Jazz, film, contemporary art and design, with a few familiar faces along the way – my pick of Hamburg’s October cultural calendar, plus one trip beyond the city.
October in Hamburg quite firmly belongs to indoor culture again. The last of the summer’s outdoor events are winding down, the concert season is getting busy, autumn exhibitions are opening one after another, and the first few days of the month still offer a chance to catch the tail end of FilmFest Hamburg. After spending rather too much time going through this year’s calendars, I eventually settled on eight Hamburg events, from jazz and contemporary art to design and film. A few of the musicians on the list also come with memories from my previous work, which admittedly made some choices easier than others.
This is the first monthly selection of its kind on the blog, and there is no complicated formula behind it. I have simply picked things I would genuinely go and see myself, leaving room for smaller venues and less obvious choices alongside some of the bigger names. October also takes us beyond Hamburg for the first time, to Berlin, where Avishai Cohen is playing later in the month. I interviewed him years ago at Müpa Budapest, so there is a little history there too. I do not intend to make the excursion an obligatory monthly feature, but whenever a concert, exhibition or something else gives me a good enough reason to get on a train to another city, it can find its way onto the list.
2 October | Amir Bresler Moog Trio – JazzHall
I have known Amir Bresler, Nitai Hershkovits and Haggai Cohen-Milo since my Budapest years and have heard all three play in various formations over time – including Amir on this very stage with the Gilad Hekselman Trio back in 2022. On 2 October they come to the JazzHall with Amir’s own project: Bresler on drums, Hershkovits on piano and Moog synthesiser, and Cohen-Milo on double bass.
Bresler spent several years drumming with Avishai Cohen and has since played with musicians including Omer Avital, alongside steadily developing his own voice as a composer and bandleader. The Moog Trio is one of his current projects, adding electronic elements to an acoustic trio setting. Hershkovits and Cohen-Milo are hardly conventional sidemen either: both are composers and bandleaders in their own right, and the three musicians have known each other – and each other’s playing – for years.
JazzHall, next to Hamburg’s University of Music and Theatre, should suit them particularly well. With room for only around 200 people, it is intimate enough to watch the communication between the musicians as much as listen to what comes out of it.
2 October · 20:00 · JazzHall Hamburg
3 October | Das Mädchen mit der Leica – FilmFest Hamburg
There are plenty of ways to catch my attention in a FilmFest programme, but putting Leica in the title is admittedly quite effective.
Alina Marazzi’s Das Mädchen mit der Leica tells the story of photographer Gerda Taro, who by the age of 26 had become one of the defining photographic witnesses of the Spanish Civil War before being killed near the Battle of Brunete in 1937. Her years in Paris with Robert Capa mean that their names are still closely linked, although Taro increasingly worked to establish a photographic identity of her own. The film begins in July 1937 and looks back at her youth in Leipzig, exile in Paris, her relationship with Capa and her time in Spain.
As a photographer myself, Taro was reason enough for me to pick this one from the FilmFest programme.
There is another good reason to choose the 3 October screening: on German Unity Day, FilmFest’s cinema screenings are free. Das Mädchen mit der Leica starts at 20:15 at Passage Kino.
3 October · 20:15 · Passage Kino
8 October | Jack Savoretti – FABRIK
Jack Savoretti has already occupied a fair bit of space on the blog this September. I followed his twenty-year career from 2007’s Between the Minds to this year’s We Will Always Be The Way We Were, and on 8 October the tour behind the new record finally reaches Hamburg, with a show at FABRIK.
It is Savoretti’s ninth studio album, arriving after a period in which he first moved towards the lighter, 1970s-influenced sound of Europiana and then somewhere else entirely with the largely Italian-language Miss Italia. The new record circles back in some ways to the guitar-led songwriting of his early years, although naturally with two decades and eight previous albums behind it.
That is partly what makes the Hamburg concert so interesting to me. The September article followed those changes one record at a time; on stage, twenty years of songs have to share the same evening. I am curious to see which parts of his catalogue make their way into the set alongside the new songs, and how tracks written during very different periods sit next to each other live. With a bit of luck, I will have rather more to say about that after 8 October.
8 October · 20:00 · FABRIK Hamburg
Related: The Art of Not Repeating Yourself – Twenty Years of Jack Savoretti
8–11 October | ART LIGHT DISTRICT #3 – Gleishalle Oberhafen
From 8 to 11 October, ART LIGHT DISTRICT returns for its third edition at Gleishalle Oberhafen. More than fifty artists will fill roughly 2,000 square metres with painting, photography, sculpture, installations and mixed media, accompanied by events throughout the four days.
ART LIGHT DISTRICT is an independent initiative founded by artists, offering another way of showing work beyond the conventional gallery system and bringing artists into more direct contact with their audience. The exhibition and evening events deliberately overlap: opening night brings an audiovisual light performance and live music, with poetry, talks, fashion and DJs following over the next few days.
Oberhafen is a fitting home for it. The former railway and warehouse district now houses studios, cultural projects and creative businesses, while much of the old industrial architecture remains intact. Gleishalle itself gives the art a rather different backdrop from the white walls of a conventional gallery.
