Gretchen Parlato Quartet

Gretchen Parlato (vocals) Alan Hampton (bass, guitar) Taylor Eigsti (piano, keys) Jonathan Barber (drums)

Tickets

With her calm, extraordinary voice, Gretchen Parlato makes every composition her own, be it a jazz standard, a Brazilian song or even a cello suite by Bach. For her album "The Wise Ones", she wrote new songs, but also revisited her own career successes with previous collaborators, including songwriter Alan Hampton and renowned jazz innovators such as Robert Glasper, Gerald Clayton and Mark Guiliana.

Gretchen Parlato has earned a reputation as one of the best singers of her generation. Even as a student, she performed with Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter, who were among her fans from the very beginning. She won prestigious awards and appeared on albums by artists such as Esperanza Spalding, Marcus Miller and Kneebody. She has worked with the famous Brazilian percussionist Airto Moreira. And she founded the vocal trio Tillery with Rebecca Martin and Becca Stevens.

"Parlato's singing goes beyond mere intimacy, as if we are invited to share in her innermost thoughts ... Fearless, captivating" (Jazzwise).

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.

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