Jutta Hipp

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Jutta Hipp on the piano

Jutta Hipp (born February 4, 1925 in Leipzig ; † April 7, 2003 in New York , USA ) was a German jazz pianist , painter and designer .

Live and act

Hipp attended the Rudolf-Hildebrand-Schule in Leipzig-Connewitz and received lessons in classical piano at the age of nine, which she finished after four years. She first heard jazz as a teenager at the age of fourteen and discovered her love for this music through contact with the illegal jazz club Hot Club Leipzig , where she also appeared as a member of an amateur jazz band during the Second World War . There were also sessions in private apartments. The circle included the jazz guitarist Thomas Buhé and the drummer Frohwalt "Teddie" Neubert. Her role models at the time were Teddy Wilson , Fats Waller and Art Tatum .

From 1942 to 1945 she was a student at the State Academy for Graphic Arts and Book Industry in Leipzig, where she took a master class with Professor Walter Buhe , Thomas Buhe's father, and was also a student of Professors Kurt Metze and Karl Miersch . In the post-war period there was a brief occupation by US troops (April to July 1945) before Leipzig was occupied by Soviet troops. During the short time of the American occupation, jazz music was also played in the headquarters of the US troops, jazz performances were possible again, and jazz could be heard on the American soldiers' channel AFN. In 1945/46 demo recordings were made with friends from the “Lime City Jazz Club” in Leipzig (including Rolf Kühn ), which were published in 2015.

In 1946, Hipp moved to West Germany with her then fiancé Teddie Neubert and Thomas Buhé , initially to play in American officers' clubs and dance halls on Tegernsee. In 1948 she had a son Lionel, whom she gave to a children's home. She performed with Paul Martin and from 1951 played professionally with the band of Freddie Brocksieper in Munich and Bavaria in US soldiers' clubs, then in the combo ( New Jazz Stars ) by Hans Koller , which also Dizzy Gillespie on a Germany Tour 1953 accompanied and appropriated the “ cool jazz ” idiom. In 1952 she moved to Frankfurt am Main and directed the Jutta Hipp Quintet from 1953 to 1955 , which initially included Emil Mangelsdorff , Joki Freund , Hans Kresse (bass) and Karl Sanner . With this line-up, the band performed at the first German Jazz Festival in 1953 and also recorded the album New Faces - New Sounds from Germany for an American label. At the suggestion of Leonard Feather, it was later distributed by Blue Note in the USA in order to make it known there and to increase its chances of performing there. In 1953 she took first place among the German jazz pianists in the podium jazz referendum, ahead of Paul Kuhn . With her next band in 1954/5, to which Attila Zoller belonged, she confirmed the reputation of being “Europe's First Lady in Jazz”. In 1954 she played at the German Jazz Festival with Albert Mangelsdorff and Zoller, but also in a session with Hugo Strasser .

In 1955 she went on tour with her quartet in Sweden, where she also recorded with Lars Gullin , and after a Yugoslavia tour with J. Freund and Carlo Bohländer, she settled on an offer from Leonard Feather , who she had heard in Duisburg in 1954, and from hers Game was excited about to the United States . There she was initially successful. She was the first European jazz musician (and the second white musician ever) to get a contract with Blue Note Records , for which she recorded three albums under her own name in 1956. In 1956 she played as a substitute for Marian McPartland, who had gone on tour, for six months in the New York club restaurant Hickory House (in a trio with Peter Ind and Ed Thigpen ). Their game got harder and got more drive . She also performed at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1956 . For a short time she also worked with Charles Mingus .

In 1956, however, there were artistic differences with Feather, partly due to the fact that she did not want to be interfered with in her musical repertoire, for example by playing compositions by Feather. Another reason was that she "brushed off" the married Feather. Before she went to the United States, she was engaged to Zoller. Feather stopped discussing them after 1956 and stated in his books that Horace Silver's influence had had a negative effect on their game. Nat Hentoff had already taken the latter view . She didn't take up again after that and only had engagements in smaller clubs in New York and on Long Island. Around 1957 she toured the southern states with saxophonist Jesse Powell , which in her own words was the musical highlight of her career. As the situation worsened for jazz musicians in the late 1950s, she took a job as a seamstress in a clothing factory in Queens . She performed as a jazz musician on weekends until 1960, but then switched to her first love of drawing and design. One reason was also alcohol problems, partly as a result of the fact that it suppressed her severe stage fright. Stage fright was also the reason for their preference for appearances in smaller jazz clubs.

