Shannon Barnett Quartet & Aurora Nealand

In 2014 Shannon Barnett moved to Cologne from New York where the Australian-born trombonist played in the WDR Big Band for five years. In 2019 she left there to take up a professorship in jazz trombone at the Cologne University of Music and Dance. Early on Barnett stood out for her stylistic versatility and aesthetic nonchalance and it’s now hard to imagine the jazz scene in Cologne and beyond without her. With the same seriousness and fun she feels equally at home in New Orleans jazz or Dixieland as in modern jazz and the musical avant-garde. With her quartet without harmony instrument she has released two albums so far, on which she plays a modern jazz music that she herself describes as “fiery to gloomy, focused on rhythmic elements and quirky humorous”. Barnett met a ‘sister in spirit’ in saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist Aurora Nealand ten years ago in Copenhagen. Like her, Nealand feels equally at home in many forms of Jazz. With her band The Royal Roses, she draws on the original swinging music of african Americans in the southern United States; in drummer John Hollenbeck’s current quartet ‘George’ on the other hand she focuses on contemporary music.