TIP

The Saalach continues to flow through the inviting landscape of the Pinzgau. In its center, the festival town of Saalfelden, however, many new things can be discovered in August. Under the motto "Begegnungen" (encounters), the international jazz scene will be coming together to experience something worth listening to far away from all the routines, with remarkable female power and a lot of US-American music.

Among the highlights is multi-instrumentalist Joe McPhee, who as a pioneer of free jazz demonstrates nuanced sound awareness with extended playing techniques. Finnish-American fusion guitarist Raoul Björkenheim offers jazz rock. Classical violinist Théo Ceccaldi designs exalted post-punk colors in a sextet. With an eventful voice, Jelena Kuljic shines in a provocative-lovely gesture in the Zappaesque all-star band Kuu. Trumpeter Scheila Maurice-Grey moves in funky Afrobeat with Kokoroko. The spectacular Swiss trio Schnellertollermeier is at once dissonantly harmonic and polyrhythmically aggressive in unheard-of ways, punctuatedly precise and unrepentantly playful, subtly meditative and snottily explosive. Inspired by Picasso's absinthe glass sculptures, cellist Erik Friedlander joins Uri Caine on a poetically intoxicating journey full of stylistic breaks. Elliott Sharp and Helene Breschand on harp plus vocals improvise lustily avant-garde in stylistically unbounded spaces. In a European premiere of his project "Songs of Resistance", Marc Ribot reflects resistance from the past on the current US reality, while Nicole Mitchell's "Mandorla Awakening II" tells of the mechanisms of domination of contemporary US society in text and music with ethnically grounded elements from rock, blues, soul and rap.