IG-Jazz Session

In the organizer's words:

The IG-Jazz session is a meeting place for the jazz and related music scene. A band plays an opening set, followed by jamming from a common repertoire. For the audience, jazz comes alive and can be experienced, for the musicians it is a place to try out their skills and meet new people. It is also an opportunity to invite bands from other cities and thus promote networking between the scenes.

On April 28th with Pocket Radio:

Benedikt Jäckle - saxophone, flute
Riaz Khabirpour - guitar
Matthias Akeo Nowak - bass
Fabian Arends - drums

Riaz Khabirpour has named his quartet "Pocket Radio". For the guitarist, who has lived in Mannheim since 2019, the band name is a reminder of his own childhood, when he started listening to music on this radio. But it is also more than that: the pocket radio gave him the impetus to become part of this musical world himself at some point.

The melodically thematic axis in this quartet is formed by Benedikt Jäckle with his eloquent, rhetorically dense phrasing on the tenor saxophone and the band leader, who opens up new dimensions of expression to the sound spectrum of his guitar with various effect devices. Halpin and Khabirpour are technically adept instrumentalists who create their own recognizable language in their improvisations. The sophistication of this pairing is particularly evident in the themes, which are often performed in unison: with their tonal proximity and distance from each other, with the contrast between cool intellect and hot emotion and the friction that arises from the "microtonal" overlaps in the harmony of the two instruments.

With Matthias Akeo Nowak and Fabian Arends, a tight rhythm section is at work, stretching the canvas for Halpin's and Khabirpour's improvisational art within a firm harmonic and rhythmic framework. Nowak's woody, warm tone on the double bass is the pivotal point for the sometimes grippingly drummed grooves, sometimes a shimmering pulsation that veils the rhythm.

Every second and fourth Monday of the month at Casino im Rampenlicht.