The Jazzfestival of Saalfelden has been in existence since 1978 and will take place in 2017 for the 38th time. Along with the Festival an arts centre has been established in 2002 called Kunsthaus Nexus. At this cultural / arts centre the programming concept reaches a wide range of musical styles, art movies, children’s programs, theatre, discussions, lectures as well as art exhibitions in the great exhibition hall. Our main focus in the main performance space Black Box are jazz concerts since this has been the original core of the organisation that established and used to organize the festival for many years. Since 2006 the Tourist Bureau of Saalfelden has taken over the official promoter-ship for the jazz festival: gathers the funds, takes care of the administrational work and carries the entire financial risk. Our organization does the programming of the Festival as well as runs and programs the Kunsthaus Nexus arts center. For the jazz festival as well as for the club at the Nexus our concept for jazz is to present new interesting bands and musicians within the improvised music scene.

Thereby our main focus is to present living composer who play their original music. With rare exceptions we stay away from presenting “… plays the music of…” concerts. We support jazz music and artists who we think contribute to the development of music and improvisation. Part of our concept is to commission and finance artists to write new music and perform it with musicians (number and origin) of their choice. This is a risk we think a promoter has to take in order to support the development of music. At least half of our programme at the jazz festival are European bands/musicians.