What is the attraction in crossing borders musically? And what are the challenges to overcome when blending together two different musical cultures into one harmonious sound? 3songsbonn spoke to Piers Faccini ahead of his concert with Ballake Sissoko at Pantheon Theatre in Bonn. Thank you Manuel from ‘Over The Border’ for arranging the interview.

Could there be any musicians more apt to personify a Festival dedicated to unifying music from across the World and embracing the creativity that comes from bringing that diversity of sound together. The Over The Border Festival in Bonn is now in its 10th year and Mali’s celebrated kora master Ballaké Sissoko, together with London born singer/songwriter and poet Piers Faccini, is about to underline everything that makes this Festival so unique and so magical.

The theme of this month’s Folk Club in Bonn of ‘Time’ was actually taken to heart by many of the evening’s performers. It must be said though that time, as Dr Who would I’m sure agree, is a theme very much open to interpretation. John Harrison‘s opener ‘Feeling Happy‘ for example takes us back in time – to the dawn of Rock n Roll. The song  having been sung by Big Joe Turner, who had a seminal hit in the mid-1950’s with ‘Shake, Rattle & Roll’. The evening’s second number, Michael Chapman’s ‘Rabbit Hills’, also sees time from a past perspective – a time machine of the heart in fact as the singer visits a scene and travels back to past memories there with his love.

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.