NICA exchange x CJW: MARSAVRIL

The French band MARSAVRIL combines complex structures with a danceable groove. Founded in Tours in 2022, the quartet released the double EP MARS and AVRIL in spring 2023: compact, coherent and just as convincing live. As part of the Jazz Migration #10 funding program, the band will be touring France and beyond in 2025.

Inspired by BADBADNOTGOOD and Makaya McCraven, but never epigonal, MARSAVRIL fuses jazz, hip-hop, electronics and math rock to create a personal sound. Their music thrives on reduction, intuition and the close friendship between the four musicians. They explore beauty, melancholy and resistance - with warmth, attitude and a clever, danceable form of urgency.

After a successful start of the concert series "NICA exchange" in cooperation between NICA artist development and Cologne Jazzweek as part of the 2022 festival edition and its establishment in the regular program of the Stadtgarten Köln, the collaboration will be continued and three concerts will be presented at this year's festival under the title "NICA exchange x CJW". NICA exchange enables up-and-coming national and international musicians, particularly from the fields of jazz and improvised music, to play on the stages of the Cologne festival. The main focus of the concert series is to create spaces of exchange for a young, experimental generation of musicians, to encourage sustainable networking and creative exchange and, in the context of the festival, to initiate a connection with an audience eager to discover new things.