Create Your Own Jazzfest Berlin Hitster Pack with Hitify
Jazzfest Berlin runs 29 October to 1 November 2026 with Anthony Braxton and Globe Unity Orchestra. Build your own Hitster pack with Hitify.
Jazzfest Berlin 2026: 63 editions of adventurous jazz
From Thursday 29 October to Sunday 1 November 2026, Jazzfest Berlin takes over the Haus der Berliner Festspiele and its neighbours: the A-Trane club, the Quasimodo and the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church. It is the 63rd edition, with 24 concerts, more than 130 artists from over 25 countries and a stack of world premieres. The festival started in 1964 as the Berliner Jazztage, and the first programme book carried a foreword by Martin Luther King Jr.
This year Anthony Braxton opens with a new septet, fifty years after his first Jazzfest Berlin appearance, and the Globe Unity Orchestra closes the festival on Sunday with a 60th anniversary concert. In between you get the Immanuel Wilkins Quartet, Amir ElSaffar, Laura Jurd, Ches Smith and a Focus Japan programme with Otomo Yoshihide.
What is Hitster?
Hitster is the party game where every card hides a song behind a QR code. You scan it, listen, and place the card on your timeline by release year. Get the order right and the card is yours. The first player with ten cards wins.
Why Jazzfest Berlin makes a great Hitster pack
Jazz is a game of decades. Between Billie Holiday in 1939 and a modern band like the Robert Glasper Experiment lie eighty years of swing, bebop, modal jazz, bossa nova, fusion and hip-hop crossover. Everybody at the table can hum a few of these songs, but putting them in the right year is another matter. Was "Take Five" before or after "So What"? (Same year, as it happens.)
It is also a pack that works for every kind of evening. Put it on in the background of a dinner, or turn it into a proper listening game with friends who like to argue about records. Jazzfest Berlin itself is known for pushing the boundaries, but this pack sticks to the tunes everyone knows, so it is easy to play from the first round.
11 songs for your Jazzfest Berlin Hitster pack
Here is a starting list of jazz classics that give the feel of the festival's history. These are our picks, not a programme, and the years are the original release of each recording:
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"Strange Fruit" is the heavy one in the pack, and "Birdland" and "Afro Blue" show how far the music travelled. Add anything you like from this year's lineup once the programme is on streaming, and you have a full deck.
How to build the pack with Hitify
With Hitify you turn a list like this into a real Hitster pack in minutes. Paste a Spotify playlist or search the songs one by one, and Hitify checks the original release year of each track. That matters for jazz more than for any other genre, because streaming services love remastered editions, compilations and "Deluxe" reissues that show the year 2009 for a recording made in 1959.
When your list is ready, download the cards as a printable PDF with QR codes, or order a printed deck delivered to your door. Scan the codes with your phone and play.
More festival music? See our Montreux Jazz Festival Hitster pack. And before game night, read our tips for guessing release years.
Start your Jazzfest Berlin pack today
Whether you are in Berlin or just wish you were: go to hitify.app, add your favourite jazz songs and build your own Hitster pack.
