Leipzig Jazz Young Talent Award: Jakob Obleser "Music is just wiggly air"
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With “Music is just wiggly air,” Jakob Obleser weaves his wide-ranging influences into a highly personal blend of groove, experimentation, and avant-garde—proving himself a worthy winner of the 2026 Leipzig Jazz Emerging Artist Award from the Marion Ermer Foundation.
In just five years, Jakob Obleser has become a defining voice on the Leipzig jazz scene. Whether as a bandmate of Max Stadtfeld, Iris Eckert, Simon Lucaciu, and Christopher Kunz, or as the leader of his solo sextet, his name is currently on everyone’s lips. And not just in his adopted home, but also in cities like Berlin, Stuttgart, and Cologne, where Obleser is a regular presence on the music scene.
The musician, who specializes in electric and double bass, consistently combines fluid grooves with a refreshing openness to the new and the unexpected. His sources of inspiration are wide-ranging, extending from jazz legends such as John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, and Louis Armstrong to pop avant-gardists like David Byrne and Éliane Radigue, a pioneer of modern electronic music. As he explained in a 2021 interview with the Baden-Württemberg Art Foundation, he loves “browsing the internet and discovering largely unknown avant-garde artists like Lowell Davidson or Sirone.”
His new solo program, “Music is just wiggly air (AKA Jiggly Jukebox),” is conceived as a musical reflection on identity: How do one’s background, education, and affiliation with a particular scene shape one’s own creative work—and how can one counter these influences with something unique of one’s own? These are questions that don’t require definitive answers. And yet, his highly distinctive mix of Guitar Bop, Drone Warp, and Bass Funk can ultimately be implicitly understood as a response—entirely without words, but instead in the language of music.
It comes as little surprise that he is one of this year’s two winners of the Leipzig Jazz Young Talent Award—and this is likely to help ensure that a new generation of up-and-coming musicians will soon stumble upon the name Jakob Obleser during their nightly wanderings through the internet.
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