Explosions of sound under open skies, stories from the GDR, and a moving finale with Gumpert and Sommer – the Peitz 2025 Jazz Festival rekindles the spirit of resistance.
By Patrik Landolt

The 62nd Jazz Festival Peitz, an open-air event in eastern Germany near the Polish border with a long tradition and great importance for jazz innovation in the former GDR, took place from August 15 to 17 under the new curator Marie Blobel. The generational change in festival leadership has been a success.

The festival unfolded in the courtyard of the Hüttenwerk industrial monument, with four different venues, the open-air stage at the center. Alongside the local label Jazzwerkstatt, founded by Uli Blobel, Intakt Records also presented new releases at the festival’s CD table. Beyond sales, this presence creates opportunities for conversations with customers, subscribers, music enthusiasts, and musicians alike.

More than twenty concerts were heard at this year’s festival. Standout memories include the powerful performance of Weird of Mouth — Craig Taborn, Mette Rasmussen, and Ches Smith — and the sonic spectacle of Bonecrusher, the nine-piece trombone orchestra led by Mathias Muche.

In the resonant Stüler Church, the trombone choir with percussion unfolded elaborate soundscapes that, though purely acoustic, sometimes reached into the spectrum of new electro-acoustic innovations. Their performance of a composition by the late trombonist Hannes Bauer, originally developed using multi-track tape recordings, was particularly striking.

On the open-air stage, the trio of Hamid Drake, Joshua Abrams, and Andreas Roysum wove trance-like grooves, improvisations, and swinging percussion into long narrative arcs. Hamid Drake’s charismatic singing, rising above the rhythm, captured the hearts of the audience.

The crowning moment of the festival belonged to the duo Uli Gumpert – Günter Baby Sommer — a “home game,” so to speak. Their tour through music forged over decades of collaboration was also a living history lesson, enriched with anecdotes from life in the GDR.

One such story accompanied their performance of Wolf Biermann’s anti-militaristic piece “Soldat, Soldat.” Sommer recalled how, after Biermann’s expatriation in 1976, the Jena Jazz Festival canceled their concert and declared the two musicians “sick.” To the audience’s astonishment, Gumpert and Sommer nevertheless appeared cheerfully at the festival — only to be placed under hotel arrest by the authorities. The concert that never took place was still granted a glowing review in the Jena newspaper Volk the next day, under the headline: “Acclaimed concert by Ulrich Gumpert and Günter Sommer.”

At Peitz 2025, the duo once again received thunderous applause — this time for the Gumpert–Sommer standards that have already become classics within their lifetimes. As an encore, they offered Roland Kirk’s deeply sorrowful “The Black and Crazy Blues” — a declaration of love to jazz, tinged with melancholy for times gone by.

(The Gumpert–Sommer Duo has 2 recordings on Intakt Records: “Das donnernde Leben” – Intakt CD 169 and “La Paloma” – Intakt CD 198).