Friwi Sternberg

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Friedrich-Wilhelm "Friwi" Sternberg (born May 23, 1931 in Lauenburg (Pomerania) ) is a German jazz and entertainment musician ( clarinet , alto saxophone ). According to Karlheinz Drechsel , he was for a long time "the leading clarinetist in the GDR" in the jazz field.

Live and act

Sternberg received piano lessons from 1939, played in the Leisnig youth band from 1944 to 1948 and attended the State Academy for Music in Dresden from 1948 to 1953. Since 1949 he was a member of the Dresden Dance Symphony Orchestra . From 1958 he was also part of Theo Schumann's octet and was co-leader of the Pieper-Sternberg Quartet. From 1968 he led his own quartet, later a quintet in which Andreas Böttcher played the vibraphone. In addition, he arranged and composed for the dance symphonists, but also wrote theater music.

In his clarinet playing, the retention of the classical intonation is striking. He has been following the Tristano School's music-making principle since the 1950s , but remained open to playing in Dixieland ensembles. He is not only featured on the dance symphonic recordings, but also on albums by Günter Hörig and Theo Schumann.

He published a “collection of studies for clarinet”, wrote a very successful, repeatedly reissued improvisation manual “Paths to Chorus Playing” and “Variations on German Folk Songs”.

literature

  • Karlheinz Drechsel: Fascination Jazz. Lied der Zeit , Berlin (GDR) 1974
  • Rainer Bratfisch: Free tones: the jazz scene in the GDR. Ch. Links Verlag, 2005. ISBN 3-86153-370-7

Web links