Dietrich Schulz-Köhn

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Dietrich Schulz-Köhn (born December 28, 1912 in Sonneberg , Germany; † December 7, 1999 in Erftstadt , Germany) was one of the most famous German jazz authors, jazz experts and radio presenter ("Dr. Jazz").

Life

Schulz-Köhn learned violin and piano as a child and played drums and trombone in a school band from 1929 as a high school student in Magdeburg . He studied music, economics and languages ​​at the universities of Freiburg im Breisgau , Frankfurt am Main and Königsberg (1934–1939) and Exeter , where he experienced Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong in England . From 1932 to 1933, for example, at the Hoch Conservatory with Mátyás Seiber, he attended the then only German course on jazz - the first ever jazz class. In 1936, he completed his training as a graduate economist from 1939 received his doctorate he attended the University of Königsberg to Dr. rer. pole. about the record on the world market .

In 1934 he founded the first German jazz club Swing Club in Königsberg. From 1935 Schulz-Köhn was employed by the Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft . He also released the records for Brunswick Records ; from 1939 he worked at Telefunken as a jazz editor. In 1938 he joined the NSDAP after joining the SA in Magdeburg in 1933. He was also a correspondent for foreign magazines such as the Billboard and the Swedish Orkester Journals . From 1935 he was also a member of Charles Delaunays Hot Club de France , which he attended in France in 1936 and 1937. He also worked on the 1936 edition of his discography book.

Schulz-Köhn maintained these contacts in Paris during the Second World War, although he rose to first lieutenant in the Air Force and although Delaunay also worked in the Resistance at the same time . He even had himself photographed in Wehrmacht uniform with Django Reinhardt and the only band with Afro-American members still playing at the time in front of the “Club Cygale” in Paris. However, he was only passing through Paris, he was stationed on the French coast, first in northern France, then on the Mediterranean and finally in Normandy.

Since he traveled with part of his record collection and was the only one in France - with Hugues Panassié , as he emphasized - to get new records, he also made himself popular with French jazz fans by playing these records in clubs. Contacts with his friend Delaunay did not break off after the war either, when he was initially a prisoner of war in France. During the war, together with Hans Blüthner and Gerd Pick, from 1943 he even published a secret fan newspaper about jazz, the Mitteilungen . Schulz-Köhn made many contributions thanks to his contacts in France, Holland, Belgium and Sweden. As a prisoner of war in France, he gave lectures in a jazz club founded in the prison camp .

Released from captivity in 1947, Schulz-Köhn was a co-founder of the "Hot-Club Hannover", the "Hot-Club Düsseldorf" and the German Jazz Federation ; full-time he was initially a clerk in the music department of the British military government. From 1949 to 1953 he was label manager at Decca (and as such responsible for the exchange of matrices between the parent company and its German daughters); he also produced records with Hans Koller , Jutta Hipp and Albert Mangelsdorff .

He first became known in the post-war years as radio presenter Dr. Jazz , beginning in 1948 with the Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk with the Jazz-Almanach , a program that was "clearly hot jazz oriented" and which lasted until 1952. He also founded more than 20 jazz broadcasts at the later West German Broadcasting Corporation (WDR) . He was able to fall back on a base of around 4,000 shellac records, which he was able to save through the war and in 1947 across the zone border. From 1957 to 1978 the WDR broadcast jazz information. Die rauhe Rille , which was broadcast from 1974 to 1992 (and continued by Werner Wunderlich ), was similarly long-lived ; he was also active at Deutschlandfunk .

Together with Joachim Ernst Berendt , he organized the traveling exhibition Jazz in USA in 1957 on behalf of the American embassy . In 1969 he co-founded the “International Society for Jazz Research ” in Graz. Since 1985 his estate and collections have been part of the “International Dr. Dietrich Schulz-Köhn Foundation ”. Together with Bruno Tetzner and Glen Buschmann , he was the founder of the several week courses for jazz music in Remscheid , with which amateur musicians were trained.

Schulz-Köhn also worked as a book author and translated Ken Williamson's This Is Jazz into German. From 1958–1961 he had lectureships in the history of jazz at the Cologne University of Music and in 1990 was obliged to hold lectures as an honorary professor at the Berlin University of the Arts .

He was married to the presenter and jazz singer Inge Klaus († 1980). In 1985 he was honored with the Order of Merit 1st Class of the Federal Republic of Germany .

Others

Jens-Uwe Völmecke brings on his Cologne label Jube a number Dr. Jazz Collection out, u. a. with swing music from Paris during the occupation.

Works

  • with Heinz Protzer: I got rhythm. 40 jazz evergreens and their history. Heyne 1994. (Paperback edition of Die Evergreen-Story: 40 x Jazz Quadriga, Weinheim, Berlin 1990, ISBN 3-88679-188-2 )
  • Interview in Klaus Wolbers (Ed.): Thats Jazz. Darmstadt 1988.
  • with Dave Kamien: Lets swing - jazz to join in. School television publishing company 1979.
  • Vive la Chanson. Bertelsmann, 1969.
  • Little history of jazz. Bertelsmann, 1963.
  • This is jazz. Engelbert Verlag, 1963 (Ed. By Ken Williamson; translation and a contribution)
  • Stan Kenton. Jazz library . Pegasus Verlag, Wetzlar 1961
  • Django Reinhardt. Jazz Library, Pegasus Verlag, 1960.
  • with Walter Gieseler : Jazz in school. Möseler Verlag, Wolfenbüttel 1959.
  • Nature and shapes of jazz music. Kevelaer 1951.
  • The record on the world market. Reher, Berlin 1940 (= Dissertation Königsberg 1939)

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See Michael H. Kater: Daring game. Jazz under National Socialism . Cologne 1995, p. 198. Schulz-Köhn could not remember the motifs in the interviews with Kater, some of them were probably career-related. In 1936, however, he was also exposed to attacks by SA “colleagues” because of his jazz lectures.
  2. ↑ The public radio prescribed this pseudonym for him because he was employed in the music industry .
  3. ↑ According to a listener survey, his program was seen as informative for jazz listeners; however, it was criticized as too rare. See Horst Ansin, Marc Dröscher, Jürgen Foth, Gerhard Klußmeier: Anglo German Swing Club. Documents 1945–1952. Hamburg 2003, p. 396f.
  4. ↑ Bernd Hoffmann : Border controls in jazz. Pp. 95-112. In: Franz Kasper Krönig, Helmut Rösing, Ralf von Appen, André Doehring : No Time for Losers: Charts, lists and other canonizations in popular music. 2008, p. 98.
  5. ↑ He contradicts some claims by Mike Zwerin : Swing under the Nazis. 1988.
personal data
SURNAME Schulz-Köhn, Dietrich
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German jazz expert and radio host
DATE OF BIRTH December 28, 1912
PLACE OF BIRTH Sonneberg , Germany
DATE OF DEATH December 7, 1999
Place of death Erftstadt , Germany