Berlin, Berlin, we’re on our way to Berlin!(*) Every autumn we go to the jazz festival, which was considered for a long time the most important festival in Europe, if not the world. In its early days it was closely linked with the man known as Germany’s ‘jazz pope’, Joachim Ernst Berendt. It was originally Nicolas Nabokov, the director of the Berliner Festwochen, who suggested to Berendt the idea of starting a jazz festival. Berendt then set to work with Ralf Schulte-Barenberg, and the ‘Berliner Jazztage’ was launched in 1964. Following a legal challenge and a court case it was forced to change its name to the ‘Berliner Jazz Fest’ in 1981.
Berendt’s concept was simple but effective: to represent the whole of jazz – traditional, glamorous, progressive, international… and from the very beginning, the political aspect of jazz was also a focus. Berendt always emphasised its international connectivity and the way it embodied ideas of emancipation and liberation as parts of its core. In the programme for the first festival, under the theme ‘Black and White, Africa-Europe’, there was a foreword by Martin Luther King Jr. which established a close connection between jazz and the American civil rights movement.
In the early years there didn’t seem to be much in the way of financial constraint on the festival’s budget. Berendt had brought the ARD (the consortium of publicly funded broadcasters) into the jazz fold, and the festival certainly gave off the impression that it could invite whoever it wanted, and pay them as much as they were asking. The most important international jazz greats came to Berlin, which meant above all the US jazz stars. During the first decades, the Berlin Philharmonie was the main festival venue, then the House of World Cultures in the 1990s, and now it is the Haus der Berliner Festspiele. The jazz clubs Quasimodo and A-Trane as well as the Academy of Arts, and for a while the Delphi Cinema, have been parallel venues for the festival.
By 1968, the idea of presenting all types of jazz had become difficult to maintain. A conflict over clothing policy – Peter Brötzmann refused to sign a contract obliging his band to perform in dark suits – provided the impetus for the launch of the Total Music Meeting, which was henceforth organised under the auspices of Jost Gebers as a festival of free improvised music, running parallel to the Jazztage. In this way, the festival always stayed close to the spirit of the times in more ways than one.
(*) Hans-Juergen Linke explains: ‘Berlin, Berlin, we’re on our way to Berlin’ is a slogan of German football fans; the final of the DFB Cup is always held in Berlin. Hans-Jürgen Linke’s feature has appeared in German at JAZZTHETIK and is reproduced here in an English version by Sebastian Scotney.
