March is not quite spring and not quite winter, and Amsterdam is doing that thing where it can’t decide. DATSKAT Festival at Bimhuis feels like exactly the right response: two nights of jazz that has long since stopped caring about what jazz is supposed to be, with the chairs cleared out and the dancefloor open.
Named after an iconic track by The Roots, DATSKAT is Bimhuis’s recurring series dedicated to the fertile overlap between jazz, hip-hop, afrobeat and neo-soul. For this weekend’s festival edition, Friday 27 and Saturday 28 March, the venue strips back to its bones, transforms its hall into something closer to a club, and lets the panoramic view of the city do the rest of the work atmospherically.
Friday opens with Sons of Jumira, a trio whose instrumentation alone, harp, double bass, drums, signals that they’re not here to play it safe. Harpist Ranie Ribeiro, bassist Julian Tjon Sack Kie and drummer Mill Voyance move between hushed, hypnotic passages and wide-open energetic sections with a playfulness that feels genuinely earned rather than performed. They’re followed by Theon Cross, the Sons of Kemet tuba player who has spent years making the case that his instrument deserves a place at the centre of modern sound. Rooted in his Afro-Caribbean heritage and drawing on everything from deep sub-bass to layered overtones, Cross has collaborated with Little Simz and Makaya McCraven and shows no sign of slowing down his quiet redefinition of the genre.
Saturday brings ROSEYE, the band led by Scottish-Australian singer and saxophonist Tallulah Rose, whose sound pulls freely from soul, rock, hip-hop and electronics without ever sounding scattered. Fresh off appearances at North Sea Jazz and ESNS, they’re working towards a new studio album and currently in that electric phase where everything feels live and slightly unresolved in the best possible way. Closing the weekend is Allysha Joy, vocalist, songwriter, keyboardist, former frontwoman of Melbourne’s 30/70, whose raw, husky voice over Fender Rhodes has drawn comparisons and collaborations from Ezra Collective to KOKOROKO. Her records have landed on Bandcamp’s best-of lists; her live sets tend to be the thing people talk about afterwards.
Both nights end with an afterparty in the café, Friday with DJ Abiba Sokoto and on Saturday with Lucas Benjamin.
Tickets are €26 per night or €40 for both. The café opens at 18:30; music from 20:30. Get your tickets here.
