Schaffhausen Jazz Festival swings with a focus on Swiss Jazz

When people tell you they're going to Schaffhausen, the first thing they say is: “Ah, the Rhine Falls…” Yes, the Rhine Falls, Europe's largest waterfall, are not far from the northernmost town in Switzerland. It's a town with a beautiful historic centre overlooked by the 16th-century Munot Fortress.

And Schaffhausen is also a city of jazz, at least once a year. Because the Schaffhausen Jazz Festival has been taking place in the city for 33 years. It is an exciting event because it focuses on the local Swiss jazz scene. So, it is a little surprising that the opening duo on the first evening of the festival in the Kammgarn cultural centre, a former Kammgarn spinning mill, is not Swiss. But both members of the Obradović -Tixier Duo who studied in Switzerland. Croatian drummer Lada Obradović and French pianist David Tixier make for a lively couple on stage, due to the way polyrhythmically tapped grooves combine with the pleasant harmonies of piano, keyboards and sampled sounds that range from cricket chirps and rainy weather to muffled rumbling to create atmospherically dense sound collages is idiosyncratic and stimulating. The largely through-composed music is broken up beautifully again and again in some places. A discovery, this duo!

Another duo constellation also offered something unusual for the ears, but also for the eyes. While guitarist Manuel Troller created atmospheric, almost meditative and repetitive sound fields on the electric guitar, Niklaus Troxler, the already 75-year-old graphic artist and founder of the Willisau Jazz Festival, was inspired to stick enigmatic patterns on a large white canvas with coloured adhesive tape. In the end, there is the message "PEACE" as a clear statement against what is happening in the world right now.   

Recently, the German trombonist Nils Wogram, who lives in Switzerland, won the German Jazz Prize with his new band Muse for this quartet's eponymous debut album, which now also performed its seriously arty combination of jazz, chamber music and new music in Schaffhausen - with overtone singing and the unusual instrumentation of trombone, saxophone, viola and harp. A musical adventure that perhaps floated along too uniformly. But this project is always coherent and superbly played.

Florian Favre presented his solo programme ‘Idantitâ’ on the concert grand piano, in which he reinterprets old folk melodies from his homeland in western Switzerland. With rumbling basses, but also tender melodies and prepared piano, the pianist created expansive, beautiful soundscapes. If only he hadn't had the idea of asking the audience to sing along at some point. Some of the audience joined in joyfully, but these interludes did not help the magic of his performance.

On two evenings at the weekend, festivalgoers had an alternative to the large concert hall in the Kammgarn. Directly opposite is the TapTab music room, a cool little club where the younger generation of musicians presented themselves for a small entrance fee. In cooperation with the Lucerne School of Music, the Schaffhausen Jazz Festival presented a selection of bachelor's and master's projects by young bands from the school. And while there were many young musicians on stage at the main venue, the audience in the hall belonged mainly to an older generation, the majority of the audience at the TapTab was young.

Attracting even more of them to the festival will be a big issue for the festival in the coming years, if they want to maintain the positive audience response this year. And those who listened to the young up-and-coming bands in the club this time might also have liked the two large formations in the main hall. Because what singer Lucia Cadotsch had to offer with Liun & The Science Fiction Orchestra and the following day saxophonist Sarah Chaksad with her Large Ensemble had to offer were fine arranging, contemporary sounds and a colourful bouquet of impressions and timbres.