First, two musical perspectives; at the end, a joint session: at Jazz im Theater, the Allotria Jazz Band from Munich meets Frank Muschalle at the piano. Swing, swinging Dixieland and boogie-woogie belong to the same era of jazz. At Theater am Wettiner Platz, they are not just placed side by side in the programme, but come together at the end of the evening.

The Allotria Jazz Band is dedicated above all to the compositions of the 1920s and 1930s. It calls its trademark “The Fine Notes Of Classic Jazz”. With its own arrangements, it achieves the sound of a small big band: the music takes on a form tailored to the lineup, without the need for a large orchestra. The musicians from Munich were guests at the festival in Kulturpalast in 2022. Now we welcome them back in a different setting.

Muschalle brings the piano perspective. His musical role models are Albert Ammons, Pete Johnson and Meade Lux Lewis, as well as Axel Zwingenberger. After eleven years of classical piano lessons, he discovered boogie-woogie at the age of 19 and has devoted himself to it exclusively ever since. The link to these role models reaches all the way to Carnegie Hall, where Ammons, Johnson and Lewis brought boogie-woogie in the late 1930s. Muschalle’s own festival appearance with the trio in Piano-Salon also dates from 2022.

Band and pianist already share one small thing before they play the first note: the year 1969. The Allotria Jazz Band was founded that year in the Munich artists’ pub of the same name, and Muschalle was born in the same year. The shared year is a small biographical twist; the musical connection is provided by swing and boogie-woogie.

Since 2025, Jazz im Theater has been bringing traditional jazz to the renovated small theatre at Wettiner Platz. There, the evening has its own destination in the joint closing session: the band and the pianist meet not merely as names on the same poster. In the end, the two sets come together in a shared jam session.

No festival finale would be complete without the Dixieland-Parade – and this scene 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 Terrassenufer through the historic city centre.

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

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