotion in the most vibrating way. An album in duet, which imposes a new language, and which introduces two great musicians on the European scene.

When a young jazz musician composes a suite and calls it 'Berlin Kaboom!', it calls to mind the many young guns in the German capital's jazz scene. Saxophonist Max von Mosch, who does exactly this with his first own ACT album, has only lived in Berlin for two years, and despite being just 33 years of age, he is already an old hand and figurehead of German jazz.

Jupiter was the King of all the Gods for the Romans: the Heavenly Father, the bringer of light. It was him you invoked when the goddess of fate had unexpectedly intervened in your life. So it was with the Swedish drummer Magnus Öström, who was dealt a stroke of fate almost five years ago when his close friend, the pianist Esbjörn Svensson, was killed in an accident. They had revolutionised the jazz world since 1993 with e.s.t. - the Esbjörn Svensson Trio.

Transylvanian Concert” marks an ECM debut for Romanian pianist-composer Lucian Ban and a welcome return for US violist Mat Maneri, in his 9th appearance for the label. The album documents a spontaneously organised performance in Targu Mures, in the region where Lucian Ban grew up. A large, highly-attentive audience follows Ban and Maneri through a programme of their self-penned ballads, blues, hymns and abstract improvisations, plus Mat’s chilling solo performance of the spiritual “Nobody Knows The Trouble I’ve Seen”, the whole informed by the twin traditions of jazz and European chamber music. Rain, drumming upon the stained-glass windows of the Culture Palace, offers occasional melancholy commentary. In all, a unique and compelling set.

German pianist Joachim Kühn could have had a career in classical music had he not early on developed an enthusiasm for jazz under the influence of his older brother, clarinettist Rolf Kühn. After leaving his natal Leipzig, then still under communist yoke, the young Bach fan arrived in Paris in 1968 in the midst of the free jazz movement. His meetings with Don Cherry, Aldo Romano, Gato Barbieri, Archie Shepp and Roswell Rudd were determining. “The spirit of jazz”, he confided, “is rebellious and free”. This became the leitmotiv of his entire career.

The critics just can’t hide their excitement when it comes to Edgar Knecht. “Jazz hasn’t been this original and stimulating for a long time”, one of them enthused; “This music is simply stunning”, respected monthly Jazzpodium confessed; and Germany’s biggest quality newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung wrote: “This is truly unheard-of music.” And truly, the German pianist and his band of bassist Rolf Denecke and drum-duo Stephan Emig and Tobias Schulte succeed in creating something genuinely new: A fusion of the vivacity of jazz and world music with the elegance of classical composition and the depth and clarity of ancient folk melodies.

'The thing that fascinates me about Goya is that throughout the course of his life he continually closes in on what he considers to be the essence of being human,' Berlins most interesting guitarist Arne Jansen says about the spanish painter Francisco Goya, whose pictures inspired him to his ACT-debut ''The Sleep of Reason - Ode to Goya'. If you've ever heard the Berlin guitarist Arne Jansen, you'll know how difficult it is to forget his special sound. That passionate rummaging around in the warm diversity of the electric guitar, where bashful understatement mixes with playful sensuality. The humaneness become sound that always searches for what is special in the commonplace, exudes serenity and yet never itself comes to rest because its quest never ceases.