The Europe Jazz Network bestows 3 awards: the EJN Award for Adventurous Programming (now at the 15th edition), the EJN Award for Music & Community (now at the 8th edition) and the EJN Zenith Award for Emerging Artists, in collaboration with 12 Points (now at the 5th edition). In the year 2026, the EJN Award for Adventurous Programming was bestowed to Südtirol Jazzfestival Alto Adige (Italy) and the EJN Award for Music & Community was awarded to Victory Beats (Ukraine).

The 15th EJN Award for Adventurous Programming goes to Südtirol Jazzfestival Alto Adige

Established by the Europe Jazz Network (EJN), this annual Award honours a European festival, club, or venue that succeeds in delivering visionary and compelling musical experiences for its audience. 

Südtirol Jazzfestival Alto Adige was praised by the jury for its long-standing commitment to young European artists, its courageous and coherent artistic vision, and its ability to create meaningful musical encounters across the entire South Tyrol, from urban spaces to remote and unconventional locations. 

The award winner was selected through a two-phase process: initially, the 200+ EJN member organisations from 38 countries nominated potential awardees, including non-members. Subsequently, a jury comprising EJN members and other respected music professionals convened online in May 2026 to select the winner from a shortlist of 21 nominees.

Comment by the 2026 Award jury

“The EJN Award for Adventurous Programming 2026 is presented to Südtirol Jazzfestival Alto Adige for its commitment to artistic encounters, innovative curatorial vision, and long-standing support for young European artists.

For many years, the festival remained faithful to a bold artistic direction, championing new generations of European improvisers and creative musicians even when safer and more commercial choices would have been easier. The jury particularly recognised the festival’s coherence, youthful spirit, and its ability to create meaningful encounters between artists, audiences, and places.

Beyond its programming approach, Südtirol Jazzfestival Alto Adige has developed a unique decentralised format, bringing music to unusual locations across the area, from mountain huts and caves to public squares in small towns, transforming the entire province into a space for discovery and artistic exploration.

The festival also inspires programmers and artists across Europe, demonstrating how a strong artistic identity can shape the evolution of a festival and contribute to the vitality of the European jazz scene.”

The jury 2026 was composed by: Enrico Bettinello (Circolo Controtempo, Italy), Frank van Berkel (BIMHUIS, Netherlands), Silvia Bolognesi (Artist & educator, Italy), Simon Kenda (Jazz Cerkno, Slovenia), and Mario Steidl (Previous award winner, Saalfelden Jazzfestival, Austria).

Comment by Max von Pretz, Stefan Festini Cucco and Roberto Tubaro, artistic directors of the festival

“We are honoured and delighted to receive this year’s EJN Award for Adventurous Programming. This prestigious European recognition encourages us in our future endeavours and reinforces our confidence that we are on the right path with our festival, something that matters when you are situated in the middle of the mountains.

Our approach to programming is only possible thanks to all the wonderful artists who are willing to embark on challenging adventures with us and our audience, at times despite uncertain outcomes. Working with these artists, with our partners and supporters, and with the EJN community is a constant source of inspiration. Envisioning new projects together fills us with gratitude and excitement for what lies ahead.

We would like to express our sincere gratitude to Klaus Widmann, the festival’s former President and Artistic Director. For almost twenty years, he remained deeply committed to his artistic vision and paved the way for the festival we continue to shape today.”

The EJN Award winners will be celebrated during the opening ceremony of the 2026 Südtirol Jazzfestival Alto Adige, on 26 June in Bolzano, and at the 12th European Jazz Conference in Cologne, Germany, on 26 September 2026, bringing together EJN members and creative music professionals from across Europe and beyond.

About Südtirol Jazzfestival Alto Adige

Today’s Südtirol Jazzfestival Alto Adige traces its history back to 1982 and the launch of “Jazz Summer”, which later became “Jazz & Other”. While in its early years the concerts were held only in Bolzano, today the festival extends across the whole region of South Tyrol.

Many concerts are unique and inseparable from their specific settings and venues. South Tyrol itself becomes a stage, with jazz music blending into its landscapes. Concerts take place in towns and villages, on mountains and alpine meadows, beside lakes and rivers, in town squares and on city streets, in parks and castles, and in historic inns and industrial spaces. The combination of urban settings, picturesque mountain locations, culinary delights and captivating music creates a distinctive festival experience. The Südtirol Jazzfestival Alto Adige runs for ten days each year, from the last Friday in June to the first Sunday in July. 

