It’s amazing how many large ensembles have performed in the LOFT over the last 35 years (many more have rehearsed there) or have even called this rather small “musical living room” (Michael Rüsenberg) their home.
It actually started with larger ensembles in 1989, when bassist Matthias Bauer (the youngest of the three Bauer brothers) organized a few concerts with improvising musicians at LOFT, which also made the venue better known in the scene.
Over the years, countless concerts with big bands or large ensembles followed. The United Womens Orchestra played one of its first and last concerts at LOFT, in the 90s there was the Bull’s Eye Orchestra, from the 2000s the Japanese super-orchestra Shibusa Shirazu could be heard here as well as the large ensembles of Stefan Schultze, Jürgen Friedrich and Jan Schreiner or, more recently, Sofia Will, The big bands of the Rheinische Musikschule and the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz Köln (Cologne University of Music and Dance) were just as much at home here as the big band of our jungloftler Pascal Klewer, the Subway Jazz Orchestra or currently the Cologne Contemporary Jazz Orchestra, because surprisingly the special, clear acoustics of the LOFT were and are very suitable for large bands and above all for the listeners. So it was no wonder that the founders of the Multiple Joy[ce] Orchestra (MJO) approached me in 2003 with a request to make the LOFT available to them as a home base for their James Choice Orchestra project (the predecessor of the MJO).

https://multiplejoyce.com/de/das-multiple-joyce-orchestra/

Few large ensembles of this kind have a long lifespan, but the MJO has now been around for 21 years, which speaks for the quality of the concept of the four founders Frank Gratkowski, Carl Ludwig Hübsch, Matthias Schubert and Norbert Stein.
The goal of being able to realize complex notations and conceptual improvisations at the highest level has remained the same, but there have been changes in the organization, so now not only compositions by the directors are performed, but also works by guest composers. After 21 years, it can be said that the goal of creating a permanent, continuously evolving ensemble from this orchestral project has been achieved: the musicians meet regularly for work phases and concerts, aiming not only to appeal to an audience from the improvising music and jazz scene, but also to audiences from the new music scene as well as open-minded classical music listeners.
The MJO is also a meeting point for a scene of musicians who want to find a new path between jazz, contemporary music and improvised music, and the orchestra is always given a new timbre by combining different generations of musicians, such as those from the Cologne University of Music and Dance, and by working with established protagonists.
In any case, we are delighted to be home to such a unique and interesting ensemble.
Hans Martin Müller, January 2025