Considering how long LOFT has been around, we’ve only been able to follow his career for a few years, but we still wouldn’t want to have missed him in Cologne’s vibrant jazz scene: double bass player Roger Kintopf.
We first noticed him here in 2017: for the 7th edition of the PLUSHMUSIC Festival, curators Hayden Chisholm and Gareth Lubbe had invited the trio First Circle under the motto “youthful yellow cats”, which Roger had founded with saxophonist Victor Fox and drummer Felix Ambach in 2014, and with which the three had immediately caused quite a stir despite their age – they were still students at the time (including the Studio Prize at the German Youth Jazz Encounter and the Special Prize of the German Jazz Union for outstanding compositions). (including the Deutschlandfunk studio prize at the Bundesbegegnung Jugend Jazz and the German Jazz Union’s special prize for outstanding compositions).
Roger had already got to know the jazz city of Cologne and the LOFT back then, however, as he began his studies at the local University of Music and Dance in 2016 at the age of just under 18, even though he was actually musically socialized on the piano, where he also earned his first spurs (Jugend Musiziert, International Rotary Piano Competition).
With our former association chairman Dieter Manderscheid and later with Robert Landfermann, he had two teachers at his side who have significantly shaped and continue to shape the music that LOFT stands for, and yet Roger always managed to amaze and inspire us with his own approach to music. When we launched the first “recording project” in 2019 – a project to promote young talent with two sponsored studio days as the main prize – he was also one of the winners at LOFT: Structucture was the name of his project, in which he had expanded his youth band First Circle to include the Berlin-based Danish saxophonist Asger Nissen.
We still enjoy this project today, as well as many others that he has organized: with Niklas Roever’s trio, he presented himself at LOFT at WDR campus jazz in 2018 and showed that he doesn’t shy away from tradition either; he has worked closely with Pascal Klewer for many years (both in Pascal’s big band and in the cross-border quintet theconstistencyofdestruction), Whether in the bands of Philipp Dornbusch, Veronika Morscher, Fabian Dudek or Simon Nabatov – he always gives the rhythm section a very special quality, and his bass tone is also always a pleasure backstage – in the sound control room of our studio.
Roger still works with Victor Fox in an improvising duo, but can also be heard regularly as a soloist, while the new Trio Percussion, in which he can be heard on an equal footing with Felix Hauptmann and Leif Berger, has developed into one of the most exciting and “freshest” modern piano trios on the recent German scene.
We are also looking forward to more music by and with him, including his latest project with Kirke Karja, Felix Hauptmann and Philip Dornbusch.