Werner Hüsgen
Three Decades on the Saxophone, and a New Chapter with Aventura Quartett
There are musicians who chase trends, and there are musicians who simply keep playing, year after year, until their body of work becomes a kind of quiet history of the music itself. Werner Hüsgen belongs firmly to the second category. For more than thirty years the saxophonist has been a constant, versatile presence on German and European stages, moving fluidly between big bands, small combos, multimedia projects and, most recently, the acoustic jazz quartet that now carries his newest musical ideas out into the world: Aventura Quartett.
A Career Built on Range
Hüsgen’s biography does not read like the story of a specialist who found one sound and stayed with it. It reads like the story of a musician who treats the saxophone as a passport – an instrument that can open the door to almost any genre, and one he has used to walk through most of them. Over three decades of mesmerising stage presence, he has taken part in, and often helped shape, an unusually wide range of ensembles and stylistic worlds.
Big bands have formed one pillar of his career. He has performed and led within the Cologne Jazz Orchestra, one of the region’s respected large ensembles, as well as with “Brownie Speaks” and the “Big Bandits” — settings that demand both section discipline and the ability to step forward as a soloist at a moment’s notice. But Hüsgen has never confined himself to the big-band format.
In smaller, more experimental constellations he has pursued entirely different sonic paths: his Amsterdam-based jazz-hip-hop project “P.U.L.S.E.” placed the saxophone inside beats and grooves far removed from the swing tradition, while “Electronic Research” pushed him into multimedia territory, pairing improvised music with visual and electronic elements. In between these projects sat the “Werner Hüsgen Quartett,” a vehicle for his own compositions and a proving ground for the acoustic, chamber-jazz language he continues to refine today.
This restlessness has taken him well beyond Germany’s borders. Concerts and tours have carried him across numerous European countries, to the United States, South Africa and to Cuba — experiences that have clearly left their mark on his musical vocabulary, which draws as comfortably on Latin and world-music colours as it does on the European jazz tradition.
Roots in Aachen: Theater, Klangbrücke and GZM
While Hüsgen’s touring life has been international, Aachen has remained an important anchor point in his career. He has contributed his playing and his musical ideas to productions at the Theater Aachen, the city’s principal stage for opera, musical theatre and drama — work that has required him to adapt his saxophone playing to the very different demands of the theatrical pit, underscoring incidental music, songs and scenic atmosphere rather than a concert programme built around his own compositions.
That same versatility has connected him to Aachen’s contemporary and improvised music scene through the Gesellschaft für Zeitgenössische Musik Aachen e.V. (GZM), the association founded in 1988 that has spent decades cultivating new music, current jazz and improvised music in the region. Since 1998, the GZM has operated from a fixed home base known as the Klangbrücke, housed in the traditional Alte Kurhaus building near Aachen’s Bushof.
The Klangbrücke provides the GZM with a studio stage, rehearsal and seminar rooms, and an office from which it organises concerts, festivals and its associated music school, “music loft.” For a musician like Hüsgen, whose career has always moved between composition, performance and pedagogy, the Klangbrücke represents exactly the kind of infrastructure that keeps a regional jazz and new-music scene alive: a place where touring artists, local musicians and audiences can meet on equal footing.
His association with the GZM situates him within a network that has, for decades, championed exactly the kind of boundary-crossing, improvisation-rich music that defines his own output.
Aventura Quartett and the “Soul & Mind” Project
It is this long accumulation of experience — big-band discipline, small-group intimacy, theatrical adaptability, world-music influence and a deep connection to Aachen’s new-music infrastructure — that feeds into Hüsgen’s most recent and perhaps most personal project: Aventura Quartett.
The quartet brings together four musicians whose combined résumés read like a cross-section of the contemporary European jazz scene. Alongside Hüsgen on saxophone and composition sit Sebastian Scobel on piano, Werner Lauscher on double bass, and Simon Busch on drums. The group’s music, gathered under the title “Soul & Mind,” is described in the ensemble’s own promotional materials as an enthralling blend of acoustic jazz shaped by contemporary influences from world music and twenty-first-century European chamber music. Through their compositions, the four musicians aim to tell deeply moving stories of life: of love, loss, hope, and the strength to begin anew. It is a mission statement that could easily read as overreach on paper, but in performance it points to something real about the group’s ambition — music that wants to carry emotional weight, not just technical polish.
The quartet has built a genuine reputation on some of Germany’s most respected jazz stages, with appearances at venues including Stadtgarten Cologne, Jazzschmiede Düsseldorf, B-Flat Berlin and Birdland Hamburg, as well as festival slots at the InFront Festival Aachen and the Stadtglühen Festival.
That such a young formation has already found its way onto these stages says something about the pedigree its members bring with them — and none more so than pianist Sebastian Scobel, a member of the Frankfurt Radio Bigband (hr-Bigband), widely regarded as one of Europe’s finest large jazz ensembles. Scobel’s presence in the quartet is not incidental.
A pianist shaped by big-band harmony and the demanding ensemble discipline of a broadcasting orchestra brings a particular sensitivity to voicing and dynamics — qualities that translate directly into the intimate setting of a jazz quartet, where every chord has nowhere to hide.
A Quartet in Full Flight
It was exactly this interplay that made the Aventura Quartett’s concert in September 2024 such a compelling evening of music. From the opening bars, the chemistry between Hüsgen’s saxophone and Scobel’s piano was unmistakable: two musicians with very different backgrounds — one rooted in decades of stylistic wandering, the other steeped in the exacting demands of Germany’s premier radio big band — meeting in a shared musical language built on listening rather than showmanship.
Hüsgen’s playing that evening carried the unmistakable ease of an artist who has spent thirty years finding his own voice on the instrument. His tone moved comfortably between lyrical restraint and moments of real intensity, never overplaying a phrase when a single held note would do more.
Scobel, for his part, proved to be far more than a supporting voice: his piano work was rich in colour, alternating between orchestral, big-band-inflected chords and moments of near-classical clarity, a clear echo of the “European chamber music” influence the quartet cites as part of its identity. Werner Lauscher’s double bass and Simon Busch’s drums gave the music its grounding, providing a rhythmic foundation flexible enough to shift from driving swing to something closer to rubato chamber playing within the span of a single tune.
What stood out most was the quartet’s ability to move seamlessly between composed material and improvisation, never letting the audience feel the seams. Pieces built on the emotional narratives the group describes — stories of loss, of new beginnings — unfolded with genuine dramatic shape rather than simply serving as vehicles for solos.
By the concert’s close, it was clear that Aventura Quartett is not merely a new outlet for Werner Hüsgen’s compositions, but a genuinely collaborative ensemble in which decades of individual experience — his own included — have distilled into something fresh, emotionally direct, and very much alive.
Looking Ahead
With a growing reputation on major European stages, a rich network of collaborators drawn from ensembles like the hr-Bigband, and deep local roots in Aachen’s Klangbrücke and GZM scene, Werner Hüsgen’s Aventura Quartett looks well placed to keep building on the momentum of “Soul & Mind.”
For a musician who has spent three decades refusing to stand still, it is, fittingly, not an ending but simply the latest aventura.