In the 1940s she studied graphic design at the University of Graphic and Book Art in Leipzig . Hipp was particularly fond of painting watercolors. Her subjects ranged from street life in Queens and her favorite beaches on Long Island to portraits of animals. For example, she had exhibitions of her pictures in 1980 and 2000 at the Langston Hughes Cultural Center in Corona , New York. Hipp, who was also known for her quick wit, also drew caricatures of other jazz musicians and wrote poems about them. Some were published on the Jazz Podium . Hipp was also a skilled doll maker and left some of her dolls to the Museum of the City of New York . Since she no longer touched the piano after saying goodbye to jazz music, many of her friends knew nothing about her jazz past until they found out about it from the obituaries.

But she stayed connected to jazz and tirelessly took photos in small jazz clubs in Queens . She also sent the photos to friends and to jazz magazines in Germany. Hipp often said in letters to friends that real jazz was more likely to be found in small clubs where she heard many excellent musicians who lacked the assertiveness to make it big. Hipp was engaged to drummer "Teddie" Frohwalt Neubert in 1944, but never married and died of pancreatic cancer in her apartment in Sunnyside (Queens).

Musical classification

As a pianist, Hipp was rooted in the swing tradition and, according to her own words, influenced by Count Basie , Teddy Wilson , but also by Fats Waller . With the advent of bebop in the mid-1940s, it was based on Bud Powell . The fact that many musicians, critics and fans heard cool jazz influences from Lennie Tristano in their playing in the early 1950s was taken rather negatively by herself. In later years, however, she expressed her admiration for the hard bop of Horace Silver , which she met in New York around 1956. At the height of her career as a jazz pianist (who also composed occasionally), she had found a new style that clearly differed from the sweeping melodies and the play, which with its adornments recorded European art music, until she moved to New York. "The energy that had provided fire to her variety of cool jazz was now clearly evident." She consistently refused to put pressure on her to push her in another direction. Her reputation as a jazz pianist, which she had acquired in the 1950s (with which she was a singular figure in Europe for a long time afterwards), was still unbroken with her West German fans decades later. After her move, she never returned to Germany, even for visits.

Persistent reception

By resolution of the Leipzig city council, a street in the city of her birth has been named Jutta-Hipp-Weg since 2011 .

On the tenth anniversary of his death in 2013, not only was the album The Lost Tapes released , which contains radio recordings from 1952, 1953 and 1955, but also Ilona Haberkamp's tribute album Cool is Hipp is Cool with compositions and poems by Hipp (as well as short excerpts from Iris's interviews Timmermann 1986).

To mark their 90th birthday, Ilona Haberkamp and Gerhard Evertz published 2015 on BE! Jazz Edition (BE 6103-09) a comprehensive artistic complete edition " The Art and Life of Jutta Hipp " with a bilingual biography (Ilona Haberkamp) and a large part of her artistic work such as drawings (caricatures by Lester Young , Horace Silver , Lionel Hampton, among others , Gerry Mulligan , Zoot Sims , Ella Fitzgerald ), oil paintings and watercolors as well as poems in which she characterized various jazz musicians, with all musical recordings and film recordings. A documentary film about Jutta Hipp by Ilona Haberkamp and director Elizabeth Ok is currently in preparation, who has already produced and published a film about Carlo Bohländer: "Carlo, keep swingin '".

Materials about Jutta Hipp from Katja von Schuttenbach's master's thesis at Rutgers University on Jutta Hipp (2006), from which a summary appeared in the Jazz Podium , was used by Thomas Meinecke in his novel Jungfrau (Suhrkamp 2008).

Discography (selection)

Label of a vinyl record by Jutta Hipp at Blue Note
  • Jutta Hipp and Her Combo: Europe's First Lady of Jazz ( Mod Records , 1955)
  • New Faces - New Sounds From Germany (1954)
  • Cool Dogs And Two Oranges (1954 and 1980)
  • The recordings from the Frankfurt Jazz Festival appeared on a Brunswick EP and later on the CD Box Bear Family 15430
  • Various Artists Cool Jazz made in Germany (1954)
  • At the Hickory House (Vol. 1 & 2) (Blue Note, 1956) - Vol. 1 from April 5th also included in the BLUE NOTES Milestones of Jazz Legends box in the line-up with Peter Ind (b) & Ed Thigpen ( dr)
  • Jutta Hipp with Zoot Sims (Blue Note, 1956)
  • The Lost Tapes: The German Recordings 1952–1955 ( Jazzhaus / ArthausMusik , 2013)
  • Hipp is cool - The Life and Art of Jutta Hipp (Be! Jazz, 2015)

literature

  • Thomas Breitwieser: Jutta Hipp, First Lady of German Jazz. In: Gunna Wendt: The jazz women. Luchterhand-Verlag, Hamburg 1992, pp. 52-59.
  • Ilona Haberkamp: Hipp Style or Adaptation? .in: Gender and Identity in Jazz in: Darmstädter Contributions to Jazz Research, Vol. 14, Darmstadt 2016, pp. 99–121.
  • Katja von Schuttenbach: Jutta Hipp , Jazz Podium, July / August 2006
  • Katja von Schuttenbach: Jutta Hipp: Painter, Pianist and Poet , Master Thesis, Rutgers University 2006.

