-Germany is of the greatest exporters of Techno and then -in the past 10 years- of some really good House music but more recently we are seeing a substantial rise of the Jazz scene. Does this transformation of the scene -in your opinion- mirrors the transformation of Germany itself, which is nowadays becoming an extremely complex and multicultural country?
Yes and I really like it. Recent politics have been increasingly inclusive, many immigrants came to live in Germany and that’s changing the fabric of the community, which is great. Plus, recently the right-wing have lost some ground (and I hope it’ll happen the same in Italy) so all this have led, as you said, to a cultural change. In regards to Jazz I see too that the youngsters are getting more and more interested in the scene and in general in this genre. Like every trend, the massified Techno wave have become standardised and people got -let’s say- bored of it, wanting to move to something different and in the past twenty years Electronic music (inc. Hip-Hop which is not so much ‘sample based’ anymore) have decisively turned into mainstream music. So in my opinion the reason why Jazz is rising again is because it embodies the new, the change. Jazz, being made by people, in a group, with real instruments that require a certain dose of technique to be played, has also a much more human feel and needs a certain amount of ‘culture’ to be approached;
whereas Techno, for instance, doesn’t necessarily imply this. You don’t need any culture to download some sample from the web and put together a Techno track and I’m not being judgemental, it’s a fact! Jazz is also about togetherness, being in a band -as I said- so it’s also of more difficult access; we can compare Techno to Punk for its immediacy and directness but at some point Punk became boring too. In the UK this shift have already took place in the past five years and so it’s happening now in Germany, which to me is honestly remarkable.