© dpa
Weekend Tips: What to Do This Weekend in Berlin
September 25 to 27, 2026: Events, festivals, exhibitions and more things to do for your perfect weekend in Berlin. more
Graewe / Jones / Drake // ganavya
Date details
- Date Sunday, 01/November/2026 18:30
- Venue Haus der Berliner Festspiele - Große Bühne
- Address Schaperstraße 24, 10719 Berlin-Wilmersdorf
- Price from €39.84
Book tickets for this date
Public transportation
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Underground
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U Spichernstr.
- U9
- U3
-
U Uhlandstr.
- U1
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U Kurfürstendamm
- U9
- U1
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U Augsburger Str.
- U3
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U Hohenzollernplatz
- U3
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U Güntzelstr.
- U9
-
U Spichernstr.
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Bus
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Friedrich-Hollaender-Platz
- 204
- 249
- N3
- N9
- N7X
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Lietzenburger Str./Uhlandstr.
- 249
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U Spichernstr.
- 204
- 249
- N3
- N9
- N7X
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Pariser Str.
- 249
-
U Uhlandstr.
- 109
- 110
- 249
- M19
- M29
- N10
- X10
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U Kurfürstendamm
- 204
- 249
- N3
- N9
- N7X
- M19
- M29
- M46
- N1
- N2
- N26
- 109
- 110
- N10
- X10
-
U Hohenzollernplatz
- N3
- 249
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Berlin, Bleibtreustr.
- 109
- 110
- M19
- M29
- N10
-
U Güntzelstr.
- N9
- N7X
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Bamberger Str.
- 204
-
Theater des Westens
- 109
- 110
- M19
- M29
- M49
- X34
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Uhlandstr./Kantstr.
- 109
- 110
- M19
- M29
- M49
- X34
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Friedrich-Hollaender-Platz
Jazzfest Berlin 2026: Graewe / Jones / Drake // ganavya // Globe Unity Orchestra
Brad Jones / Georg Graewe / Hamid Drake, ganavya, Globe Unity Orchestra – Oben Porträts eines Bassisten, Pianisten, Schlagzeugers und einer Frau. Unten Jazzbigband während eines Auftritts.
© Caroline Mardok, Wolfgang Gonaus, Žiga Koritnik, Carlos Cruz, Kazue Yokoi
18:30
Graewe / Jones / Drake
(DE, US)
German premiere
Pianist Georg Graewe is one of the key figures in German free jazz history, an inveterate explorer who has never settled into a single practice or school of thought in a career spanning nearly six decades. His early love for progressive rock eventually took him and his bandmates toward free jazz, and his quintet released two remarkable albums for the legendary FMP label in the mid-1970s, both overlooked gems that captured the pianist’s interest in structural rigor and unbound improvisation. In the subsequent decades he’s led a wide variety of projects, most famously a paradigm-setting chamber trio with cellist Ernst Reijseger and drummer Gerry Hemingway, along with a series of large ensembles that increasingly plugged the prerogatives of free jazz within contemporary music.
In both GrubenKlangOrchester and the more recent Sonic Fiction Orchestra, Graewe has increasingly focused on long-form composition, where elaborate writing is energized and expanded by carefully plotted improvisations unmoored from any given stylistic language. Yet as much as the pianist has focused on more intricate, composition-based work, he remains a stunning improviser, as demonstrated by a first-time trio outing with Chicago drummer Hamid Drake and the Lisbon-based American bassist Brad Jones at the annual Konfrontationen festival in Nickelsdorf on a 35-degree day in 2024, later released as More Than Anything. Graewe worked with the drummer when he spent time living in Chicago in 1997, where he formed one of his best bands, a quartet with Drake, Frank Gratkowski and Kent Kessler. Reuniting with Drake and meeting Jones for the first time on a hot July day in Austria, the trio took flight, delivering a spellbinding performance, unspooling through breathtaking peaks and valleys, a model of intense free jazz mastery.
