The award was presented by Ian Robertson, Board Member of BMW AG, and Hans-Georg Küppers, Director of the Department of Arts and Culture of the city of Munich. Beate Sampson, editor at the German broadcasting station BR Klassik, hosted the evening’s event.

The BMW jazz award has become an integral part of the European jazz scene, and we are already looking forward to its seventh season next year. Ian Robertson as he presented the award said he was “satisfied with the choice of this year’s winners and thanked everyone involved for their dedication and passion, and for making the event such a great success,”

Last night’s outstanding final concert of the series BMW Welt Jazz Award 2014, the Swiss sextet “Hildegard Lernt Fliegen” and the Dutch trio “Tin Men and the Telephone” performed in the auditorium of the BMW Welt to compete for the award .

With the auditorium of the BMW Welt sold out, the two ensembles performed in front of about 550 spectators. Following the motto “Sense of Humour”, they presented a mix of musical perfection and humoristic interpretation. Finally, the jury of experts decided on Hildegard Lernt Fliegen as the winner.

This morning matinee performances, which were free of charge, featured national and international ensembles, including Mostly Other People Do the Killing (US), Stian Carstensens Farmers Market (NO), Echoes of Swing (DE), Tin Men and the Telephone (NL), Hildegard Lernt Fliegen (CH) and David Helbock’s Random/Control (AT). Audiences were raving about the ensembles’ performances in the double-cone structure of the BMW Welt.

For more than 40 years now, the BMW Group has initiated and engaged in over 100 cultural cooperations worldwide. The company places the main focus of its long-term commitment on modern and contemporary art, jazz and classical music as well as architecture and design. In 1972, three large-scale paintings were created by the artist Gerhard Richter specifically for the foyer of the BMW Group’s Munich headquarters. Since then, artists such as Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Olafur Eliasson, Jeff Koons, Zubin Metha, Daniel Barenboim and Anna Netrebko have co-operated with BMW. The company has also commissioned famous architects such as Karl Schwanzer, Zaha Hadid and Coop Himmelb(l)au to design important corporate buildings and plants. In 2011, the BMW Guggenheim Lab, a global initiative of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, the Guggenheim Museum and the BMW Group celebrated its world premiere in New York. The BMW Group takes absolute creative freedom in all the cultural activities it is involved in for granted – as this is just as essential for groundbreaking artistic work as it is for major innovations in a successful business.

The distinguished panel of expert judges included Oliver Hochkeppel (journalist for music and cultural affairs at the German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung/chairman); Roland Spiegel (music desk, jazz expert at the German radio station Bayerischer Rundfunk “BR Klassik”); Andreas Kolb (editor-in-chief of the magazines JazzZeitung and neue musikzeitung); Heike Lies (musicologist, Division of Music and Music Theatre of the Department of Cultural Affairs of the state capital Munich) and Christiane Böhnke-Geisse (artistic director at jazz club Unterfahrt, Munich).