"Festival" begins with "celebration" - and the start of the Jazz Days yesterday was also a celebration for us. Yesterday evening the Leipzig Jazz Days started into the 37th round with the awarding of the Leipzig Jazz Young Talent Award and two wonderful concerts. 

The UT Connewitz, to which this benefit evening was dedicated, was bursting at one seam or another. More than 200 visitors first heard congratulations from cultural mayor Michael Faber and jazz expert Bert Noglik: first to the jazz club for being awarded the venue program prize, then (and above all) to Eva Klesse, who accepted the Leipzig Jazz Young Talent Award from the Marion Ermer Foundation. The young drummer then played the prize-winner and festival kick-off concert with her quartet - and a loudly demanded encore. Afterwards, the Jazztage and Deutschlandfunk presented Eric Schaefer + The Shredsz on the stage of the one hundred year old cinema in Leipzig-Connewitz. With the program "Who is afraid of Richard W.?" the quartet around Eric Schaefer hinted at what the audience can expect until October 6 under the festival motto "Siggi und der gelb Hai": Richard Wagner, but completely different - in some projects then also viewed through the glasses of Frank Zappa. The occasion for this is the 200th anniversary of Wagner's birth and the 20th anniversary of Zappa's death, whose parodic treatment of Wagner was the starting point for the program design. Thus, the greatest hero of German late Romanticism, Siegfried from the Song of the Nibelungs, will not be competing against a dragon, but against the yellow shark from Zappa's last album "The Yellow Shark". Among others, Joshua Redman, Carla Bley, Bugge Wesseltoft & Henrik Schwarz feat. Dan Berglund, Heinz Sauer & Michael Wollny will be performing. the DEKAdance concert on October 6 has been brought forward to 8 pm.