Since its founding in 1990, the Schaffhausen Jazz Festival has dedicated itself to national creativity in the field of “jazz and improvised music”. From the conviction that this showcase firstly guarantees a great diversity at a high level and secondly that there is an interested public for it, the organizing committee continues to stick to its guiding idea. Every year in May there are about 10 formations on the festival stage of the cultural center Kammgarn in Schaffhausen. The Swiss jazz scene is richly equipped. There will be no single food in digestible portions. Quotation Patrik Landolt, Festivalzeitung 1992: “The thematic restriction to Swiss jazz has advantages and disadvantages that are worth thinking about. Basically, I consider it an advantage that the Schaffhausen jazz festival is committed to a concept and does not join the conventional festival circus. Most European jazz festivals have the same faceless appearance: the organizers buy jazz stars and newcomers from international agencies. The conglomeration of more or less arbitrarily committed jazz groups on one weekend is called a jazz festival and is intended to give the city, which invests public funds, an image boost in the supra-regional city competition. The audience is staffage, the musicians do their job. The Schaffhausen concept “Swiss Jazz” forces us to come to terms with Switzerland. Since music is not created in a vacuum, but refers to the social, social and aesthetic reality, music allows conclusions to be drawn to reality. A CH festival can be a mood report of the local reality. In game and creativity are often more time diagnosis than in scientific analysis. In addition, local music developments and regional shades can be recognized in this context. As Switzerland (luckily) has no national culture, but thanks to its federalist structures, manifold cultural manifestations, a Swiss jazz festival also threatens not to become a celebration of a national culture. What the Swiss jazz scene needs is an annual retrospective of local productions and developments; a festival where musicians of all sorts can present new projects and groups and where the local audience and a national and international public can get an overview of the local.