A physicist, a composer, a wine merchant, and a history teacher meet to play jazz from a hundred years ago. This is how the founding story of the Besen Street Boys begins, and the band themselves tell it like the start of a mediocre joke. The four came together in Jena in 2015. Since then, they've been tearing up the venues in their city, and the verb is fitting, because the word "trumpet" is in their name.
Gunnar Besen gave the band his family name, and Basin Street in New Orleans did the rest. If you like, you can also hear the drummer's jazz brushes in the name, but those are precisely what this quartet doesn't use. The Besen Street Boys play without drums or piano. Martin Marczinke lays the foundation with tuba or sousaphone, his rich tone weaving the fundamentals with his own improvised lines. Daniel Siegmund on banjo handles harmony and rhythm simultaneously, and even sings. His banjo marks the pulse, the tuba adds the accents beneath, and the quartet swings without a single cymbal sounding.
Two voices lead the way. Besen's trumpet introduces and varies the old themes, while Dirk Wasmund responds on the soprano saxophone. His tone is smooth, his playing a touch more modern than the originals, creating a friction between melody and counterpoint that gives the quartet its unique sound.
The repertoire stretches far back into the early days. “A Monday Date” was written by Earl Hines and made famous by Louis Armstrong, “Some Of These Days” was already a hit in 1910, and “Louisiana Fairytale” is one of the charming songs of the 1930s that Fats Waller popularized.
With this programme, the four ventured as far as New Orleans in 2025. In the city’s French Quarter, they played at Fritzel's European Jazz Pub on Bourbon Street and at the Mahogany Jazz Hall. In Germany, the quartet was a guest at the festival in Dresden in 2025 and 2026, as well as at Quedlinburg swingt.
The band’s motto is “Jazz from the old days for people of today.” You can check that out in Jena, where the four perform regularly. At the OFF, the most recent line was: on every first Monday — free admission, dancing welcome. Many a bar room has been transformed into a Swinging Ballroom.