About us

New and exciting experiences for music fans from Frankfurt and beyond.

The beginnings

Jazz Montez is one of those stories that people tell each other...

Since 2016, Jazz Montez has organized a variety of concert series and cultural festivals at unusual venues in Frankfurt, Germany. Under the direction of Lorenzo Dolce, Jazz Montez features up-and-coming, established, local and international bands performing jazz and jazz-influenced music for a large, diverse and especially young audience. So far, events have taken place at Kunstverein Familie Montez, ATELIERFRANKFURT (Jazz im AF), open air at Hafenpark (Holidays), as well as around and within the Museum Angewandte Kunst (EL BARRIO and OPEN HOUSE, together with AMP and Restaurant Emma Metzler).

For their innovative programming, they were awarded the APPLAUS prize by the German government five times in a row and received the main prize as "Germany's best concert series" in 2022. Besides hosting concerts, Jazz Montez produces music videos and runs the music label "Jazz Montez Records". In 2021, they released "Jazz Montez Presents Vol. I," a compilation featuring seven young German jazz bands, recorded, mixed and mastered in Frankfurt. In 2022, they released the album "Born With Nostalgic Bones" by 17-year-old Frankfurt singer-songwriter Julie Kuhl. In the first half of 2023, "Jazz Montez Presents Vol. II" will follow, featuring international recording artists such as FloFilz, J.Lamotta and Abáse. Jazz Montez actively promotes intercultural exchange on the pressing issues of our time, collaborating with organizations such as Amnesty International and Pro Asyl. Collaborations with the renowned Ensemble Modern, which specializes in new music, and the hr-Bigband exemplify Jazz Montez's interest in networking with other cultural institutions across genre boundaries.

Lorenzo Dolce

1. Vorsitzender

Joel Amine

film, board

Mirek Macke

Familie Montez Director.

TIM ROTH

Holidayspartner. Contrast Trio.

Ingrid Schäflein

Board

History 

From traditional to modern jazz concerts

Jazz Montez has existed since March 2016 and has been a non-profit, registered association since 2018. The events are characterized by a colourful and diverse programme ranging from traditional to modern jazz concerts.

Audience 

By today's standards, this is something unique in Germany.

We wanted to offer the city's exceptional jazz musicians something exciting and new again, and for us that starts with the audience. The average age at our concerts is around 30. We have a lot of guests who are around 20 years old; on our network channels, the average age is 24. This is something unique for today's jazz scene in Germany and is certainly unparalleled in Frankfurt. We are by no means an age-discriminatory venue. On the contrary, our aim is to appeal to as heterogeneous an audience as possible and to mediate between the different generations. While we would like to introduce the younger audience to classical jazz, we want to interest the older audience in modern styles. In this way, we contribute to a diverse jazz scene that can be as lively again in the future as it was in Frankfurt a few decades ago. The average audience of 100 guests per concert also confirms that we are the most successful jazz series in the Rhine-Main region. The high audience average and the low average age alone do not offer the citizens of Frankfurt am Main and the surrounding area a unique concert experience, but the realization of our various concepts does.

Concepts

Jazz Montez sees itself as a flexible, organizational umbrella.

Jazz Montez sees itself as a flexible, organizational umbrella that offers a home to various forms of musical performance with references to jazz. Our extremely experimental team is always coming up with new concepts alongside or within the classical concert events with which we started. For example, we regularly invite musicians from different scenes and cities under the motto "Heimatliebe". These events focus on the idea of networking the German jazz scene with the Rhine-Main scene and are the only attempt in Frankfurt to explicitly address the "lost daughters and sons" of the city of Frankfurt and the surrounding area who had to leave the city due to the lack of a jazz academy. We have been able to bring them together with the soloists of the HR Big Band in this context and so the professionals from the HR Big Band are also always in contact with the Frankfurt graduates of the major German jazz academies by making music with them. We would like to briefly outline other concepts that have already been realized:

Jazz Montez

The nucleus, the seed from which everything else grew: jazz concerts at the Montez Family Art Association. The vault under the Honsell Bridge with its large windows overlooking the River Main houses an extraordinary art collection and regularly invites renowned artists. Once or three times a month, we transform this space into a concert hall and invite up-and-coming and established local and international bands to play here. After the concerts, we always have DJs who get the audience shaking. We call this AFTERSHOWJAZZ.

Jazz Montez Records

Jazz Montez Records releases jazz and jazz-influenced music from Germany and beyond. After releasing its first record in 2021, the compilation "Jazz Montez Presents Vol. I", the label presented the album “Born With Nostalgic Bones" by Frankfurt-based singer-songwriter Julie Kuhl in 2022.

In 2023, "Jazz Montez Presents Vol. II" will follow featuring such international recording artists as FloFilz, J. Lamotta and Abáse.

Holidays

In the summer, we organize open air concerts in front of the gates of the Kunstverein Familie Montez together with Bimba Records. The bands that perform here all have a jazz background, but are also drawn to krautrock. The audience sits on a staircase, which we convert into a grandstand, and listens to spherical, hypnotic sounds while the sun sets behind the Frankfurt skyline.

El barrio

During the “Museumsuferfest” on the last weekend in August, we will be working with Bar AMP and Restaurant Emma Metzler to transform the park around the Museum Angewandte Kunst into an enchanted landscape full of music and gastronomic delights.

A wide variety of influences create a transcultural whole here, with which we want to present a model for the way in which we want to live together in a global city like Frankfurt, based on South American city districts.

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