Thomas Meinecke comes to Enjoy Jazz for International Anthem

For decades, I presented current, relevant, outstanding and challenging records on my radio show on Bayerischer Rundfunk (the "Zündfunk" program aimed at a young audience). Compared to my listening habits at home, jazz remained underrepresented for a long time. It always seemed to me as if it was a kind of private problem that I had never stopped listening to, admiring and worshipping jazz since the beginning of my adolescence (when I had a poster of Bix Beiderbecke hanging above my bed). I had seen Thelonious Monk live when I was 15 (just before he went silent forever). In the early 1980s, Sun Ra was the first musician I interviewed for the radio. And I also played his records on my show. The Sun Ra Arkestra had a relevance that worked wonderfully with the post-punk music I was following at the time. Later I found in Carl Craig's Detroit techno (albeit programmed) structurally what jazz meant to me, in Theo Parrish even an equivalent to Monk (I had also found this in Junior Kimbrough's Delta Blues), which all fitted in perfectly with the emerging discourses on the post-colonial Black Atlantic. And logically, gems like Georgia Anne Muldrow's albums kept coming out that were absolutely up-to-date. But it took even longer for me to fill entire programs with albums that explicitly wanted to be understood as jazz. It's the Chicago-based "International Anthem" label that took my breath away right away with its releases that are both innovative and in the jazz canon, for example by Jamie Branch, who died young a few weeks ago (and would have played in Ludwigshafen on October 10), the incomparable (much more than just) trumpeter Ben Lamar Gay, for whose concert I will be traveling to Mannheim on november 3, as well as for Makaya McCraven on november 10. Alabaster dePlume also releases on "International Anthem", I would say: "Jazz / not Jazz". Also very great. He's playing in Ludwigshafen on October 12.

Thomas Meinecke, born in Hamburg in 1955, is a writer, musician and radio DJ. He has been a guest at the Enjoy Jazz Festival several times, most recently in 2019 as a discussion partner for festival director Rainer Kern in the "Learn to Enjoy Jazz" series.