Line-up
Georg Graewe – piano
Brad Jones – double bass
Hamid Drake – drums, frame drum, voice
20:00
ganavya
(AT, DE, US)
There might not be another musician who honors and extends the artistry of the great Alice Coltrane more than Indian-American vocalist ganavya, who now calls Berlin home. The singer and composer has long erased the boundaries between jazz and South Asian devotional practice, understanding that improvisation is what unites the two traditions. For years she balanced academic studies in ethnomusicology and critical inquiry – she studied under Vijay Iyer at Yale – and performances with a wide variety of collaborators, but everything changed after she performed with the enigmatic British R&B band Sault in London in December 2023. By then she had already attracted the attention of Shabaka Hutchings, who released her stunning 2024 album like the sky, I’ve been too quiet on his Native Rebel label. She’s released two subsequent albums on LEITER, the imprint run by pianist Nils Frahm.
ganavya’s voice is beyond analysis, a warmly liquid force that caresses and glides between the weightless contours of her songs. While her recordings have included a variety of stellar collaborators, her working group surrounds her voice with only harp and double bass, tracing out the leanest of structural forms and aerating harmony with cascading arpeggios. ganavya’s voice and stage presence do the rest. She seems to inhabit the music, melodies pouring gently but generously from her imagination. It’s impossible to separate those sounds from her rapport with listeners as she shares stories about her music as if she were a close friend to everyone gathered to hear her.
Line-up
ganavya – voice
Miriam Adefris – harp
Sebastian Singwald – double bass
21:20
Globe Unity Orchestra – 60 Years: Apokalyptische Nabelschau
(DE, DK, GB, IT, JP, NO, PL, US)
Pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach has an illustrious history with Jazzfest Berlin, stretching back decades. In fact, in 1966 he was commissioned by the festival’s original artistic director Joachim-Ernst Berendt, when the event was known as Berliner Jazztage – to form a large-scale improvising group, a request that heralded the arrival of the Globe Unity Orchestra. Ever since the ensemble has grappled with shifting ways to orchestrate the ineffable: the elusive creativity of free improvisation. The pianist has consistently enlisted musicians from around the planet who share his pursuit in choreographing spontaneity, and the commitment has helped him corral sonic lightning for 60 years. Over that long period, members have come and gone.
The line-up for this rare occasion is particularly special with three figures who’ve worked in the group since the 1970s – saxophonist Evan Parker, drummer Paul Lytton, and trombonist George Lewis, who rarely performs on his original instrument now that he’s devoted himself largely to composition and education. Of course, some of the junior members of the ensemble like bass clarinetist Rudi Mahall and trumpeter Axel Dörner are still Globe Unity Orchestra doyens. Joining Schlippenbach at the keyboard for the first time in the band’s history with some four-handed interaction is the great Aki Takase.
Line-up
Alexander von Schlippenbach – piano, composition, direction
Aki Takase – piano
Evan Parker – soprano and tenor saxophone
Daniel Erdmann – tenor saxophone
Henrik Walsdorff – alto saxophone
Rudi Mahall – clarinet, bass clarinet
Tomasz Dąbrowski – trumpet
Kasper Tranberg – trumpet
Axel Dörner – trumpet
George Lewis – trombone
Christof Thewes – trombone
Gerhard Gschlößl – trombone
Antonio Borghini – double bass
Paul Lytton – drums
Dag Magnus Narvesen – drums
With the friendly support of the Robert D. Bielecki Foundation
Graewe / Jones / Drake
(DE, US)
German premiere
Pianist Georg Graewe is one of the key figures in German free jazz history, an inveterate explorer who has never settled into a single practice or school of thought in a career spanning nearly six decades. His early love for progressive rock eventually took him and his bandmates toward free jazz, and his quintet released two remarkable albums for the legendary FMP label in the mid-1970s, both overlooked gems that captured the pianist’s interest in structural rigor and unbound improvisation. In the subsequent decades he’s led a wide variety of projects, most famously a paradigm-setting chamber trio with cellist Ernst Reijseger and drummer Gerry Hemingway, along with a series of large ensembles that increasingly plugged the prerogatives of free jazz within contemporary music.
