Jazztube Bonn 2025 - Das große Finale!

After the successful concerts at the selected subway stations in Bonn, the Jazztube voting is over and the audience and fans have chosen their favorites. Congratulations to the bands!
Since Knud unfortunately cannot be at the Pantheon due to scheduling reasons, the next band Emajamaa will move up.
On Monday, October 27, 2025 we welcome these three bands to the Pantheon Theater Bonn for the grand finale:

Carl Zinsius Project
Emajamaa
Phalanx

CARL ZINIUS PROJECT

The Carl Zinsius Project is a chamber ensemble, improvisation collective and groove machine all in one. And plays its very own version of European jazz in the 21st century.

In spring 2024, the ensemble will present its debut album "Five Banana - The music of Carla Bley".
On it, the five musicians interpret the repertoire of composer Carla Bley with great curiosity, joy of playing and open ears.

The US-American Bley, who died in October 2023, is certainly one of the most important jazz composers of our time. Bley wrote pieces for the pianist & her first husband Paul Bley as early as the 1960s and thus became part of the avant-garde jazz movement. As conductor & arranger for Charlie Haden's "Liberation Music Orchestra", composer of the jazz opera "Escalator Over The Hill", founder of her own label and leading woman in a male domain, Bley has always been a role model without equal.

On "Five Banana", strange & humorous compositions meet beautiful, simple yet surprising melodies and give an insight into the work of this unique composer.

A program in the field of tension between jazz, avant-garde and gospel with the typical Bley wink.

Cast in the Pantheon:
Matthias Bergmann (trumpet)
Simon Below (piano)
Conrad Noll (double bass)
Carl Zinsius (drums)

EMJAMAA

Emajamaa stands for music that makes dreams dance.
With Fernando Lyra on handpans, rav drum and sansula, Tabea Hörsch on cello and Christian Maurer on prepared percussion, this unusual line-up explores new technical and tonal possibilities and combines them with influences from Scandinavian jazz, minimal music, classical music and folk to create their very own language.
In their original compositions, the sounds of cello, handpan and drums interweave to create a rousing performance that takes the audience on a journey through inner landscapes, sometimes dreamy, sometimes dance-like.

Line-up at the Pantheon:
Tabea Hörsch (cello)
Fernando Lyra (handpans, rav drum, sansula)
Christian Maurer (percussion)

PHALANX

The martial band name is a little misleading: the quartet Phalanx does not sound like a closed front, but is an open system. The main coordinates are jazz and something avant-garde metal-like that is hard to define. Anything can happen within these coordinates, and when the band speaks of "25 ideas" per composition, this is still a modest formulation.
The wealth of ideas and beauty of Phalanx's music arise from poles that are still traditionally opposed to each other: Jazz on the one hand, rock and noise on the other. Or in terms of instruments: the piano on one side, an electric guitar distorted in many interesting ways on the other. Jazz rock, so to speak - but without everything that often makes classic jazz rock so gruesome. In other words, without any self-indulgent prancing around and bad gimmickry.
Instead, the three musicians around band leader Mathieu Bech (piano) - Axel Zajac (guitar), Xaver Feest (bass) and Johannes Pfingsten (drums) - play an amalgam of jazz and avant-rock. Pieces in which elegiac piano melodies can be replaced by a freewheeling guitar without there being a change of genre; in which neoclassical music is interrupted by noise and you think "Yes, that's right". Or, to quote a track title: "Now I realize it too".
There is so much to discover on "Wild", Phalanx's debut album. A catchy piano line at the beginning and end of "Hansa 55" brings everything to the point, but only briefly tapped, where others would build a whole piece out of such a melody. And in between, the instruments circle each other in a gentle improvisation. As in "Köln", where the metal guitar screeches and the piano holds its own, asserting a crystal-clear tonality and setting the direction, while Axel Zajac fabricates splinters and flashes of sound. Or, as in the four-part "Mexico", everything fragments into a small-scale jam, only to merge into a particularly beautiful passage at the end.
The connections made in the music of Phalanx are indeed new in this form and only possible because four musicians from very different projects and traditions come together here. Mathieu Bech plays improvised music with the AusbruchDuo and - also with Johannes Pfingsten on drums - the Trio Flonks, but also folk rock with the Sem Seiffert Trio and reggae with Animo Sono. Bech is also a drummer, which also has an effect on the piano, which is often treated as a rhythm instrument here. Axel Zajac plays guitar in the metal free jazz band Malstrom and has perfected the principle of noise infusion in this context. Bassist Michael Haupt forms something of an antithesis with the rather sunny-tempered jazz trio Joern and The Michaels. And drummer Johannes Pfingsten is involved in countless projects, including with the drum'n'bass duo Wallfacer.
All of this flows together in the sound of Phalanx and results in something new on the debut album "Wild" that has never been heard before: jazz overflowing with melodies that has absorbed the intensity of rock and free improvisation.

Line-up at the Pantheon:
Mathieu Bech (piano)
Axel Zajac (guitar)
Xaver Feest (double bass)
Johannes Pfingsten (drums)