In 2026, it will take place from 26 June to 5 July, presenting 52 concerts at 35 venues across South Tyrol, with more than 100 artists taking part. The opening concert at the NOI Techpark in Bolzano will feature the captivating Gard Nilssen Supersonic Orchestra. This large ensemble will not only deliver a spectacular opening concert but also set the tone for the first festival weekend. After the opening night, the musicians will appear in various formations across different festival spaces, creating a dynamic opening chapter for the ten-day programme.

Full programme: https://www.suedtiroljazzfestival.com

The Europe Jazz Network (EJN) is happy to announce that the 8th EJN Award for Music & Community goes to Victory Beats, an inspiring Ukrainian initiative using music to support and empower people affected by war trauma.

Jury Statement

The jury was deeply impressed by the originality, urgency and social impact of this initiative. At a time when Ukraine continues to face the devastating consequences of a full-scale war, Victory Beats offers an innovative response by using music therapy and DJing to support people experiencing war trauma. Working from locations like Lviv, Kyiv, Dnipro and Odessa, they reach out to veterans and civilians, war victims, prisoners of war survivors, and families of veterans.

The jury wishes to highlight the value of Victory Beats' methodology from a trauma-informed perspective. Musical creation and joint music-making offer participants a sense of agency and choice at a time when so much has been taken from them, a principle that resonates deeply with trauma-sensitive practice. While each participant follows an individually tailored programme, the project also creates meaningful space for shared experience: through joint playing, family retreats, and the community that has grown around Victory Beats, including the veteran band born from the project. In a context where war remains a daily reality, this combination of individual care and collective belonging offers a form of resilience that reaches beyond any single participant.

Volodymyr Nedogoda, Head of Victory Beats, highlights the motto of the organisation: "In the dark times of the most terrible war of our time, music performs a true miracle - music saves lives."

More info about Victory Beats are available at this link.

The jury also wished to acknowledge three outstanding projects that received Highly Commended recognition:

• Jazz House Community Orchestra (JCO) from Cologne, Germany, was recognised for its long-term commitment to inclusion and participation in the context of a music school. The project creates an inspiring space where musicians of different ages, backgrounds and abilities come together as equals, demonstrating how collective music-making can foster belonging, dialogue and lasting community relationships.

   

• The Community Week of Jazzfest Berlin by the Berliner Festspiele (Germany) was praised for placing local communities at the heart of a major festival through an ambitious programme of participatory activities and partnerships. The jury recognised the initiative as an excellent example of meaningful community engagement within a festival context.

   

• Ensemble des Musiciennes, formerly “Les Initiées” (France) received a Highly Commended mention for its valuable contribution to strengthening representation, collaboration and professional opportunities for women in music. The jury recognised the project's artistic outcomes and commitment to creating supportive networks and empowering participants through collective practice.

The jury commends all applicants for the exceptional quality of this year's submissions, which once again demonstrate the richness, diversity and transformative power of community music initiatives across Europe and beyond.

Jury members: Alex Carr - chair (Cheltenham Festivals, UK), Lucas Dols (Sounds of Change, NL, previous award winner), Rosa Galbany (Jazz I AM/Taller de Músics, ES), Mark van Schaick (inJazz/Buma Cultuur, NL).

About the Award

The EJN Award for Music & Community is bestowed each year by the Europe Jazz Network to an organisation or project for its groundbreaking work on social inclusion, celebrating initiatives that use jazz and creative music as tools to engage, connect and empower communities.

For the third time in 2026, a public nomination phase was launched through an online form, opening the process to both EJN members and non-members. This allowed the wider community to suggest interesting and relevant projects, and submit detailed information about them. From these submissions, a shortlist of 10 projects was created and carefully evaluated by a jury composed of EJN Board members, previous award winners, and experts in the field.

Previous Recipients

Over the years, the Award has celebrated a range of pioneering initiatives across Europe: Sounds of Change (Netherlands) in 2025; Taller Obert by Taller de Músics (Spain) and Bunkern Bokar (Sweden) in 2024; B:Music for Generation Ladywood (UK, 2023); Katowice JazzArt Festival / Miasto Ogrodów (Poland, 2022); JazzDanmark for JazzCamp for Girls (Denmark, 2020); Pasquale Innarella Rustica X Band (Italy, 2019); and Banlieues Bleues for their actions musicales (France, 2018).

We are very happy to announce SC’ÖÖF from Switzerland as the winner of the 4th Zenith Award for emerging artists - an initiative launched by the Europe Jazz Network (EJN) in collaboration with Irish organisation IMC’s 12 Points Festival, and supported by Creative Europe.

