Berlin's jazz clubs

Map of 9 locations in Berlin, Germany

Berlin's jazz is played mostly below street level and mostly in rooms built for something else: a cinema basement, a corner grocery, the cellar of a lightbulb factory, a brick tunnel under the S-Bahn. These are the rooms that still run a regular programme, with the jam nights that hold the local scene together and the hours they actually keep. Most of the Charlottenburg stalwarts are reached by a staircase and no lift, so the step-free question is answered for each one rather than assumed.

Places in this collection

  • Yorckschlösschen — The same name has been over this door for more than a century: a middle-class corner pub through the 1960s, an artists' watering hole from…
  • Junction Bar — Listed under modern jazz in the Jazz Clubs Worldwide directory for Berlin, and counted by berlin.de among the better live addresses in the…
  • Badenscher Hof — Jazz club, restaurant and music café in one room, serving Cajun dishes alongside the live programme of jazz, blues, swing, funk, Latin and…
  • The Hat — A long brick-lined tunnel under the S-Bahn tracks at the back of Kranzler Eck, with the bar down one side and a small stage on the other, i…
  • Zig Zag — Floor-to-ceiling windows put the room on display from the pavement: mismatched furniture, low light, and a grand piano and drum kit on a sl…
  • b-flat — Founded in 1995 by the musicians Jannis and Thanassis Zotos with the actor Andre Hennecke, and counted with A-Trane as one of the city's tw…
  • Kunstfabrik Schlot — A Jazzkeller in the cellar of a nineteenth-century lightbulb factory near Nordbahnhof, where the regulars call it das Schlot. It started in…
  • A Trane — A Charlottenburg grocery store until the club opened in 1992, rebuilt by its owners on the logic of a recording studio rather than a bar, w…
  • Quasimodo — The club sits in the basement of the Delphi Filmpalast, reached by stone steps off Kantstraße, and the cellar was a party venue long before…

Related collections