Skip to main content

Main sponsor

Dresdner Jazzmeile

Media partner

The world’s largest and oldest festival for traditional jazz

Steep Wall Stompers

Meerane
Traditional jazz from western Saxony, with saxophone, clarinet and trombone in the frontline and no trumpet at all. Piano, tuba, banjo and drums provide the driving beat promised by the band’s name.

Anyone who used to follow the Friedensfahrt knows the Steile Wand von Meerane, that cobblestoned climb where the cycling pros got out of the saddle and spectators crowded the roadside. When a jazz band was formed in the western Saxon town in the late 1970s, the name was an obvious choice. Steile Wand became Steep Wall, and anyone who wants to make it to the top has to stomp up there, out of breath. That is how the Steep Wall Stompers came into being, with a touch of international flair for the provinces.

Since then, they have been among the most steadfast exponents of traditional jazz in western Saxony. Seven musicians play seven instruments: saxophone, clarinet, trombone, piano, tuba, banjo and drums. There is no trumpet, and that is intentional. The band itself likes to advertise with the line that it is guaranteed to be without trumpet and harp, and cheekily counts seven instruments on 14 legs.

Without a lead brass instrument, the melody is distributed differently than in a classic Dixieland frontline. Clarinet and saxophone share the lead, sometimes in unison, sometimes alternating, while the trombone lays down counterlines and glissandi beneath them. This gives the ensemble a softer, rounder sound without losing drive, because tuba and banjo push the two-beat feel strongly forward, and the piano fills out the harmonies with stride figures.

They play the classics of traditional jazz, pieces you may have heard a hundred times and that have been played a thousand times before. The Stompers perform them with a liveliness as if they had just been written, and the music does not sound nearly a century old. Some of the musicians also play in the Hot and Blue Jazzband, which likewise comes from Meerane and has celebrated its 50th anniversary.

The band is very much on the road throughout Central Germany, playing at city festivals and in jazz clubs, at the jazz late-morning session in the Leipziger Hopfenspeicher as well as at the Jazz Band Ball in their hometown. In Dresden, they were guests at the Riverboat Shuffle on the paddle steamer „Rathen“ and brought a fan base from Meerane with them. Anyone who has ever experienced how clarinet and saxophone rise up the melody together there will understand the name: it goes uphill, but in time.

back to the lineup