With two horns, drums, electronics and guitar, SC’ÖÖF bring traditional jazz instruments into an avant-garde soundscape. Their music is fuelled both by their passion for odd grooves and a consciousness of social responsibility in their creative practice. The band is composed of Noah Arnold (Saxophone), Elio Amberg (Saxophone), Christian Zemp (Guitar) and Vincent Glanzmann (Drum Kit & Electronics), and so far published 3 albums: CDR003SA (2022), Weaving Elephants (2020) and Kreidenfels (2017). The quartet was supported by Pro-Helvetia as part of their high priority support scheme 2022-2024 and was selected to perform as part of the official jazzahead! showcase programme in 2023.

The EJN Zenith Award was created in 2019 to shine a spotlight on a remarkable European ensemble or solo project working in creative jazz and improvised music. The winner is selected from the carefully curated 12 acts performing at the 12 Points festival, all coming from different European countries. The Award celebrates the ensemble’s ability to break musical boundaries while demonstrating an original approach to performance and a potential for a strong, ongoing international career. The name “Zenith Award” was adopted to reflect the level of excellence in the winning act, and its capacity to show a way forward for the future of creative music in Europe. Previous recipients of the Zenith Award were Trio Heinz Herbert from Switzerland in 2019, Nout from France in 2023, and Liv Andrea Hauge trio from Norway in 2024.

For each award edition, the Europe Jazz Network nominates an international jury of artistic directors, all EJN members, to choose the winner out of the 12 bands performing at the 12 Points festival. This year, 12 Points festival took place in presence, after a few years of pause, between 24-27 September 2024 at G Livelab in Tampere, Finland. Please see below the full list of the 12 bands that performed at the festival, coming from Austria, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland.

Comment from the award jury: “SC’ÖÖF creates imaginative soundscapes with a conglomerate of sounds traversing between computer generated pulses and acoustic bursts of expression, all meticulously orchestrated into an original sound. Their musical stories are rooted in the industrial realm, but yet the group produce an overall organic, human-like fluent feel. The outcome is a percussive, rhythmically unpredictable, melodically compelling experimental jazz-dub-d’n’b-breakbeat-hiphop-noise set that exudes great musicianship, boldly taking on the freedom of expression.

With their fresh, eclectic and captivating approach SC’ÖÖF can build bridges between jazz fans and audiences of different genres and has a potential to bring the needed generational refreshment of jazz festivals. Thus, the jury believes the band’s future on Europe’s festival and club stages is bright and it is proud to present the Zenith Award to SC’ÖÖF.”

The Zenith Award jury for this year was composed by: Christoph Huber (Porgy & Bess, Austria), Martyna van Nieuwland (Music Meeting, the Netherlands), Ragnhild Menes (Kongsberg jazzfestival, Norway), Tina Lešničar (Ljubljana Jazz festival/Cankarjev dom, Slovenia), Max von Pretz (Südtirol Jazzfestival Alto Adige, Italy), Kenneth Killeen (12 Points/Improvised Music Company, Ireland).

On being named the winners of the Zenith Award 2024, SC’ÖÖF commented "We’re extremely jazzed to win the Zenith Award! It’s even better than finding the last piece of pizza at a party- pure joy! The whole 12 Points festival was a fantastic whirlwind of creativity, where we laughed, and soaked in inspiration! Thank you for this honour- we can’t wait to keep creating music that makes you move and maybe even question your life choices!"

SC’ÖÖF will now receive an outstanding prize of performances and promotional opportunities from among the EJN membership, including a prestigious showcase at the European Jazz Conference 2025 in front of over 400 music professionals from all over Europe and beyond in Bari, Italy (25-28 September 2025) as part of the showcase programme of the Conference.

EJN will also support additional international tours and concerts inside the EJN membership, setting up a communication and professional development strategy to promote the Zenith Award winners through its members and contacts and assisting in developing the winning act’s visibility and viability in the international arena. 

About SC’ÖÖF
SC’ÖÖF is an experimental band that has formed its own radical sonic language, which is at once refreshingly adventurous and in-your-face. A strong affection for captivatingly odd grooves and an excessive live energy makes Sc’ööf an exciting bag of surprises.

Their contemplative attitude and their joy for fundamental research is strongly audible in their music and their creative process. Extending this attitude to the questions of social resonance and cultural relevance, the members of Sc’ööf have acted as a driving force to form «Club Dänemark» which acts at once as a collective think tank, transdisciplinary event organizer and record label.