Ede is a 22-year old composer and singer coming from Spain, who has already found her voice and her way. Even though she has just "taken the first steps" in the music scene, she has walked a long way to come here and she has a comprehensive education in music, performing arts and dancing. Just as many Millenials, she started out uploading videos of her own compositions to YouTube in which she appeared singing and playing different instruments. Her immense talent and infectious personality were the key elements to gain a loyal audience that has seen her rise and grow artistically.

The story of the German a cappella band “basta” started out as a get-together of two of the current members, William Wahl and René Overmann, who shared a passion for a cappella music. Having played together in some bands as teenagers, they decided to join forces and start the band, in which they sometimes performed as a quartet along with other friends. Until one day the band members at that time came to the conclusion that they should arrange a stage number and write their own songs. That is how they began rolling in 2000, when they spent the whole summer writing, rehearsing, and playing their own official concerts.

The great musician and song-writer Björn Heuser was raised in Cologne (Germany) and has a close connection to the city, its life, and its history, which is one of the reasons why he writes and sings in Cologne’s dialect Kölsch. His music career started very soon when he was a little kid and he learned how to play the piano, guitar and bass, among other instruments; with the age of 13 he wrote his first songs and from then on, he performed several times with his father in different events and started his solo career. The first album Schloflos came out in 2011 and took him on tour with his band.

Fug and Janina are a German duo that plays music for children and that started their adventure back in 2010 when both met and discovered that both of them played the ukulele enthusiastically. At the beginning, they only performed for friends and in small venues, but very soon they received requests from schools, day-care centers and special schools in Cologne.

One of the legendary figures of Cologne’s music scene is the German singer Gerd Köster, whose sign is the dialect he uses: Cologne’s dialect Kölsch. He is part of the history of Cologne’s most celebrated artists and he first started his music career as the frontman of the German band “Schroeder Roadshow”. It was an anarcho-political-rock band that sang ironically about politics and that became one of the cult bands in the German Federal Republic. Later on, he started his solo career with the project “The Piano Has Been Drinking”, a project that consisted of a Kölsch adaptation of many Tom Waits lyrics and that was welcomed with pleasure in Germany.

The singer, composer and comedian Hans Süper was born in 1936 and his music career is linked to Cologne’s popular carnival and carnival music. He started playing from a very young age, since he came from a family of experienced musicians, and began giving concerts with his brother as a duet. Later on, he met his music partner Hans Zimmerman, with whom he created the “Colonia Duett”, a celebrated duo that started in 1974 and in which he is best known for his role as a singer and Flitsch player (Flitsch is the Kölsch term for mandoline), and Zimmerman played the guitar and sang. They were —and still are—a successful and beloved duo in Cologne and Germany that got to play between 250 and 300 gigs a year, for which they prepared a whole stage set that included mimic and original compositions that made the audience laugh and enjoy.

In 2012 Peggy Sugarhill gathered a strong all-girl band around her that rocks everything away. Peggy followed her desire to combine her music with the language of her homeland Cologne and her band was immediately on fire. The city greeted the girls gratefully because such a project had never been heard before. Ever since Peggy Sugarhill first played her new rockabilly "op Kölsch" [in Kölsch] on stage with the spectacular girls from Rockemarieche back in 2014, she has turned the Cologne music scene upside-down. Her songs are inspired by Chuck Berry and Beyoncé and there are hints of pop, rock'n'roll and country music all sang in Cologne's dialect Kölsch. This combination works brilliantly—even beyond the Rhine area, as was proved when they opened for the German band Kasalla on their Germany tour 2017.

The German singer and songwriter William Wahl, known as one of the members of the a-cappella band “basta”, started his music career very soon after high school. He studied music in Cologne and Berlin and was music director of various musicals. After several years in the music industry and numerous records with his band “basta”, he decided to start his solo career with the album Wie schön wir waren [How beautiful we were] in 2012. Since then, he has been immersed both in basta projects and solo projects, like the collaboration with German comedian Jens Heinrich Claassen, in which William played the piano.

Trovači is a band that plays ska & reggae from the Balkans and that founded in Düsseldorf back in 2003 by four “ex-Yugoslavian” friends. Their lyrics are in German, Serbian and Croatian and they share their own personal Balkan views on topics like immigrant worker clichés, German everyday life world-wide politics or heartaches, always with self-mockery.

The German band Zöller & Konsorten first appeared in 2016 as a rock ‘nd’ roll group that brought together some of Germany’s best rockers: Jürgen Zöller, Lyle Närvänen, Christoph Stein-Schneider, Steffi Stephan, all admittedly lovers of the road and some of them with more than 30 years touring. Their first single Achterbahnfahrt served as an introduction for what was to come: their debut album Flucht nach vorn. Every song cut by the band is pure spontaneous rock and a snapshot of a lifetime lived by drummer and singer Jürgen Zöller. They have been touring since then and writing new songs to play live! If you want to discover more about Zöller & Konsorten, you can visit their website or listen to their music on all digital platforms!