Marcus Schinkel Trio feat. Ernie Watts - Ernie Watts Birthday Tour 2026

Ernie Watts Birthday Tour 2026

Crossover is not a label here, but an attitude: music as an open language that does not respect borders but crosses curiously. Ernie Watts, two-time Grammy Award winner and one of the great saxophonists in jazz, embodies this attitude like no other. His musical biography naturally combines apparent contrasts — from Thelonious Monk to Aretha Franklin to the Rolling Stones — and thus stands for a rare mix of singing tone, virtuosity and openness to style.
The fact that he meets cross-border commuter Marcus Schinkel therefore seems almost logical. Schinkel masterfully moves between jazz, classical and rock and, with his trio, develops a sound that deliberately sets itself apart from the mainstream of many piano trios. Lyrical piano playing is combined with distorted synthesizer colors — as if concert grand pianos and electronic texture did not compete but complement each other.
The first collaboration at the Bonn Jazz Festival in 2016 was immediately hailed as a highlight, and it is precisely this energy that the project continues: a dialogue between experience and experiment, between tradition and the present, between precision and free discharge. What is created live is not a “crossover as an effect,” but consistently contemporary music that loves suspense — and draws the audience right in.

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