The Zig Zag Jazz Festival has been running since 20 July and it closes on Saturday, which means this is the last week to get to the Gasometer in Schöneberg before the whole thing packs up for another year. Eleven summer nights, more than twenty concerts, and the closing stretch is stacked: Al Di Meola on Monday, Eliane Elias and Ivan Lins on Tuesday, Dhafer Youssef on Thursday, Ute Lemper on Saturday.

Away from the Gasometer there is one show that jazz obsessives will not want to miss: Aki Takase and Alexander von Schlippenbach playing piano duo at Sowieso on Friday. Here are twelve nights worth leaving the house for.

Joey Calderazzo Trio · Gasometer Schöneberg · 18:00

Calderazzo got the call nobody wants to get. When Kenny Kirkland died in 1998, he took the piano chair in the Branford Marsalis Quartet, and he has held it for more than twenty-five years now, across records like Four MFs Playin’ Tunes and The Secret Between the Shadow and the Soul. Born in New Rochelle in 1965, he started on classical piano at eight and later studied with Richie Beirach, which tells you something about where the harmonic restlessness comes from. Before Marsalis he played extensively with Michael Brecker. In 2011 he and Branford cut a duo record, Songs of Mirth and Melancholy, on Marsalis Music, and that stripped-down setting is where you hear him clearest. A trio at 18:00 is an early start for the Gasometer, so plan accordingly.

Al Di Meola · Gasometer Schöneberg · 20:30

He turned 72 five days ago. Di Meola was nineteen when Chick Corea called him to replace Earl Klugh in Return to Forever, putting him next to Stanley Clarke and Lenny White for a Carnegie Hall date and, shortly after, on No Mystery, which won a Grammy in 1975. He grew up in Bergenfield, New Jersey, went to Berklee in the early seventies, and spent his teenage years soaking up Latin music alongside the jazz. Then in December 1980 he sat down at the Warfield Theatre in San Francisco with John McLaughlin and Paco de Lucía, and the resulting live album, Friday Night in San Francisco, went on to sell more than four million copies and reset what an acoustic guitar trio could be. Fifty years into the career and the picking hand is still the whole point.

Eliane Elias · Gasometer Schöneberg · 18:00

Elias has more than twenty-six albums as a leader and a shelf of Grammys, and she is one of the few musicians who is genuinely first-rate as both pianist and singer rather than a pianist who also sings. She grew up in São Paulo and was performing with Toquinho at seventeen, touring alongside the poet Vinícius de Moraes, which is about as direct a line into the bossa nova songbook as exists. She moved to New York in 1981, went to Juilliard, and a year later joined Steps Ahead. What comes out of all that is a Brazilian sensibility played with genuine instrumental heft, not the tasteful wallpaper version.

Ivan Lins Quartet · Gasometer Schöneberg · 20:30

Two hours after Eliane Elias finishes, the man whose songs she has recorded takes the same stage. Lins has been writing and performing Brazilian popular music for over fifty years, and his first hit, “Madalena”, was recorded by Elis Regina in 1970, which is the sort of debut most songwriters do not recover from. He is a Latin Grammy winner whose compositions have been picked up by a long list of international jazz musicians, so if you go on both Tuesday nights you get the songbook and its author back to back. Go to both.

Mathias Ruppnig presents FOAM · Kunstfabrik Schlot · 20:00

Ruppnig is an Austrian drummer and composer who did his bachelor and master at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Graz and has since become one of the busier players in European jazz. FOAM, released in December 2025, is the record he assembled a genuinely serious band for: Kurt Rosenwinkel on guitar, Joander Cruz on alto and flute, Musina Ebobissé on tenor, Tony Tixier on piano and synth, Lorenz Heigenhuber on double bass. All About Jazz described the feel as a seventies ECM album, which is fair, the horn writing is spacious and the opener “Petrology Kid” sets the tone. Schlot is the right room for this.

Torsten Goods meets Atrin Madani · A-Trane · 20:30

This is night one of a four-night residency at A-Trane, and Goods is the right guy to hand a club to for a week. He was born Gutknecht in Düsseldorf to Irish and German parents, grew up in Erlangen, and picked up the stage name from Les Paul himself while studying at the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music in New York. That New York stretch put him on stage with Les Paul, Mike Stern, Jack Wilkins, Peter Bernstein, Howard Alden and Frank Vignola. He records for ACT, he lives in Berlin, and the comparison people reach for is George Benson, which is to say he sings and plays with equal authority and does not treat the groove as an afterthought. The residency runs Wednesday through Saturday, with Kim Sanders joining from Friday.