Web links

References and comments

  1. ↑ She described some of her experiences, which showed her non-conformist attitude, to Michael Kater, who in his book Daring Game (Cologne 1995, p. 281 f.) Comes to the conclusion that the young women in the club are "a stable element" because the men could be drafted.
  2. ↑ a b Gerlinde Kämmerer: Jutta Hipp , City of Leipzig 2014
  3. ↑ See Schuttenbach, Jazzpodium, July 2006
  4. ↑ republished on L. Gullin Vol. 3 1954/55 Late Summer
  5. ↑ The art dealer Heinz Te Poehl paid her for the flight. Cf. Robert von Zahn (Ed.) Jazz in North Rhine-Westphalia since 1946. Cologne undated, p. 230.
  6. ↑ 2000 reissued by the Japanese Blue Note offshoot. For Blue Note it was considered lost at the time of the CD edition, but still received the royalties from the good sales in Japan.
  7. ↑ Breitwieser: Jutta Hipp. First Lady of German Jazz. 1992.
  8. ↑ Katja von Schuttenbach: Jutta Hipp: Painter, Pianist and Poet. Master's thesis, Rutgers University, 2006.
  9. ↑ a b The many talents of Jutta Hipp - extensive documentation provides information , Jazzzeitung, December 7, 2015
  10. ↑ Katja von Schuttenbach: Jutta Hipp: Painter, Pianist and Poet. Master thesis, 2006.
  11. ↑ Later she worked as a tailor and textile designer on Long Island until 1995. See Jazzzeitung 2003/5.
  12. ↑ She admitted her alcohol problems in a 1986 interview with Iris Timmermann , whom she interviewed for her thesis.
  13. ↑ The bassist Heinz Grah characterized the music that Hipp played with Koller and then in their own groups as "cool bebop. You could still hear the melody. They improvised very nicely, but that actually had nothing to do with jazz ”. (quoted from Robert von Zahn, Jazz in Cologne since 1945. Cologne 1997, p. 82) According to Hipps' later judgment, this only expressed the influence of Koller. (Quoted in Schuttenbach Jazzpodium 2006)
  14. ↑ Breitwieser: Jutta Hipp. First Lady of German Jazz. 1992, p. 57.
  15. ↑ Council meeting of May 18, 2011 (resolution no. RBV-822/11), official announcement: Leipzig Official Gazette no. 11 of June 4, 2011, in force since July 5, 2011 and August 5, 2011. Cf. Official Journal No. 16 of September 10, 2011.
  16. ↑ Evertz published the book Jutta Hipp - her life and work , Jutta Hipp, jazzbuch-hannover also privately for friends in 2012
  17. ↑ Website Katja von Schuttenbach
  18. ↑ The recordings of this Blue Note record, which were previously available as a Japanese Toshiba CD, are all also published on Frankfurt Special: The Legendary Jutta Hipp Quintet 1954 (Fresh Sound Records, 2006)
  19. ↑ Originally only 4 of these titles appeared on EP MGM E 3157; the remaining titles were published in 1980 by L + R Records . Most of these titles are now also on Frankfurt Special: The Legendary Jutta Hipp Quintet 1954
  20. ↑ An EP, initially for Gigi Campi's mod label , the CD also contains recordings with the H. Koller Quintet without Hipp and with A. Zoller - solo. The four Cologne recordings by Hipp were all released on Jazzrealities JR-001 CD Cool Jazz Made in Germany and on Frankfurt Special: The Legendary Jutta Hipp Quintet 1954 .
  21. ↑ More Blue Notes - Milestones Of Jazz Legends. www.discogs.com, accessed April 17, 2019 .
  22. ↑ cf. Jutta Hipp: Lost Tapes: The German Recordings 1952-1955 (2013) on All About Jazz
  23. ↑ The essay has no source and contains various errors (e.g. that Hipp was known in the USA because of her collaboration with Koller) and androcentric evaluations .
personal data
SURNAME Hipp, Jutta
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German jazz pianist, painter and designer
DATE OF BIRTH February 4, 1925
PLACE OF BIRTH Leipzig
DATE OF DEATH April 7, 2003
Place of death New York City