As part of the festival motto "Body Time", space is also to be given to special sounding bodies. The starting point for this concert was the encounter of several vibraphones. Afterwards: TRAINING feat. Işıl Karataş

Those who already found the time and the right place last year know what it means when Cansu Tanrikulu is on stage at the Leipziger Jazztage: The space becomes an immense, vibrating sound body that absorbs everything. Chairs, stage, lamps, even the visitors - everything contracts, expands, changes shape and color. It is an event that explores the depths of the space in order to fill them. Every corner and every conceivable crevice is called upon, carried along and made present. And therein lies the unlikely power of Tanrikulu's performances: The sound space is not sufficient unto itself, but points to larger, more distant dimensions. Each sound a story, a thread or speck of dust that speaks thus and here to those who have learned to listen. Her music is not an end in itself, Tanrikulu says, but political commitment. This becomes quite obvious when you follow her, enter the spaces she opens and listen to the stories that find voice in them. 

This year, the two vibraphonists Volker Heuken and Evi Filippou will open those spaces together with Cansu Tanrikulu and tell their stories in a trio. Two vibraphones and Tanrikulu's voice - how better to mark that the sound body as a phenomenon will be given special attention in the 45th edition of the Leipziger Jazztage? And who could be better suited for this than Evi Filippou and Volker Heuken, two extraordinary painters on the tubes.

Trained in Berlin, where she has been living since 2011, Filippou not only mixes in the field of jazz, but is equally active in orchestras and chamber music ensembles as well as in music theater, which marks an important creative area (founding member of the Opera Lab Berlin Ensemble; Neue Werkstatt der Staatsoper Berlin; Hauen und Stechen Musiktheater Kollektiv). Filippou performs her own compositions with her quintet inEvitable.

Volker Heuken studied in Nuremberg and Leipzig, where he was a student of Michael Wollny until 2019. This is not his first time as a guest at the Leipzig Jazztage either: in the trio Heuken | Stadtfeld | Heigenhuber, Heuken played an unforgettable opening night at UT Connewitz in 2019. The year, in other words, in which the trio was awarded the Jazz Nachwuchspreis of the city of Leipzig. Not only has Heuken been exceedingly busy since then (including as artistic director of the German vibraphone festival Vibraphonissimo or the Heuken Sextet, Organic Vibes or LAMA), he also found the time to build his own lithophone in between all that. So much for sounding bodies, sounding plates and vibrating stones. An extraordinary as well as extraordinarily promising line-up - a formative encounter with what sound, sonic and space can be.