Joachim Kühn

Three famous jazz musicians, the German Jochim Kühm, the Moroccan Majid Bekkas, the Spanish Ramon Lopez, realize a long-term dream: One month of free time together in Morocco, time for music, for encounters, for a new CD. They rent a small studio in Rabat and invite guest musicians. They travel to the desert to meet a legendary group of native drummers, to play with them and make recordings. In between excursions into the everyday life of Morocco, computer crashes, and little crises. A film about improvised music and the work on it, a film about encounters of different cultures, a film about understanding and not understanding. Where do you come from, where do you go to?

At first glance, the pairing of veteran American saxophonist Archie Shepp and German pianist Joachim Kuhn seems an unlikely one. Performance at the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain - May 2011.

The music label MPS (Musik Produktion Schwarzwald) from Villingen is known worldwide to fans, musicians and lovers of jazz. Legends such as Oscar Peterson, Duke Ellington, Friedrich Gulda, Monty Alexander, George Duke, Freddie Hubbard, Jean-Luc Ponty or the Singers Unlimited traveled to the small Black Forest town from the mid-1960s onwards to take in the entrepreneur's son Hans Georg Brunner-Schwer. Around 500 albums were released on MPS, many of which are long-established classics. Thus, for two decades Villingen became a jazz mecca, which stars Jean Luc Ponty, Jasper van't Hof, Monty Alexander, Rolf and Joachim Kühn or Gunter Hampel, as well as Charly Antolini, Daniel Humair, Alexander von Schlippenbach and Eberhard Weber still rave about today. The documentary takes viewers on a fascinating journey into the 60s and 70s and tells one of the most incredible chapters in jazz history, which originated in southwestern Germany.

Joachim Kühn and Michael Wollnyse perform as a duo at the Leipzig Opera. Their first four-handed encounter was back in 2008 and resulted in the album Piano Works IX: Live At SchlossElmau. Fifteen years later in 2023, a new opus entitled DUO, also recorded live, sealed the reunion of these two giants of European jazz piano. The specialist press in Germany were gushing in their praise, calling it ‘the concert of the century’.

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A comprehensive history of European Jazz, exploring the origins of the US-influenced Jazz clubs after the Second World War, the first steps independent of American jazz and the various changes of direction that have repeatedly occurred in European jazz in the search for that "own voice" that European jazz musicians have helped to form. Featuring the great masters of European jazz such as Chris Barber, Jan Garbarek, Juliette Gréco, Stefano Bollani and Till Brönner, to name but a few.