Jazzpreis der Stadt Köln: Preisträgerkonzert von Leif Berger

Leif Berger präsentiert im Rahmen seines Preisträgerkonzerts ein Set seiner Band "Neon Dilemma"

Horst and Gretl Will, both big jazz fans, began awarding the scholarship through their foundation in 1998 - embedded in the awarding of a total of five scholarships by the city of Cologne.
This year's winner of the Horst and Gretl Will Scholarship is jazz drummer and composer Leif Berger.

From the Horst and Gretl Will Scholarship jury's statement on their decision to award the prize to Leif Berger "Leif Berger is a technically extremely accomplished, virtuoso and versatile drummer. His skills and his unprejudiced musical curiosity have made him suitable for formations of the most diverse styles. From a stylistic point of view, his work achieves a multi-colored expansiveness between electronic music, advanced pop music, modern jazz and experimental music that is second to none. As a percussionist, despite his idiomatic adaptability, he remains distinctive and can always bring something of his own to the music of any ensemble in which he plays. Beyond these rich skills, Leif Berger has developed an impressively mature profile as a composer. His sound imagination and compositional skills have brought him into close contact with segments of contemporary serious music. Leif Berger's ability to calculate sound, his sense of compositional form and the complexity of his musical ideas never stand in contrast to the liveliness and emotional immediacy of his work."

Since 2017, Leif Berger has been on the road as bandleader and composer for "Hinweis auf die Sonne", "Leif Berger Sextett", "Lärmtrompeten des Nichts", the collectively organized trio "Neon Dilemma" and his current project "Leif Berger Quartett". As a "side person", he currently plays in ten other bands.

Leif Berger's current compositional work for the "Leif Berger Quartet" follows the vision of creating an electro-acoustic world of sound and song that reconciles the apparent musical opposites of complexity and emotionality. His current improvisational work, on the other hand, follows the vision of creating a musical space that is as value-free as possible, in which his many different experiences and influences find their way in, in order to then ideally come together to form an organic whole.