Swinging evening in the cultural bistro: Mr. Smith delights the audience!

Swinging evening in the cultural bistro: Mr. Smith delights the audience!

On October 8, 2025, music lovers experienced an unforgettable evening in the Kulturbistro Münster-Sarmsheim. The band “In Your Dreams” around the charismatic bandleader Axel Schmitt, known as “Swinging Mr. Smith”, thrilled their audience with a captivating concert that was organized by the club CULTURE VERY CLOSE was organized. The atmosphere was elegant and lively, framed by paintings by talented artists from the Bingen art space, which gave the evening an additional setting.

Musically, the band offered a colorful mix of jazz, swing, bossa nova, blues and ballads. The concert opened with the classic “Don’t get around much anymore” by Duke Ellington. This was followed by other prominent pieces such as “Tea for Two” and “Lady Be Good” by George Gershwin and original compositions by Axel Schmitt, which addressed personal themes from his family life. With special attention to the keyboard technique of Thilo Wagner on the piano and the unamplified sound variety of Rudolf Stenzinger on the double bass, the international jazz tradition, which has roots back to the 19th century, captivated everyone.

An evening full of emotions and classics

Jazz, which shaped the music of the 20th century, has its origins in the streets of the USA, in a context influenced by racial discrimination and slavery. The development of this form of music was strongly influenced by brass bands and street musicians, who made a decisive contribution to the emergence of archaic jazz and later ragtime. The bandleader Axel Schmitt and his musicians represent the golden age of swing, which boomed between the 1920s and 1940s, when stars like Duke Ellington shaped the scene. A fact that music lovers did not forget that evening as they rediscovered the special feeling of swing and improvisation in the sounds of “In Your Dreams”.

The audience was thrilled and got carried away by the energetic performance, so the musicians were called for an encore. The rousing conclusion to the concert was “Sweat Giorgia Brown”, a classic that went down in music history over a hundred years ago and brought the evening to a dignified end. This shows how the multitude of jazz standards – from “All of Me” to “Fly Me to the Moon” – still produce relevant and popular pieces today. The diversity in jazz remains unbroken, and the concert by Axel Schmitt and his band shows that this style of music is still very popular and that there is always something new to discover.

The evening at the Kulturbistro Münster-Sarmsheim will be remembered not only as a magnificent concert experience, but also as a contemporary expression of the deep-rooted jazz tradition that keeps the spirit of past decades alive and at the same time takes a look into the future, in which the challenges of the digital music landscape must be addressed creatively. If you want to be there next time, you should check out the club's events CULTURE VERY CLOSE Don't miss it and immerse yourself in the world of jazz.