About

Alex Bayer is a double bassist, composer and improviser based in Nuremberg. His music moves between composed structure and free improvisation, odd meters and song-like melodies, and between the jazz club, the cinema and the concert hall.

As a child he refused to learn the recorder; instead he found John Coltrane and Dave Brubeck in his older brother’s record collection and was drawn to the sound of the New York downtown scene. Largely self-taught on the bass, he later studied double bass with Rudi Engel at the Nuremberg University of Music.

His latest album, A Slight Change of Plans (Klaeng Records, 2024), features Loren Stillman (saxophone), Max Arsava (piano) and Bill Elgart (drums). It follows ZODIAC (2019) and RADAR (2022), both on mono-Ton records, the latter with Stefan Karl Schmid, Roland Neffe, Peter Fulda and Jim Black. His first band, Pentelho, released its debut in 2011, after which Bayerischer Rundfunk called him the “Bavarian answer to Charles Mingus”.

With Johannes Ludwig and Jan F. Brill he plays in BADWILL, whose monthly concert series at the Stille Wasser café-bar in Nuremberg is built on collaborations with guest musicians and visual artists. He curates and leads a free improvisation night at SB – Space Between in Nuremberg. With Jonathan Hofmeister and Jan F. Brill he performs the live soundtrack of Dating Planet A, a film-concert by filmmaker Johannes Felder that has toured cinemas and festivals across Germany and Austria. He is also a member of the Volker Heuken Sextet, Claudia Döffinger’s Torso Ventuno Big Band and the baroque/improvisation project Orpheus has just left the Building.

As a sideman he can be heard on more than 25 albums, most recently with Torso Ventuno (Nachtwache, Owl Way Records, 2025), Max Arsava (Nowhere Dense, AUT Records, 2024) and the Volker Heuken Sextet (Deepfield, XJazz!, 2023). He has performed with Loren Stillman, Jim Black, Nils Wogram, Michel Godard, Jens Winther, Rudi Mahall, Nduduzo Makhathini, Eva Klesse, Ronny Graupe, Olga Reznichenko, John Schröder, Oliver Steidle and Heidi Bayer, among others. He is a founding member of the Nuremberg music collective Metropolmusik.

Alongside performing, Alex Bayer teaches jazz bass as a main subject and jazz bass pedagogy at the Nuremberg University of Music, and is a lecturer in professional practice for the Master’s programme in big band at the Frankfurt University of Music and Performing Arts (HfMDK).