Live review: Till Bronner and his band & others at the 28th Tbilisi Jazz Festival 2025: Videos, Photos

The jazz festivals of the Republic of Georgia, Tbilisi, like this year’s 28th Tbilisi Jazz Festival, always stand out in the region and not only for their prestige and high culture of organizing concerts, which is naturally wonderful and a celebration for the invited guests and the jazz-loving audience. And the name Till Bronner might not be on every trumpet players list of great jazz musicians, but it should.

The first time I listened to this gifted musician in the Tbilisi jazz Festival 2025, I was amazed by the deep background of his styling. Many times I thought I was listening to Miles, other times I heard Chet Baker and still others, Dizzy. For such diversity to be bound up into one performer as young as Mr. Bonner is a true gift.

To describe his effortless playing, is possible through his instrument and effortlessly. Mr. Bonner was born in Vierse, Germany and has been influenced by many styles of jazz, including Bop, Fusion, Pop and Country. His trumpet styling has also been influenced by such musicians as Freddie Hubbard, Dizzy Gillespie and Chet Baker and his most influential teachers were Bobby Shew and Malte Burba.

Till was raised in Rome and received classical trumpet education at the Jesuit boarding school Aloisiuskolleg in Bonn followed by a study of the jazz trumpet at the music academy in Cologne under Jiggs Whigham and Jon Eardley.

For what it is, Till Bronner Group is perfect: the problem is what it is, a set of standards given the lightest of treatments that push it toward lift music. You want dinner jazz, then here it is, sweet, digestible and impeccably played. Of course, this is very much Brönner territory, and on, for example was playful with the genre: as a collection of rock covers, done jazz-lite, it had a wry appeal, especially was jigged with. He’s safely gone for material that’s long populated the muzak world.

There’s a kittenish allure to his light vox, he makes Chet Baker sound like Iggy Pop, which befits a samba-ish take. But it’s Brönner’s buttery-toned horn that stands out: like Chris Botti, he can take that hard, unforgiving instrument and give it an oily smoothness. Just occasionally there’s a phrase that takes you back, that wears loafers and a turtle neck.

“It’s so much fun to have an umlaut in your name,” says trumpeter Till Bronner. He cut his teeth as a soloist in Berlin’s RIAS Big Band and is now one the most successful German jazz musicians. He’s certainly a star in his home country and has a considerable international track record, having played with Dave Brubeck, Tony Bennett, Mark Murphy, Ray Brown and Johnny Griffin over the course of his 18 CDs.

Opening number is also the title of the new CD The Good Life, “probably my most personal album in years,” he has said. It’s a track made famous by Frank Sinatra and Till Bronner wisely decides not to try to compete as a singer on this one. Roberto Di Gioia’s rippling piano provides a ski slope for Brönner’s honeyed muted trumpet.

On Sweet Lorraine Di Gioia continues to display his artful prowess with a boppish solo that throws the melody up in the air and catches it in a new configuration as it comes down. Brönner offers his first vocal, conveying the lyric with swinging rhythm and percussive emphasis. Interestingly, he sings like a drummer rather than a horn player — notably strong on pulse and timing.

Switching back to the trumpet Brönner plays a big solo, bold and boisterous with a flavour of the early days of jazz highly appropriate for this song. The fact that he only sings the occasional chorus in a largely instrumental setting again recalls the heyday of the big bands, when vocalists were a small element of a large jazz combo.

This song is another example of the leader’s seamless alternation between trumpet and vocals and there is neat, invigorating use of sticks on the rims and cymbals. There’s also a terrific partnership here between Muller’s school – of – Wes – Montgomery electric guitar, notes falling big and singular like fat raindrops on a tropical night, and Brönner’s soaring, slicing, rapid fire trumpet.

Bronner opening with breezy, sashaying muted trumpet as Müller plays cheerful, chunking guitar and Di Gioia fills the gaps with piano chords. Müller accelerates into joyful, buoyant bop and Brönner’s horn rings high, keen and clear, emerging from the tune like a spotlight through smoke.

Let us stop panting prejudices and accept that jazz must not only be crooked and adventurous, but that its challenge can also consist of presenting songs of all kinds in an instrumentally immaculate manner. And then, when a master in his field, like Till Bronner, from time to time puts the trumpet down to contrast the cleanly produced euphony with the sound of his voice, which he recently described as qualitatively not better than sufficient in an interview, he does so not to annoy his followers, and not to give his critics ammo for a simultaneous groaning, but rather as a kind of corrective for the slagless trumpet sound.

It is a real pleasure to bath by listening in the aesthetics dedicated to the rounded euphony owed to super precision and discipline and implemented by Till Bronner and his four members of his band. This sound ideal is located emotionally on the elegant, cool side, and it is due to the virtuosity that is the prerequisite for the precision offered.

However, this has nothing to do with complacency and with smoothness at the most as far as edges are rounded off and shallows are filled up to a safe level. Euphony in this sense does not mean that you have to forgo power and momentum when these are called for in the more lively songs, but definitely forward-looking rhythm group.

The fact that one feels as a whole beamed into the sixties is appropriate to the origin of the songs and in view of the current joy of retro everything else as wrong. The centered around the famously sounding, virtuosically played trumpet alongside the contrasting voice of Till Bronners in the vicinity of his constantly professional and compassionate companions acting in any moment like on gentle cat paws.

Till Bronner’s new songs is being marketed as “smooth jazz”, but if this gig is anything to go by, that sells it rather short. This is fluent, expertly played jazz, as taut as it is relaxed. The real stuff.

In addition to Till Bronner, the 28th Tbilisi Jazz Festival hosted two alto saxophonists Lakecia Benjamin and Steve Coleman, two as if musicians, who say nothing in the soul language, who never establish any kind of spiritual communication with the audience, not only in Tbilisi, but also anywhere else, who have no intellect and thought, about whom it is better to remain silent.

This was perhaps due to the fact that the festival was held on May 1-3, immediately following the International Jazz Day, when many prestigious and famous musicians were simply in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, to celebrate Jazz Day.

By the way, International Jazz Day was also celebrated in Tbilisi, on April 30, where the Tbilisi Jazz Band played with invited musicians Jason Isaacs, Jean Loup Longnon, Sibel Kose.