When Micha Winkler raises his trombone, Hot Jazz is no marketing slogan, but a promise. The Dresden band brings Oldtime Jazz from the twenties and thirties out of the archives and onto the stage with full physical commitment: driving, swinging, full of zest and with the fire that once made Louis Armstrong and Fats Waller famous. Hot Jazz emerged in New Orleans and Chicago as the most immediate, most visceral form of this music, and that is exactly what Micha Winkler's band conveys: not a museum-like reconstruction, but living energy.
Michael Winkler, born in Meißen in 1972, studied jazz trombone, arranging and composition at the Dresden University of Music Carl Maria von Weber, then went on to take master classes with Prof. Jiggs Whigham in Berlin. For a good two decades he has been one of the defining figures on the Dresden jazz scene, as a trombonist, bandleader, arranger and lecturer. The Hot Jazz Band, founded around 2007/2008, is his most direct statement of commitment to the energy of early jazz. Flexible from trio to septet, and also seen as a marching band, it follows the credo that jazz is not something to be consumed, but something to be lived with. The audience is swept along, whether it wants to be or not. Classics such as Bei Mir Bist Du Schön, On The Sunny Side Of The Street or When The Saints Go Marching In sound in this line-up as fresh as if they had just been written.