8–11 October · Gleishalle Oberhafen
From 10 October | Joyce Pensato: Eyes For You – Sammlung Falckenberg
Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Batman, Homer Simpson and characters from South Park appear again and again in Joyce Pensato’s paintings. They are instantly recognisable, but Pensato takes them a long way from their original worlds. In her often large-scale black-and-white enamel paintings, familiar faces are distorted, pulled apart and rebuilt through loose, forceful brushwork.
Opening on 10 October, Eyes For You at Sammlung Falckenberg is Pensato’s first major institutional solo exhibition in Europe since her death in 2019. It ranges from early still lifes and Batman drawings of the 1970s to the monumental paintings of her later career, tracing how the visual language she became known for developed over several decades.
The familiar characters make an easy way into the exhibition, but there is much more going on here than the pleasure of spotting Batman or Donald Duck. Pensato spent decades experimenting with paint, scale and repetition, and Falckenberg’s vast rooms should give the larger pieces plenty of space.
10 October 2026 – 4 April 2027 · Sammlung Falckenberg, Hamburg-Harburg
18 October | David Duchovny – Markthalle
David Duchovny brings his Prince of Pieces European tour to Hamburg’s Markthalle on 18 October. Released this year, the record is his fourth, following his 2015 debut Hell or Highwater.
He arrived at music relatively late, taking up the guitar seriously and starting to write songs around the age of fifty. Since then, songwriting and touring have become a regular part of a career that had already moved well beyond acting. Prince of Pieces sits somewhere around roots rock, folk and the American singer-songwriter tradition, continuing in the direction of his earlier records.
Duchovny has kept writing books alongside all of this. Several novels have appeared over the past decade, followed by his first poetry collection, About Time, in 2025. That literary side of his career is relevant to the songs as well, where language and storytelling tend to matter at least as much as the arrangements around them.
The Hamburg date will bring the new record together with songs from the previous three albums.
18 October · 20:00 · Markthalle Hamburg
From 23 October | Hella Jongerius: Whispering Things – MK&G
For more than thirty years, Hella Jongerius has been interested in what happens when industrial production meets materials that are not quite as obedient as industry might like them to be. She has worked with Vitra, IKEA, Camper and numerous other manufacturers, while her own studio has become a place for extensive experiments with colour, textiles and materials.
Opening at MK&G on 23 October, Whispering Things brings together more than 400 pieces. Finished furniture, textiles and ceramics sit alongside prototypes, models, sketches, collages and films, so the process of arriving at an object becomes as much a part of the exhibition as the object itself.
Questions around mass production run throughout Jongerius’s practice. How much irregularity can remain when thousands of supposedly identical objects are being made? How does the same colour behave on different materials and under different light? Her approach leaves room for imperfections that industrial manufacturing would normally try to eliminate and treats colour as part of the material rather than something simply applied at the end.
The exhibition opens on the evening of 22 October and to the general public the following day.
23 October 2026 – 13 June 2027 · Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg
29 October | Kurt Elling & Yellowjackets – NICA Jazz Club
I interviewed Yellowjackets during my years at Müpa Budapest, so seeing them in NICA’s October programme immediately caught my attention. This time they are coming to Hamburg with Kurt Elling, revisiting music by Joe Zawinul and Weather Report.
Across more than four decades, jazz, fusion, funk and R&B have all found their way into the Yellowjackets sound in different proportions. Today the band is Russell Ferrante on keyboards, Bob Mintzer on saxophone, Dane Alderson on bass and Marcus Finnie on drums. Elling brings another layer entirely: improvisation has always been central to his singing, and his voice tends to operate within a band rather than simply sitting in front of it.
Their project uses Zawinul compositions and the Weather Report repertoire as its starting point, filtered through the sound Yellowjackets have developed over decades and Elling’s own approach to the material.
The 21:00 show proved popular enough for an additional concert to be added at 18:00.
29 October · 18:00 & 21:00 · NICA Jazz Club
Worth leaving Hamburg for | Avishai Cohen Trio – Berlin
Every now and then, I would like to let this monthly selection wander outside Hamburg when there is something elsewhere worth making the journey for. First up is Avishai Cohen in Berlin on 22 October.
There is an old Budapest memory attached to him too. After interviewing Cohen and seeing his concert at Müpa, I ended up having dinner with him and the band, and at some point during the evening introduced him to my old friend, Hungarian musician and producer Miklós Malek Jr. The two quickly found themselves deep in a conversation about music, which was rather fascinating to listen to from the same table and is probably one reason I still remember that evening so clearly.
I have followed Cohen’s career ever since. His music has always moved very naturally between jazz, Israeli and broader Middle Eastern influences, classical ideas and complex rhythmic traditions without making those ingredients feel as though they have been assembled simply for effect.
For Berlin, he is joined by pianist Itay Simhovich and drummer Eviatar Slivnik. The trio can also be heard on this year’s Eternal Child, which should give some idea of where the evening is heading.
They play twice at Zig Zag Hall on 22 October, at 18:00 and 20:30.
22 October · 18:00 & 20:30 · Zig Zag Hall, Berlin
One more October tip: #seeforfree
On 31 October, Hamburg’s #seeforfree returns for Reformation Day. This year 49 museums are taking part, offering free admission to their permanent collections as well as numerous temporary exhibitions.
The list ranges from Hamburg’s major institutions to much smaller collections, so it is also a good opportunity to try somewhere you may have passed many times without ever going inside. Guided tours and other events are planned throughout the day as well.
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