Jakob Bänsch Quartet & Ella Zirina

GERMAN JAZZ PRIZE 2024:

Jakob Bänsch was a junior student of trumpeter Bastian Stein in Stuttgart at the age of 15. In the same year, the trumpeter, who was born in Pforzheim in 2003, became a member of the Baden-Württemberg State Youth Jazz Orchestra. From 2020, he played in the national jazz orchestra for three years and in 2021 he moved to Cologne to study jazz music. And as if that wasn’t enough, in 2023 he released “Opening” with his quartet, which has now been nominated for the “German Jazz Award” as “Debut Album of the Year”. His music is aesthetically and stylistically open, inspired by the jazz of Wayne Shorter or Maria Schneider as well as late Romantic composers such as Maurice Ravel, Alexander Scriabin or Gustav Mahler. Bänsch’s harmonies have that poetic mellifluousness, his themes have that quiet melos that makes the songs sound so incomparable. Latvian Ella Zirina, born in 1997, is only slightly older. She studied jazz guitar with Jesse van Ruller in Amsterdam, among others, and has this crisp tone with which she eloquently phrases her solo choruses in an exciting way – an adequate partner and ideal guest for the concert with the Jakob Bänsch Quartet at the Cologne Jazzweek.