The piano is getting company. Frank Muschalle has invited Stephan Holstein, who brings along clarinet and saxophone. In Die Tonne, boogie-woogie meets a wind voice – and a pianist who unites bass and melody in two hands has a musical partner at his side.

Muschalle is well known to the festival as a boogie-woogie pianist from Berlin. In this music, the left hand carries a steady bass figure, while the right hand adds blues phrases and riffs. Holstein adds another melodic voice. His two instruments each have a different connection to jazz: the clarinet has been part of the music since its early days in New Orleans, while the saxophone later shaped swing and rhythm and blues. In this way, the guest broadens the musical dialogue at the piano.

For this encounter, a basement club is by no means an unlikely setting. Boogie-woogie emerged among African American pianists in the southern United States and found its center in Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s. It was played in bars, dance halls and at private parties, where piano and audience came close together. That intimacy is part of this music's history.

Die Tonne also has its very own history of musical neighborhood. On 13 March 1981, it opened in the vaulted cellar of the Kurländer Palais. During the festival, the club became a meeting place for musicians and audience alike. This is where stairwell jazz was born: after their performances, bands came to the already packed Die Tonne and played from the stairs. Where space in the room was tight, the music still found a way to reach the audience.

To this day, Die Tonne remains one of the festival’s most traditional venues. For Muschalle and Holstein, it provides that familiar setting for the interplay of piano and horns. And Boogie-Woogie does not make a solo appearance in the club: with clarinet and saxophone at its side, the evening continues into the jazz traditions to which the festival has been devoted since 1971.

No festival finale would be complete without the Dixieland-Parade – and this is an image that stays with you: up to two dozen floats, hundreds of participants, tens of thousands of spectators lining the parade route from the start at the former Carola-Brücke along the Terrassenufer through the historic city center.

The Dixieland-Parade is Traditional Jazz in its most vibrant and original form, because jazz was literally born in the street, and the marching-band heritage emerged in the funeral processions and festival parades of early-20th-century New Orleans. Anyone standing along the route today and hearing the sound of a Brassband approaching experiences a direct echo of that history. And anyone lucky enough to look down from the Brühlsche Terrasse onto the Terrassenufer sees the panorama of this parade set against the backdrop of Dresden’s historic old town.

The parade belongs to the city and to everyone in it.