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Zimmermann & Lienhard

LOFT

Zimmermann & Lienhard

Tizia Zimmermann – acc Pablo Lienhard – electr

Tickets

Fabian Dudek, Victor Fox, Felix Hauptmann, Kirke Karja, Roger Kintopf, Julia Sanjurjo, and Tizia Zimmermann know each other well; each of them has often played in one of the others’ bands. But the fact that these seven musicians from Cologne, Tallinn, and Zurich were approached almost simultaneously to perform a concert at Cologne Jazzweek with one of their projects was purely coincidental. So why not come together as a collective? No sooner said than done: their collective KROM will make its debut at Cologne Jazzweek 2026. The Zurich-based accordionist Zimmermann has been collaborating with her Berlin-based compatriot, electronic musician Pablo Lienhard, since 2018. They play music that has found a home in the deepest bass, draws its power from resonant drones, and relies on long, trance-like drone tones. The sounds of their instruments intertwine so closely that the boundaries between acoustic and electronic sounds seem to dissolve, and everything merges into an energetic whole.

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Venue:

LOFT

The LOFT in Cologne's Ehrenfeld district is exactly what its name suggests: a spacious loft on the top floor of a former perfume factory. Since 1989 it has been home to the city's musical avant-garde as well as a scene hub and a jazz laboratory for students.

Over those decades it has grown into a respected stage for improvised music, contemporary music, and jazz, with a reputation reaching well beyond Germany. Most of the Cologne jazz musicians who have made their mark nationally and internationally in the past thirty years took their first career steps here, among them Nils Wogram, Hayden Chisholm, Angelika Niescier, Frank Gratkowski, Robert Landfermann, Pablo Held, and Sebastian Sternal.

The Cologne Triennale, WDR, and Deutschlandfunk stage concerts and recordings at the LOFT, and the venue has been invited to the Moers Festival five times. Its own label, 2ndFloor, releases selected recordings, and more than 1,000 live and studio productions made in the LOFT studio have appeared on other labels. Supported by the association 2ndFloor e. V. and the collective jungesloft, it presents over 200 events a year.

Top-tier instruments – including a Steinway D grand, one of the finest concert pianos in any German jazz club – a professional recording studio with award-winning engineers, and the room's distinctive atmosphere have drawn many prominent guests, from Lee Konitz, Steve Lacy, and Peter Brötzmann to Kurt Rosenwinkel, Marilyn Crispell, and Jim Black. Still, the programming focus remains on supporting Cologne's own musicians.

Since 2009 the LOFT has received the NRW venue programming award every year, an honor that specifically recognizes work with emerging regional artists. In 2016 the British Guardian named it one of the ten best jazz clubs in Europe, and at the German Jazz Prize it was voted "Club/Venue of the Year" in 2021 and again in 2023 — a category decided not by the expert jury but directly by the more than 1,300 members of the German Jazz Union.

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