Jazz guitarist Joscho Stephan - who has been guaranteeing sold-out audiences as a Gypsi Swing musician on national and international stages for 20 years - is now giving an open-air guest performance on the Parkdeck together with musicians from the Deutsche Oper Berlin. Why not extend your holiday-summer feeling by another evening and immerse yourself in the great music of Django Reinhardt, who together with Stéphane Grappelli founded the first European jazz style in the 1930s at the Hot Club de France in Paris.

Jazz guitarist Joscho Stephan will be speaking about his favourite music, the Gipsy Swing — “When I was in my teens my uncle gave me a mixed audio cassette loaded with pop music and including a song by Django Reinhardt, »Minor Swing«. After that I spent years listening to Django Reinhardt records and accompanying him on my own guitar. I was trying to get to the bottom of what he was about. I soaked up every single composition of his and began, little by little, to come up with my own versions. Reinhardt invented Gipsy Swing in the 1930s in Paris, and I’m now another voice in the movement, if you like, preserving and developing Swing. Last year I hooked up with a piano trio and we brought out a CD of Mozart and Beethoven material as Gipsy Swing. Smashing!”