The summer quarters of the ZigZag Jazz Club present international highlights

Jazz in Berlin has many good addresses, and the fact that there is no real center between Charlottenburg, Neukölln and Weissensee is perhaps part of the nature of this music. One of the best addresses, the Friedenau ZigZag Club, has recently been on the move itself. The venue on Hauptstrasse, which survived the Corona period with a lot of support from the audience and musicians, is not being abandoned, but from autumn onwards it will only operate at half power – and above all: half volume.

The dispute over noise protection, which sooner or later affects almost every club in residential areas, could not be avoided here either. Despite extensive soundproofing measures, the bass went through the roof when the volume was turned up really loud.

New restaurant at Gleisdreick

The long-term solution now lies in a move. With the cold storage facility at Gleisdreieck, operator Dimitris Christides has his eye on a place that would be happy to accommodate his club. The financing of the renovation has not yet been fully clarified – there is also money from the Lotto Foundation Berlin involved. With a bit of luck, however, the ZigZag should move into the property built in 1901, which was once Europe’s largest cold storage complex, at the end of 2025. The club on Hauptstrasse will then only serve as a secondary venue.

The Kühlhaus’s inner-city location offers the opportunity to attract an audience that also feels a connection to the club as a neighbor. The planned expansion of the space also carries a risk. Where the previous ZigZag was well filled during normal operation and bursting at the seams with prominent names, it must now find the happy medium between a program with international highlights and a connection to the local scene: Smaller concerts should not take place in front of half-empty rows. That does not help the bands, nor does it pay the rent.

Popup an der Spree

What Dimitris Christides has in mind is shown for the time being in the pop-up club set up with the support of Vitali Kivmann’s Althafen Foundation, which ZigZag has moved into as its summer quarters on the Spree until the end of August. Right next to the East Side Gallery, on Mühlenstraße, he has invited musicians who otherwise would not necessarily have stopped in Berlin – and certainly not in this still intimate setting.

When was the last time trumpeter Terence Blanchard was in town, performing here with his E-Collective and the Atom String Quartet (July 20)? Who would have thought that Cécile McLorin Salvant, who can be safely called the best singer of her generation, would find her way here with pianist Sullivan Fortner, only he an old ZigZag acquaintance (July 29)? And how many more opportunities will there be to hear saxophonist Charles Lloyd, who at the age of 86 is more sensitive to tone than ever, in the illustrious circle of Jason Moran, Larry Grenadier and Brian Blade (July 24)? The list is much longer.

On a club level, the ZigZag has always filled the gap between popular big-stage acts that often bypassed Berlin and the experimenters and sound researchers in venues for the initiated. Only the A-Trane on Pestalozzistrasse is attempting something similar. Other clubs such as the Schlot on Chausseestrasse or the B-Flat on Dircksenstrasse have a more local character from the start.

Dimitris Christides, one of the city’s 100 cultural figures recently selected by the Tagesspiegel, knows exactly that he needs a regular audience that can blindly rely on the quality of the events, and those whose fandom or connoisseurship drives them to individual concerts. He has a knack for this. That’s why the luck he needs is certainly a little easier.