In both GrubenKlangOrchester and the more recent Sonic Fiction Orchestra, Graewe has increasingly focused on long-form composition, where elaborate writing is energized and expanded by carefully plotted improvisations unmoored from any given stylistic language. Yet as much as the pianist has focused on more intricate, composition-based work, he remains a stunning improviser, as demonstrated by a first-time trio outing with Chicago drummer Hamid Drake and the Lisbon-based American bassist Brad Jones at the annual Konfrontationen festival in Nickelsdorf on a 35-degree day in 2024, later released as More Than Anything. Graewe worked with the drummer when he spent time living in Chicago in 1997, where he formed one of his best bands, a quartet with Drake, Frank Gratkowski and Kent Kessler. Reuniting with Drake and meeting Jones for the first time on a hot July day in Austria, the trio took flight, delivering a spellbinding performance, unspooling through breathtaking peaks and valleys, a model of intense free jazz mastery.
Line-up
Georg Graewe – piano
Brad Jones – double bass
Hamid Drake – drums, frame drum, voice
20:00
ganavya
(AT, DE, US)
There might not be another musician who honors and extends the artistry of the great Alice Coltrane more than Indian-American vocalist ganavya, who now calls Berlin home. The singer and composer has long erased the boundaries between jazz and South Asian devotional practice, understanding that improvisation is what unites the two traditions. For years she balanced academic studies in ethnomusicology and critical inquiry – she studied under Vijay Iyer at Yale – and performances with a wide variety of collaborators, but everything changed after she performed with the enigmatic British R&B band Sault in London in December 2023. By then she had already attracted the attention of Shabaka Hutchings, who released her stunning 2024 album like the sky, I’ve been too quiet on his Native Rebel label. She’s released two subsequent albums on LEITER, the imprint run by pianist Nils Frahm.
ganavya’s voice is beyond analysis, a warmly liquid force that caresses and glides between the weightless contours of her songs. While her recordings have included a variety of stellar collaborators, her working group surrounds her voice with only harp and double bass, tracing out the leanest of structural forms and aerating harmony with cascading arpeggios. ganavya’s voice and stage presence do the rest. She seems to inhabit the music, melodies pouring gently but generously from her imagination. It’s impossible to separate those sounds from her rapport with listeners as she shares stories about her music as if she were a close friend to everyone gathered to hear her.
Line-up
ganavya – voice
Miriam Adefris – harp
Sebastian Singwald – double bass
21:20
Globe Unity Orchestra – 60 Years: Apokalyptische Nabelschau
(DE, DK, GB, IT, JP, NO, PL, US)
Pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach has an illustrious history with Jazzfest Berlin, stretching back decades. In fact, in 1966 he was commissioned by the festival’s original artistic director Joachim-Ernst Berendt, when the event was known as Berliner Jazztage – to form a large-scale improvising group, a request that heralded the arrival of the Globe Unity Orchestra. Ever since the ensemble has grappled with shifting ways to orchestrate the ineffable: the elusive creativity of free improvisation. The pianist has consistently enlisted musicians from around the planet who share his pursuit in choreographing spontaneity, and the commitment has helped him corral sonic lightning for 60 years. Over that long period, members have come and gone.
The line-up for this rare occasion is particularly special with three figures who’ve worked in the group since the 1970s – saxophonist Evan Parker, drummer Paul Lytton, and trombonist George Lewis, who rarely performs on his original instrument now that he’s devoted himself largely to composition and education. Of course, some of the junior members of the ensemble like bass clarinetist Rudi Mahall and trumpeter Axel Dörner are still Globe Unity Orchestra doyens. Joining Schlippenbach at the keyboard for the first time in the band’s history with some four-handed interaction is the great Aki Takase.
Line-up
Alexander von Schlippenbach – piano, composition, direction
Aki Takase – piano
Evan Parker – soprano and tenor saxophone
Daniel Erdmann – tenor saxophone
Henrik Walsdorff – alto saxophone
Rudi Mahall – clarinet, bass clarinet
Tomasz Dąbrowski – trumpet
Kasper Tranberg – trumpet
Axel Dörner – trumpet
George Lewis – trombone
Christof Thewes – trombone
Gerhard Gschlößl – trombone
Antonio Borghini – double bass
Paul Lytton – drums
Dag Magnus Narvesen – drums
With the friendly support of the Robert D. Bielecki Foundation
Runtime: Thu, 29/10/2026 to Sun, 01/11/2026
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© Chris Baker
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© Eventim
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© Eventim
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