Brothers Kühn - Two musicians play each other freely
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | Brothers Kühn - Two musicians play each other freely |
| Country of production | Germany |
| original language | German |
| Publishing year | 2019 |
| length | 90 minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director | Stephan Lamby |
| script | Stephan Lamby |
| production | ECO Media |
| music | Rolf and Joachim Kühn |
| cut | Silke Olthoff |
| occupation | |
| |
Brothers Kühn - Two Musicians Play Each Other Free is a documentary by Stephan Lamby that traces the lives of the brothers Rolf and Joachim Kühn in different episodes and follows them to places where their memories come to life. The preview of the film took place in the Babylon cinema in Berlin on September 3, 2019 in the presence of the Kühn brothers, Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and his wife. The film was first broadcast on September 21, 2019 on the television program 3sat .
background
The documentary filmmaker and jazz connoisseur Stephan Lamby tells the life story of the two brothers Rolf Kühn and Joachim Kühn in his film and watches them on their tours. The film is essentially an extended double interview with the clarinetist Rolf Kühn (born 1929) and his brother, born in 1944, the pianist Joachim (who also plays his second instrument alto saxophone in the film ). Both grew up in Leipzig; her father and brother were circus artists who actually performed under the stage name "Brothers Kühn".
Her mother was Jewish, ran a tobacco shop and stayed in Leipzig; she miraculously survived the war in the city, but her sister did not. There is a poignant moment when Rolf Kühn stands over a stumbling block in Leipzig and remembers his aunt Martha, who was transported from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz on the last transport , where she and her husband were gassed.
In the film, Rolf Kühn tells of his beginnings as a musician when he played the harmonium at funerals . If he helped carry the coffin, there would be fifty pfennigs more. He tells of his enthusiasm for Benny Goodman as a teenager, whom he later met personally in New York. He lived there a few floors above Billie Holiday and played in the bands of Goodman and Tommy Dorsey . He later returned to Germany and directed, composed and arranged for the NDR television orchestra in Hamburg. The film shows how he shows enthusiasm for new projects even at an advanced age; in his band he plays with the young drummer Christian Lillinger . "The mutual admiration and respect between the older and the younger musician are tangible and inspiring."
It also reports how Rolf Kühn managed to get his brother Joachim out of the GDR in 1966 by persuading Friedrich Gulda to invite his brother to a jazz competition in Vienna as the official representative of the GDR. The pianist managed to escape the two Stasi officers who wanted to pick him up. He lived first in Paris and now in Ibiza. The film deals with topics as diverse as Stasi files , drug use, previous marriages, prostate cancer , mortality and Joachim Kühn's life in California in the late 1970s.
Lamby accompanied the brothers on their most recent tours, traveling with Rolf Kühn to New York and to Joachim Kühn in Ibiza. The film repeatedly shows excerpts from an appearance in the Stage Club in Hamburg, where the brothers played with their ensemble in early 2019.
Reviews
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The authors of Jazz thing said: “Lamby's film is also a journey through time through German-German history, tells the loving relationship between two brothers and their human and musical freedom.” Sebastian Scotney ( London Jazz News ) wrote: “One aspect of the film that gives it its charm - and which will hopefully give the film a life abroad - are the two brothers' completely different characters. Rolf is in charge, Joachim the free spirit. ”The author clarifies this with the scene when director Stephan Lamby asks her alternately to explain what the word freedom means for her. Rolf replies [...] that for him freedom means having the financial means to do what he wants, as he remembers all too clearly the times when he couldn't do it. For the younger brother Joachim, with his strong Leipzig accent, freedom means a life without restrictive appendices such as "cats, mutt, children, church". Joachim Kühn often speaks about the desire to concentrate on the essentials and to keep the unnecessary at bay; his attitude strongly reminds the author of the themes of Saul Bellow's later works such as The Actual (1997) and More Die of Heartbreak (1987).
What comes out of it is a balanced and complete picture of the two musicians and also the warmth of their feelings for each other, Scotney sums up. Lives so fully lived, he said, “are also there to teach us lessons about how artists react to the world and interpret it to be in different ways. This film is an extended close-up, it shows us what makes Rolf and Joachim Kühn tick and does it very well. "
Hannes Hütt ( Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung ) said, “Stephan Lamby's film is a document of its own history of fascination. The author and documentary filmmaker once played jazz himself, in New York and Brazil. With the portrait of the Kühn brothers, he added a facet to his cinematic repertoire that will also be useful for political documentaries and that opens the musician's absolute pitch to political leitmotifs. "
In the author's opinion, the first pictures of the film are stunning; “Rolf Kühn, who is almost ninety years old, plays the clarinet, lost in himself. The camera shows him from behind in an armchair, then Joachim repeats the notes of the next appearance from the di-de-di-de-lu sheet. Cut, they enter the stage together, Joachim rages like a berserk on the piano, Rolf comes into the picture from the side. The next scene shows Rolf somewhere outside, maybe in New York, it's so short, but Rolf's radiant, melancholy face sticks in the mind of the viewer like a visual fermata. "For Hütt these images from the history of the 20th century are primed, "The face of a surviving witness who touched the world with pneuma and the joy of playing and won it over."
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d e Sebastian Scotney: The Kühn Brothers - Jazz Across Borders. London Jazz News, September 22, 2019, accessed September 23, 2019 .
- ^ A b c d e Hannes Hütt: Film about the Kühn jazz brothers: They are so free. September 21, 2019, accessed September 22, 2019 .
- ^ Brothers Kühn - Two musicians play each other freely at ECO Media
- ^ A b Christian Broecking, Stefan Franzen & Martin Laurentius: Brothers Kühn. JazzThing, September 19, 2019, accessed September 23, 2019 .