Nesrine · Gasometer Schöneberg · 18:00

Nesrine Belmokh is a Franco-Algerian singer, cellist and songwriter, and the unusual part is that she does the two things at once rather than putting the cello down to sing. She arrived in 2018 with the trio NES and has since released two albums on ACT, Ahlam and the self-titled Nesrine, built on voice, cello and percussion and pulling from classical, pop, jazz and North African roots. Her training is not decorative: she has played in Daniel Barenboim’s West-Eastern Divan Orchestra and in the Valencia Opera Orchestra under Lorin Maazel, and she has guested with Cirque du Soleil. Early show, get there.

Dhafer Youssef · Gasometer Schöneberg · 20:30

Youssef was born in 1967 in Teboulba, Tunisia, into a family line of muezzins, and you can hear that in the voice long before you get to the oud. Malak in 1999 put him on the international map, and Electric Sufi (2001) and Digital Prophecy (2003) pushed the fusion of jazz, oriental modes and electronics much further than the phrase “world jazz” suggests. Birds Requiem in 2013 and Diwan of Beauty and Odd in 2016 are the ones to start with if you are new to him. His tenth album, Shiraz, is the most personal thing he has made. The falsetto is the thing people remember afterwards.

Aki Takase & Alexander von Schlippenbach · Sowieso · 20:00

If you only go to one thing this week, consider this one. Takase and von Schlippenbach have been playing piano duo together for over three decades, long enough that FMP put out Piano Duets: Live in Berlin 93/94, and they were still at it in 2023 with Four Hands Piano Pieces on Trost. Von Schlippenbach is the founder of the Globe Unity Orchestra and one of the central figures in European free improvisation; Takase came from Japan and built a body of work that runs from Fats Waller and Ellington reinterpretations to full-blown free playing. Two pianos in a small Neukölln room is a completely different physical experience from two pianos in a concert hall. Sowieso holds maybe a fraction of what the Gasometer does, which is the point.

Nita Aartsen Latin Jazz Quartet with Eduard Alexander · B-flat · 21:00

Listed here as Aasten, but this is Nita Aartsen, the Jakarta-born pianist who has been called Indonesia’s finest jazz player and was named best female jazz artist by AMI. She built her thing by taking classical material and running it through Latin rhythm, and she works the international festival circuit across Asia, Australia, the Americas and Europe. Her B-flat quartet pulls players from Indonesia, Japan and the US, which is exactly the kind of lineup that late-night B-flat sets exist for. Doors are late, the room gets warm, nobody is in a hurry.

The Zig Zag Jazz Festival: Django Reinhardt Orchestra · Gasometer Schöneberg · 18:00

Closing day at the Gasometer, and they open it with the manouche repertoire. The Django songbook is one of the few bodies of jazz music that never needed rescuing or reviving, it simply kept being played, passed down through families and campfires and Paris clubs without ever quite entering the conservatory. That is why an orchestra playing this material at six in the evening on a summer Saturday makes sense in a way that a lot of repertory jazz does not. Come early, stay for Lemper, treat it as one long evening rather than two tickets.

The Zig Zag Jazz Festival: Ute Lemper · Gasometer Schöneberg · 20:30

The festival closes with the definitive interpreter of Weimar Berlin, which is a fairly perfect piece of programming for a gasometer. Lemper was born in Münster in 1963, trained in dance at the Cologne Dance Academy and in acting at the Max Reinhardt Seminar in Vienna, then broke through as Sally Bowles in Cabaret in Paris and Velma Kelly in Chicago in the West End and on Broadway. Her first record, in 1988, was Kurt Weill, and it went to number one on Billboard’s crossover chart. Berlin Cabaret Songs in 1997 gathered composers the Nazis had banned and put them back in circulation. More than thirty records across forty years, and she still sings this material like it is dangerous, because in its own city it once was.

That is the week. The Gasometer goes quiet after Saturday, A-Trane runs its residency, and Sowieso has the show the rest of them will be talking about.

See you out there.