Westphalia Jazz Prize 2023 for Luise Volkmann from Bielefeld: Video, Photos

The saxophonist and composer Luise Volkmann receives the Westphalia Jazz Prize 2023. The 30-year-old comes from Bielefeld and moves with her music in the field of tension between contemporary improvisation and composition.

The prize awarded at the International Jazz Festival in Münster consists of a three-part concert series for the prize-winner. The jury, made up of festival director Fritz Schmücker, Waldo Riedel from the Domicil jazz club in Dortmund and Lena Jeckel from the cultural office in Gütersloh, who has programmed concerts for the Bunker Ulmenwall for a long time, described Luise Volkmann as an “exceptional musician”.

Above all, they were characterized by their collective improvisation and their constant search for extraordinary tones, sounds and rhythms. “Your projects also deal with political and social statements,” says the jury’s statement. “The musician wants to use her music to touch hearts, to show solidarity, to draw attention to social issues.”

At the Jazz Festival in Münster from January 6th to 8th, 2023, Luise Volkmann will be heard several times in different formations. With her twelve-piece band Été Large, she will be performing on Sunday, January 8th, 2023 in the Great House of the Theater Münster. As a trio “3 Grams” she will be experimenting with voices and sound on Saturday, January 7th, in the Small House.

In addition, on the Saturday and Sunday of the festival, she performs with Été Large members for a good half hour in the Dominican Church in Münster, where the Gerhard Richter artwork “Two Gray Double Mirrors for a Pendulum” is located. There will be further prizewinner concerts in Dortmund and Gütersloh.

Musician now lives in Cologne: Luise Volkmann studied saxophone, composition and musicology in Leipzig, Paris and Cologne. Luise Volkmann has been teaching a mixture of artistic conception and cultural-philosophical approaches at the Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences since 2021 in the master’s program “Expanded Media”. The musician lives in Cologne.