Music journalist, author and sound artist Michael Rüsenberg invites jazz greats to an interesting exchange at "Speak Like A Child." The title of the series goes back to the title track of the legendary Herbie Hancock album from 1968 and is a reference to the musical primary color of the Stadtgarten. Now the popular interview series is also available as a podcast, to be heard here on this website, Spotify and iTunes.

In 1978, guitarist Raimund Kroboth was one of the founding members of the Initiative Kölner Jazzhaus e.V. A year earlier, he had come to the Rhine from Landshut (Lower Bavaria). He is not only known as "the Bavarian", he loves and cultivates the image, although - he only learned the dialect in the cathedral city. Coupled with a great sense of humor, there is nothing backwards about Bavaria as Kroboth represents it.

He is a cosmopolitan. There is hardly another Cologne jazz musician who has traveled to as many countries - mostly on behalf of the Goethe Institute - as Raimund Kroboth. Mostly, however, not with jazz music, not even in the broader sense, but with specific, color-changing forms of "world music".
Nevertheless, his start in Cologne was jazz rock with the prominent band NoNett (Reiner Michalke, Norbert Stein, Reiner Winterschladen and others), 1979-1984. With Heinz, 1986-1992, he already moved away from jazz rock (CD titles include "Bavarian Backbeat").

With the Schäl Sick Brass Band, 1995-2013, he enters the field, which he has since cultivated in numerous variations: World music or "songs from everywhere".

2009-2019, this was the Tabadoul Orchestra, and since 2005 it has been the Tzaziken, a female vocal sextet, accompanied by a jazz musician sextet.
Kroboth is the driving force; he listens to the song fundus of the world, he searches & finds, he rewrites, arranges, gives impulses. He does not claim authenticity ("A and B become C".).

Whoever experiences the Tzaziken cannot escape their maelstrom of good humor. The conversation with Raimund Kroboth took place on March 29, 2022 in the club "Jaki", below the Stadtgarten, two days before his 70th birthday.