Skip to main content
Bill Stewart ft. Walter Smith III and Larry Grenadier
Photo: Bill Stewart, Walter Smith III, Larry Grenadier © Artist

Stadtgarten

Bill Stewart ft. Walter Smith III and Larry Grenadier

Bill Stewart (drums) Walter Smith III (tenor saxophone) Larry Grenadier (bass)

Tickets

The Bill Stewart Trio with Larry Grenadier and Walter Smith III is one of the most exciting formations on the jazz and improvisation scene today. In recent years, the trio has twice spent a week at New York's legendary Village Vanguard, where they recorded the album Band Menu. Stewart and Grenadier have a long history together as sidemen with Pat Metheny and John Scofield, among others. Stewart first met Walter Smith III at a Danny Grissett recording session and was immediately impressed by his individual sound.

The drummer and composer Bill Stewart has been one of the most sought-after musicians on the scene for over 30 years. The New York Times wrote: "His true specialty is making a good band sound even better in an inexplicable way." He has worked with John Scofield, Pat Metheny, Maceo Parker and others and has led a trio with Larry Goldings and Peter Bernstein for decades. His Blue Note albums Snide Remarks (1995, NYT Top Ten of the Year) and Telepathy (1997) as well as other trio and quartet releases have shaped his reputation. Band Menu deliberately marks a move away from sonorous keyboard formations towards an open, melodic trio without chordal instruments.

Praised by the New York Times as "deeply intuitive" and by Bass Player Magazine for his "fluid sense of melody", Larry Grenadier has worked with Joe Henderson, Stan Getz, Brad Mehldau, Paul Motian and Pat Metheny, among others. He is co-founder of the collaborative trio Fly and the quartet Hudson and released the acclaimed solo album The Gleaners (ECM) in 2019.

Walter Smith III is an award-winning saxophonist, composer and educator. His fifth album as a leader, Twio (2018), was released with his long-standing trio and guests such as Christian McBride and Joshua Redman. He has played and toured with Roy Haynes, Terence Blanchard, Eric Harland, Jason Moran, Ambrose Akinmusire, Christian McBride, Christian Scott and Sean Jones, among others. The Houston native lives in Boston and is chair of the woodwind department at Berklee College of Music. Jimmy Heath said of him: "Walter Smith is a perfect example of standing with one foot in the past and the other in the future."

Further information

Venue:

Stadtgarten

The first concert in the newly built Stadtgarten concert hall in the mid-1980s launched a program unlike anything Germany had seen: an independent, artistically driven concert series devoted to contemporary improvised music. It was guided neither by attendance figures nor by public subsidies, yet it guaranteed musicians minimum fees and was run on professional terms. The conditions mattered just as much: an acoustically optimized, street-level concert space offering a strong setting for audiences and performers alike. Operations were financed through the adjoining hospitality business, the Stadtgarten restaurant and beer garden, a model that drew attention well beyond Germany.

Today the Stadtgarten Köln ranks among Europe's internationally recognized venues for contemporary and improvised music. The American magazine Down Beat features it regularly in its listings; it has received Germany's federal APPLAUS venue program award several times, including "Venue of the Year" in 2016, followed by the German Jazz Prize in the same category in 2022. More than 400 events across the full spectrum of contemporary music now take place there each year. Its international standing rests above all on the high proportion of demanding, experimental programming.

A programming mission of this kind depends on reliable public support. The venue's 30th anniversary in September 2016 opened that prospect: through a partnership between the City of Cologne and the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, programming work is being substantially strengthened, and from 2017 onward the Stadtgarten Köln is being developed step by step into a "European Center for Jazz and Contemporary Music" – with the goal of becoming one of Europe's leading music centers.

more info

More dates at Stadtgarten: