JOO KRAUS // No Excuse

For many years now, Joo Kraus has quite rightly been one of the most renowned jazz trumpeters in our part of the world. Joo may not have been born with the trumpet, but he was taught it at school. His father already played the trumpet and taught him his first fingerings.

Catapulted into the scene at the age of 19 by winning first prize in the national "Jugend musiziert" competition, he gained five years of stage experience with the electro-rock band "Kraan". Together with Hellmut Hattler, Joo founded the hip-jazz duo "Tab Two" in the early 1990s. The rhythm section and effects were already coming from the computer - quite a groundbreaking innovation at the beginning of the 1990s.

"Tab Two played throughout Europe, Asia and the USA, produced eight albums and were one of the biggest influencers in this genre worldwide. In the 2000s, Joo Kraus increasingly wrote his own songs. He produced his album Sueño in Havana's oldest recording studio and arranged songs by Michael Jackson into an intellectually sophisticated tribute to the King of Pop.

Joo Kraus - that's many decades of international stage and studio experience, countless worldwide tours, 2 Grammy nominations, the Echo Jazz award for best German trumpeter and 6 German Jazz Awards in gold. But regardless of whether Joo performs with the Cuban pianist Omar Sosa, with Paula Morelenbaum, as a guest of Klaus Doldinger, with the SWR Big Band or with his own quartet "Joo Jazz", there is always that unmistakable sound: modest and powerful, a rousing joy of playing paired with sensitive attentiveness to his fellow musicians.

Joo has also been active as a songwriter for many years and has already written for Tina Turner, among others. He also arranges and composes for orchestra, big band and theater. The Ulm native is a musician at heart, who prefers to dissolve genre boundaries and style labels and make music the way he lives: freely and emotionally. And so he sets off from his home planet of jazz on ever-expanding voyages of discovery to play beyond any crossover orthodoxy with shooting stars from other galaxies - be they soul, funk, pop, hip-hop, Latin or electro. As a trumpeter and composer, Joo has opened his mind to musical styles from all over the world, but his sometimes melancholy, sometimes cheerful melodies remain one hundred percent Joo Kraus.

Line-up: Joo Kraus (trp, voc, b); Ulf Kleiner (rhodes, keys); Jo Ambros (git); Sebastian Schuster (db, moog); Martin Grünenwald (dr)