Siegfried Schmidt-Joos

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Siegfried Schmidt-Joos (born April 17, 1936 in Gotha , Thuringia ) is a German music and culture journalist as well as the author of books from jazz , pop and rock music culture .

biography

After graduating from the Arnoldi High School in Gotha, he studied German and musicology at the Martin Luther University in Halle-Wittenberg from 1954 to 1957 . At the same time, he created one of the first officially approved jazz clubs in the GDR with the “Arbeitsgemeinschaft jazz halle” in the FDJ university group. In 1956/57 he moderated the first jazz series on television in the GDR as part of the entertainment series “Stelldichein der Synkopen”. From 1957 to 1959 he studied cultural studies in Frankfurt / Main, where he gave lectures by Carlo Schmid , Theodor W. Adorno , Max Horkheimer and Walter Höllerervisited. In addition, he represented the jazz magazine “schlagzeug” in Frankfurt as a correspondent, which was published by the Berlin-based Äquator-Verlag.

From 1959 to 1968 Schmidt-Joos worked as a music editor at Radio Bremen and provided articles on jazz and beat for almost all German broadcasters. In addition, he was a freelance editor for the supplement "jazz-echo" in the "Gondel" magazine as well as for the jazz sections of the specialist journals Fono Forum and "Musikalische Jugend" and wrote articles for "Month", "German Panorama", twen , Petra , Playboy , Brigitte and other magazines.

Between 1965 and 1968 he hosted the program “Swing-in” in the afternoon TV program of ARD with topics such as “Pop Jazz - Free Jazz”, the American Folk Blues Festival and portraits of Bill Ramsey , Paul Kuhn and the Edelhagen Orchestra . In this series, US stars such as Aretha Franklin , Country Joe McDonald and BB King were introduced to German television audiences for the first time .

In 1968 Schmidt-Joos moved to the culture department of the news magazine Der Spiegel in Hamburg, to which he belonged until 1978 and where he was responsible for the pop music section, among other things . From 1979 to 1987 he headed the “Light Music” department at the radio station RIAS Berlin and then worked until 2001 in the same function as department head at Sender Freies Berlin ( SFB , later RBB ).

Schmidt-Joos was known primarily for the first time in December 1973 at Rowohlt published rock lexicon , which he, together with the journalist and radio host Barry Graves wrote in collaboration with Bernie Sigg. The work became the standard work, of which the sixth, updated and expanded edition was already available in October 1975 with a circulation of 119,000. The last edition with his co-author Barry Graves, who died of AIDS in 1994, was published in 1990. In August 2008, the rock lexicon , which had grown to two volumes of over 1000 pages each, was edited in a completely revised version with partner Wolf Kampmann . The total circulation at that time was over half a million.

In 1974 Schmidt-Joos became a member of the “Popular Music” committee in the German Music Council, and from autumn 1974 Siegfried was Vice-President of the Board of Trustees of the German Phono Academy .

Since 2006 he has been a member of the board of trustees of the Lippmann + Rau Foundation in Eisenach (alongside Wim Wenders , Johannes Heisig , Eva Demski , Udo Lindenberg and others).

On September 27, 2008 he was awarded the annual "Blues-Louis" award at the 28th Lahnstein Blues Festival .

Schmidt-Joos has been "one of the most important pioneers of pop in the media landscape in the Federal Republic of Germany since the late 1960s," says the historian Detlef Siegfried .

Publications (selection)

  • Business with hits , Bremen 1960
  • Jazz - face of a music , Geneva 1960
  • The Book of Spirituals and Gospel Songs (as co-author), Hamburg 1961
  • The musical , Munich 1965
  • with Kathrin Brigl: Of course ... (songwriter portraits, two volumes), Hamburg 1983 and 1985
  • with Kathrin Brigl: Fritz Rau - Accountant of Dreams , Berlin 1985
  • Idole (publisher, rock portraits, nine volumes), Berlin 1984 to 1987
  • with Barry Graves: Rock-Lexikon , Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 1973; Reprints and further editions up to 1990
  • with Bernward Halbscheffel: Rock-Lexikon , Hamburg 1998
  • with Wolf Kampmann: Pop-Lexikon , Hamburg 2002
  • My Back Pages. Idols and freaks, death and legend in pop music , Berlin 2004, ISBN 978-3-86732-849-4
  • with Wolf Kampmann: Rock-Lexikon , Hamburg 2008
  • The Stasi doesn't swing. A jazz fan during the Cold War , Halle: Mitteldeutscher Verlag 2016, ISBN 978-3-95462-761-5 .

literature

  • Siegfried Schmidt-Joos, Barry Graves: Rock Lexicon. With discographies by Bernie Sigg, Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1973, 2nd edition 1975, reprint 1978, ISBN 3-499-16177-X , p. 2 (publisher's text on this book ).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ 40 years of "Rock-Lexikon": An interview with Siegfried Schmidt-Joos. In: GoodTimes , 1/2014, p. 86.
  2. ↑ F. Bajohr et al. a. (Ed.): More than a story. Contemporary historical perspectives on the Federal Republic. Göttingen 2016. p. 380.
personal data
SURNAME Schmidt-Joos, Siegfried
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German music and culture editor, author
DATE OF BIRTH April 17, 1936
PLACE OF BIRTH Gotha , Thuringia