Siegfried Loch

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Siggi Loch 2017 (c) ACT / Sophia Spring
Siggi Loch at the St. Ingbert Jazz Festival (2008)

Siegfried "Siggi" Loch (born August 6, 1940 in Stolp , Pomerania ) is a German music manager, producer and founder of the jazz label ACT .

Life

Loch was born in Stolp (now Słupsk in Poland) and grew up in Merseburg . In 1951 his family moved to Hanover, West Germany . In 1954, a fall in the soap box race on Lindener Berg brought him to the front page of the Hanover press ; in the following year he finished second and qualified for the race in Düsseldorf . When Sidney Bechet attended a jazz concert in Hanover in 1955, he was enthusiastic about jazz and made him want to publish jazz records himself. As an amateur drummer, he led the band "Red Onions" from 1956 to 1960. In 1960 he finally became a representative for EMI Electrola . Shortly after he switched to Philips Ton in 1962 , he heard Klaus Doldinger in Düsseldorf , whom he persuaded to make recordings. That was his first job as a producer. At Philips Ton he was head of the jazz division, but in addition to jazz musicians such as George Gruntz , Ingfried Hoffmann , Klaus Weiss , Attila Zoller, he also brought the American Folk Blues Festival and beat groups such as The Searchers and The Rattles as well as the Spencer Davis Group and Jerry Lee Lewis out.

Loch actually wanted to found his own jazz label early on. But Liberty boss Al Bennett, who had heard from him about the Beatles , persuaded him in 1966 to become the managing director of the newly founded Liberty / United Artists Records and Metric Musikverlag in Munich, which he stayed until 1970. He produced a. a. more Klaus Doldinger, Jean-Luc Ponty (for Pacific Jazz), Katja Ebstein and Sigi Schwab . In 1971 he was founding managing director of WEA Music in Hamburg, later Warner Music Germany , and of MUZ Musikverlag in Munich. At Warner he helped a. a. Marius Müller-Westernhagen and Heinz Rudolf Kunze achieved a breakthrough. In 1975 he became Vice President of WEA International and from 1983 to 1988 President of WEA Europe in London .

In 1988 he realized his dream of founding his own label and joined forces with representatives of Neue Deutsche Welle, Annette Humpe and Jim Rakete , for ACT Music & Vision . In 1989 the partnership with Rakete and Humpe ended and in 1992 Loch founded the pure jazz label ACT Music & Vision in Hamburg. In the same year he started to produce again and with the "Jazzpaña" ( Vince Mendoza and the WDR Big Band Cologne ) had two Grammy nominations in the USA. In 1993 he founded emócion , a label for flamenco music. In 1998 he and ACT moved to Feldafing near Munich. In 2003, ACT moved to Munich, where the company's headquarters are to this day, even though Siggi Loch has lived in Berlin since 2008. Loch had particular success with the Swedish funk jazz musician Nils Landgren , whom he heard at JazzBaltica in 1994, with the trio of the pianist Esbjörn Svensson, who died in 2008, and most recently with the Korean singer Youn Sun Nah and the pianists Leszek Możdżer , Michael Wollny and Vijay Iyer . Another focus for him is the promotion of young German jazz musicians in the "ACT Young German Jazz" series. According to the company, the profits at ACT are systematically reinvested in building up its own artists.

In 1973, Loch was a founding member of the Deutsche Phonoakademie , of which he was a board member until 1982, and from 1975 board member of the "Bundesverband der Phonographischen Wirtschaft" (IFPI). Siegfried Loch is one of the most important German jazz producers alongside the ECM producer Manfred Eicher and the Enja founders Matthias Winckelmann and Horst Weber .

Awards

  • 1998: Annual German Record Critics' Award
  • 2010: Knight's Cross 1st Class of the Swedish North Star Order
  • 2012: Skoda Jazz Award
  • 2010/2011/2012/2013: Echo Jazz for ACT as Label of the Year
  • 2014: Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany and WDR Jazz Prize
  • 2017: Order of Merit "Commander" from the Norwegian Krone

Fonts

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Stefan Arndt: Ritter der Seifenkiste , in: Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung of March 10, 2010, p. 7
  2. ↑ a b "The biggest jazz producers were Germans" , Die Welt , December 31, 2007.
personal data
SURNAME Hole, Siegfried
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Loch, Siegfried E .; Hole, Siggi
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German record producer
DATE OF BIRTH August 6, 1940
PLACE OF BIRTH Stumble