General: Porgy & Bess sees itself as a jazz and music club with a diverse program. Porgy & Bess serves as a venue for musical encounters, dialogue, and exchange for musicians and audiences alike. The primary focus is on creating a structure that takes into account the diverse forms of expression within the local (jazz) scene as well as new avenues for development (e.g., collaborations with international guest musicians).

Furthermore, a club that serves as a “meeting point” for the local creative scene facilitates the exchange of experiences across stylistic and aesthetic boundaries; it serves as a testing ground for a wide variety of projects that are not bound by the dictates of an “ultimate statement,” and as a platform for ongoing work and development. A primary goal of Porgy & Bess is to foster collaboration among local musicians from a wide variety of artistic backgrounds, thereby counteracting the tendency toward musical ghettoization.

Over the past few decades, the European jazz scene has firmly established itself as an independent and innovative force in jazz. Since P&B defines itself as a European jazz club, it goes without saying that it showcases creative European music. Collaborations with European partners—both in the club scene (Moods/Zurich, Stadtgarten/Cologne, Unterfahrt/Munich, AMR/Geneva, Bimhuis/Amsterdam, A-Trane/Berlin, Opus/Budapest, Victoria/Oslo, Ronnie Scott’s/London, Blue Note/Milan, Fasching/Stockholm, Tonne/Dresden ...) as well as on the international festival scene (Berlin, Moers, Rotterdam, Paris, Sarajevo, Ljubljana, Budapest, Prague, Warsaw, Istanbul, Barcelona ...) increasingly shed light on diverse aspects of non-Austrian approaches to improvisation. Close ties, particularly with event organizers and musicians from the former “Eastern Bloc” (Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Lithuania, Russia, Estonia, Serbia-Montenegro, Croatia, Albania ...) foster international cultural exchange (see the “Step across the border” festival series).

Jazz is historically defined as African-American music, and innovative impulses still come from the “birthplace of jazz”: two good reasons why, on the one hand, the great American soloists of this genre and, on the other hand, the up-and-coming generations are featured in the program.

Here are the facts: In 2025, a total of 450 events took place over 311 event days in the various venues at P&B—311 evening concerts on the Main Stage, 43 matinees and midnight events, 96 concerts in the Strenge Kammer, and 2 exhibition openings in our exhibition space, the Public Domain. All of these events attracted a total of approximately 69,000 visitors, which works out to a daily average of over 220 people.

I haven’t researched all the figures in detail since our opening season in 1993/94, but I’m fairly certain I can say that over two million visitors have attended the P&B in total, which, conversely, means that—at least statistically speaking—every Viennese woman and man has visited our venue at least once.

In addition to these “real” visitors, there are those who watch the concerts via live stream, which we’ve been offering nearly every day since April 4, 2020. Statistically, we can track “unique visitors”—that is, the IP addresses of people who log in—so while we don’t know exactly how many people are actually sitting in front of their screens, we do know that this number cannot be any lower. What we can say with a high degree of certainty, however, is that the number of visitors has at least doubled thanks to the stream.

Christoph Huber, July 2026