SOUTHBOUND JAZZ QUARTET

They share a passion: music that appeals equally to soul, mind and body. Their roots lie in blues, rock, Brazilian bossa nova, European classical music and Latin American folklore. The Southbound Jazz Quartet carries the sun in their hearts and jazz originals and standards in a basket full of warm feelings.

The singer Lilly Santon comes from Padua, Italy, and grew up in Brazil. After studying architecture in Venice, she lived in New York and Munich between 1980 and 2002. Among her most important mentors are Barry Harris, Sheila Jordan, Mark Murphy and Jay Clayton. In the 1980s she performed in New York with Don Cherry's Collective Ensemble, alongside Jim Pepper, Bob Moses and Dennis Charles.

Together with Jimmy Weinstein, Lilly founded the Traveling School/PlayJazz in 2002. In 2006, they founded an annual jazz workshop at the Mallorca Jazz Sa Pobla Festival and have since hosted hundreds of jazz workshops in Europe and the US. In collaboration with the Barbara Weil Cultural Association, Santon and Weinstein curate a concert series at Studio Weil in Port D'Andratx, Mallorca.

Tizian Jost has been a professional jazz pianist since 1985 and is an important voice in the German scene. He has appeared on over 60 CD recordings and is at home in many genre contexts, with his playing always rooted in the hard bop tradition. As a pianist and also as a vibraphonist, Jost has played with many illustrious names of the jazz scene such as Tony Lakatos, Mark Murphy, Dusko Goykovich and Paulo Morello, touring the globe with a wide variety of formations. He has been teaching jazz piano in Munich since 1995 and has also been a professor since 2015.

Urs Johnen was born in Tübingen in 1982, grew up in Calw in the Black Forest and now also lives in Berlin and in Andratx, Mallorca. He studied double bass in Stuttgart and in Weimar, received lessons from Horst-Dieter Wenkel, Ulrich Lau, Manfred Bründl, Frank Möbus, Jo Thönes, Klaus Dusek as well as Patrick Bopp and was a scholarship holder of the Thuringian Orchestra Academy as a double bass player with the Jena Philharmonic Orchestra. Early experiences in classical ensembles such as the Jeunesse Musicale Franco-Allemande, the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie or the Philharmonie der Nationen on the one hand and jazz ensembles such as the Landesjugendjazzorchester Baden-Württemberg on the other hand shaped his self-image as a musical bridge builder and border crosser. He is active in jazz, pop and classical music and has performed with formations ranging from early to contemporary music as well as from singer-songwriter pop to avant-garde jazz in Germany and abroad.

Jimmy Weinstein is from Chicago, USA, and grew up in California and Mallorca. He has been a drummer and composer for over 30 years, performing throughout the US, Europe and Japan. Jimmy studied drums and guitar at Berklee College in Boston. His teachers over the years have included Max Roach, Alan Dawson, Yusef Lateef and Joe Hunt. He has collaborated with Ahmed Abdullah's Diaspora, Sheila Jordan, Alex Harding, Jay Clayton, Marcello Tonolo, and Rachel Gould. He has led groups with Chris Cheek, Ben Monder, Satoko Fujii, Jeff Parker, Oscar Noriega, Elie Massias, Masa Kamaguchi, and Matt Renzi, among others. Together with Abdullah, Harding and Kamaguchi, he formed the quartet NAM, whose album "Song of Time" was chosen by Down Beat Magazine as one of the 25 best live recordings of all time.