Diego Pinera & friends @ZigZag Berlin

Diego Pinera And Friends Series
FEAT: Elias Stemeseder, Felix Henkelhausen, Wanja Slavin & Ben Kraef

This is a series of great musicians that Diego Pinera has put together as an all star line up!
Diego Pinera has won an Echo Award for Best Instrumentalist of the Year 2017 (Drums/National) and the German Jazz Award for Best Arrangement of the Year 2023, making him one of the most important personalities in the jazz scene.
The term "child prodigy" quickly comes to mind when researching Uruguayan-born Diego Pinera. He was already playing drums as a child and later received "regular" training in Cuba, the USA and Germany. His adopted home is Berlin. And, yes, the 42-year-old is such an outstanding drummer that it is no surprise that he proved his talent as a child.

Elias Stemeseder (*1990) is a pianist, keyboard instrumentalist, electronic musician and composer. His work combines musical processes, ideas and means of expression from different temporal and geographical origins and translates them into personally shaped organizing principles.

Wanja Slavin (*1982 in Freiburg im Breisgau) is a German jazz musician (saxophone, composition, also clarinet, flute, piano) who also works as a music producer. In 2014, he was awarded the ECHO Jazz as instrumentalist of the year national saxophone/woodwinds for the album Slavin-Eldh-Lillinger.[3] In 2020, he was honored with the band Slavin-Henkelhausen-Merk as part of the new German Jazz Award. In 2021 he was nominated for the German Jazz Award as a saxophonist and won first place at the BMW Welt Jazz Award with the Peter Gall Quintet in 2021. The album "Confrontation" by Mirna Bogdanovic, which he produced, won the 2021 German Jazz Award in the category Debut Album of the Year.

Felix Henkelhausen (* 1995 in Oldenburg (Oldenburg)) is a German jazz musician (double bass, composition). Henkelhausen presented himself with a septet on RBB Kultur in 2019, where Ulf Drechsel counted him among the assets of the Berlin jazz scene. He founded his own quintet with Wanja Slavin, Uli Kempendorff, Elias Stemeseder and Leif Berger, with whom he released the album Misanthropic Tendencies on Blackbird Music in 2021, which was unanimously praised by critics. Hans-Jürgen Schaal, for example, said: "Rarely has there been a debut album that went the whole hog so skillfully. A masterstroke."

Ben Kraef, a German-Montenegrin saxophonist and composer who graduated from the Hanns Eisler Academy of Music, lives in Berlin.
In 2007, he moved to New York City on a scholarship from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and earned a Master of Arts degree from the City College of New York in 2009.
In recent years, Ben has received several international prizes and awards, including the Biberacher Jazzpreis (2006), the "Concours International de Jazz de Fribourg" (2007), the Yamaha Saxophone Contest (2007) and the Billie Stoller Scholarship for an outstanding scholar and musician from the City College of New York (2008).