Eddie Rosner

Eddie Rosner

Eddie Rosner (born May 26, 1910 in Berlin ; died August 8, 1976 in West Berlin ; actually Adolph Rosner , occasionally Adi Rosner, Ady Rozner and Eddy Rosner, Russian Эдди Игнатьевич Рознер) was a German-Russian jazz band leader , trumpeter , Geiger and cornet player of Swing . He was one of the most popular jazz musicians in Germany until 1933 and in the Soviet Union from the 1940s to 1960s, was one of the leading big band leaders and also known as a composer .

Life and effect

Adi Rosner was born in Berlin as the son of a Polish-Jewish shoemaker. After studying at the Stern Conservatory and at the Hochschule für Musik, he played in Berlin with the dance bands of Marek Weber and Willi Rosé-Petösy and between 1930 and 1933 with Stefan Weintraub's Syncopators and recorded with them. Threatened by the National Socialists because of his Jewish origins, he first went to Belgium and then, due to visa problems, traveled via Zurich and Prague to Poland , which at that time had a flourishing jazz scene in the Piłsudski era. In 1936 he founded a seven-piece jazz band in Warsaw . Its members were the drummer Georg "Joe" Schwartzstein and the singer Lothar "Lionel" Lampel, who had emigrated with Rosner.

The band enjoyed rapid success in Poland, expanded staff and toured France , the Netherlands , the Scandinavian countries and Latvia . In Paris , the formation recorded eight pages for Columbia . Her repertoire included pieces that Rosner would later make popular in the Soviet Union, such as "Caravan", "On the Sentimental Side" or "Midnight in Harlem". Adi Rosner played with the Syncopators on ships on the Hamburg-America Line . He was in correspondence with American jazz musicians such as Gene Krupa . His encounter with Armstrong led to him being referred to as "white Louis Armstrong" after receiving a photo with this dedication from the trumpeter.

After the outbreak of war , Rosner and his wife, the Jewish singer Ruth Kaminska (a daughter of the actress Ida Kaminska ), fled to the Soviet Union in Belarus , as the route to the USA was blocked by the invasion of Poland by German troops. From then on he called himself "Eddie Rosner". In occupied Lviv he received an invitation from Minsk and, through the subsequent support of the first secretary of the CPSU there , Ponomarenko , a jazz friend, the opportunity to continue his band as the state jazz orchestra of the Belarusian republic ( Belostok Jazz ). He founded and directed the best financed jazz orchestra of what was then the Union of Soviet Republics . With Eddie Rosner's band, swing music reached its peak in the USSR. You made many appearances as far as Vladivostok , especially in troop support. In 1941 they were invited to a private demonstration for the General Secretary of the CPSU in Sochi . Stalin liked the performance, which protected Rosner and his band from repression during this period. The short-term openness to American culture during the war led to a golden age for Soviet jazz.

After the end of the Second World War, however, the cultural policy changed again. So Rosner fell out of favor, especially as a Jew and a foreigner. Like most of his musicians, he was arrested. Rosner tried to return to Poland and was arrested on pretexts in Lviv at the end of 1946. He disappeared in Siberian camps in the Kolyma region. There, however, he had the opportunity to found a quartet that performed in Kolyma from 1947 and thus avoided forced labor. The Kommandant, a jazz fan who had heard Rosner's band during the war, made sure that the best jazz musicians on the peninsula were brought together in his band. In the summer of 1947, the band traveled to the other camps under guard to entertain the guards, prison officials, and their wives. Finally Rosner got the opportunity to lead the orchestra of the camp theater in Magadan ( Maglag for short ). Many excellent exiled musicians from Moscow and jazz musicians from the emigrant colonies of Shanghai and Harbin in Manchuria played in this orchestra .

After Stalin's death, Rosner was released from prison at the end of 1953 and tried to revive the band with younger musicians in Moscow in 1954. This new formation, which was headed by Rosner until 1971, caused a sensation and quickly proved itself to be one of the most prominent in the country. The range of music played ranged from original pieces from the pen of western-oriented Soviet composers and arrangers to swing versions of the film music by Theo Mackebens or Charlie Chaplin , traditional jazz standards , evergreens ("Stormy Weather") to modern jazz compositions from Woody Herman , Count Basie , Quincy or Thad Jones repertoire. Over the years the Eddie Rosner orchestra and its top-class musicians (drummer Boris Matwejew , multi-instrumentalist Dawid Goloschtschokin , pianist Nikolai Lewinowski , saxophonists Gennadi Golstein and Alexander Pishchikov ) have developed into by far the best ensemble.

Rosner has also contributed to the development of tango , the style of easy listening and revue in Russia. He received opportunities to appear (including in the film Die Karnevalnacht and popular TV shows such as Blaues Lichtlein (Goluboj Ogonjok) ) and some honors, discovered and engaged many young talents, accompanied well-known singers, dancers, entertainers and other stars, wrote songs, was but always exposed to the dangers of crushing official criticism, omnipresent regulation and censorship. He was neither rehabilitated nor accepted into the composers' association; concerts by his orchestra abroad were also not permitted. In addition, at the end of the 1960s, the cultural authorities' interest in the form of a state big band, the number of which has since been drastically reduced.

All of this meant that Rosner was no longer interested in another life in the Soviet Union: He submitted a total of eight exit applications, all of which were rejected. During the Nixon visit, he managed to sneak into the American embassy disguised as an American tourist and asked the ambassador there to help him leave for Germany. Forced retirement and a new performance ban, he was allowed to leave in 1973. He then died impoverished and forgotten in Berlin in 1976 and was buried at the Jewish cemetery in Heerstrasse / Scholzplatz.

An Eddie Rosner Jazz Festival has been organized in Berlin since 2010 (as part of the German-Russian Festival). The idea of ​​the festival goes back to the initiative of the " Oscar Strok and Eddie Rosner Interest Group" founded in 1998 (also known as Oskar Strock & Eddie Rosner Heritage Society). The Swinging PartYsans music project, launched by the interest group , deliberately focuses on works that are considered to be the estate of Eddie Rosner.

Since May 27, 2018, a plaque commemorates Eddie Rosner on his birthplace in Gormannstrasse (Berlin). The board was initiated by the Oskar Strock and Eddie Rosner Heritage Society, manufactured, installed and officially opened with the support of the WBM - Housing Association Berlin-Mitte. -

literature

• Gertrud Pickhan , Maximilian Preisler: driven out by Hitler, persecuted by Stalin. The jazz musician Eddie Rosner . be.bra Wissenschaft verlag, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-93723-373-4 .
• S. Frederick Starr : Red and Hot. Jazz in Russia 1917-1990 . hannibal, Vienna 1990. ISBN 3-85445-062-1 .
• S. Frederick Starr: Jazz in the USSR . In: That's Jazz - The Sound of the 20th Century (exhibition catalog), Darmstadt, 1988.
• Inna Klause: The sound of the gulag. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2014, pp. 460 - 466.

Literature in Russian

• Dmitri Dragilew: Labyrinths of Russian Tango . Aletheia-Verlag, St. Petersburg 2008, ISBN 978-5-91419-021-4 .
• Dmitri Dragilew: Eddie Rosner: Let's hit the jazz, it's damn clear . Nizhny Novgorod, Dekom, 2011, ISBN 978-5-89533-236-8 .

Web links

Commons : Eddie Rosner  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Eddie Rosner in the catalog of the German National Library
• Portrait on Deutschlandfunk
• detailed English-language portrait with images and discography from patefon.ru
• International Herald Tribune
• Portrait of Eddie Rosner