Friday night at Pantheon saw the Decennial start of Bonn’s celebrated Over the Border Festival. Yes, that’s ten years of World Class music from all over the World. This year represented by 22 concerts featuring 128 artists from 37 Countries.

Amongst those 128 artists is Bonn’s own keyboard wizard Marcus Schinkel, who described the rehearsal for this one opening show featuring ‘Local Ambassadors’ as an intense but joyous event, where the musicians, including six singers from Cuba, Senegal, and Peru had time only to meet up just once in advance and rehearsed for 10 hours to perform just this single concert. Hats off to all the backing musicians for this including Mike Herting (keys), Bob Vogston (guitar), Marius Goldhammer (bass) Papa Samory Seck (percussion) for managing to cross so many musical seas so calmly on the night.

Trends come and go, but quality will always survive just as long as there are people who know it’s out there. At 80 years old, and with some 50 albums released over 5 decades, Iain Matthews still has something to say – and the audience at Bonn Harmonie on Wednesday proved there are still people who want to hear him say it.

“There’s a lot going on right now” explains the man onstage. A new solo Album, a new Bloodbrothers one with Albert (Castiglia), A Rockpalast live CD (recorded at Bonn Harmonie). But THIS is all I really wanna do!” and he’s counting down the next song on the setlist to his band. Mike Zito is back in Bonn and it’s time for the blues…

Cologne-based trumpeter and composer Frederik Köster is constantly on the lookout for innovation and reinvention in Jazz. At the Dottendorfer Jazznacht this week he also showed that he had found excellent  contributors to his vision in young musicians Jannis Sicker, Calvin Lennig and Dominik Mahnig. Be prepared to experience an evening of excellently improvised fresh jazz music – but don’t expect to be able to take it away to enjoy at home. Dark Matter, as the band are called, do not do ‘takeaways’

The theme of Folk Club Bonn meeting number 165 was ‘Partytime’. In retrospect it should have been ‘Sing-a-long Night’. A plethora of neatly typed lyric sheets arrived on the tables at Dotty’s well before the evening started. Obviously quite a few musicians had spotted that we had a choir on the list tonight – not that the extra trained voices were needed. Folk Club audiences have always subscribed to the simple rule of singing along and keep changing your key until the people around you stop staring in your direction. It always works for me anyway.

It’s twelve years since Eric Sardinas last set foot on the Harmonie stage. He played such a blinder of a set then that I even bought a t-shirt. ‘Respect Tradition’ it says on the back and Sardinas doesn’t just respect tradition, he dusts it off and turns it up to 10 on a rusty looking resonator guitar that looks like it was dug up at the crossroads right after midnight. If you like your music restful and sweetly melodic, you’re in the wrong concert hall tonight my friend. If however you like it rough around the edges and neat like a strong glass of bourbon, this might just be heaven.

We’re mid-way through the set at Bonn Harmonie. Danny Bryant lets his guitar hang down loose from his shoulder as he steps up to the microphone and introduces the song ‘Tougher Now’. “Two years ago I stopped drinking. I nearly died”, he says. Then he pulls the guitar back up to his chest and begins a song that came out of those dark days – ‘Tougher Now’. We are seeing a leaner a happier and indeed a tougher Danny Bryant from the last time I saw him here at Bonn Harmonie in 2019, and, as many a musician has found before him, the music hasn’t suffered or creativity dried up. Songs played from the new disc ‘Nothing Left Behind’ stand up against everything that went before.

Just checking the bio of Joo Kraus and I am amazed to find the man in the baseball cap with seemingly boundless energy onstage is undertaking his 60th Anniversary tour this year. A perfect time to reflect on those 60 years and also a perfect subject for the very first ‘Jazzportrait’ presentation by Christian Ottens (aka Yassmo).