Wolfgang Mitschke

Wolfgang Mitschke (2019)

Wolfgang Mitschke (born March 7, 1957 in Lindau (Bodensee) ) is a German jazz musician and composer . His preferred style is between smooth jazz , fusion and bebop .

Artistic career

Mitschke did his Abitur in 1976 at the Bodensee-Gymnasium in Lindau. After initially studying law at the University of Konstanz and successfully completing the Great State Examination in Stuttgart in 1982 , he took professional private lessons for drums at the Saarbrücken University of Music with Ronald Lück, drummer at the Saarland Radio Symphony Orchestra , from the late 1970s to the early 1980s . His musical role models include the drummers Jack DeJohnette , Victor Lewis , Billy Hart and Dennis Chambers as well as stylistically very different pianists such as Oscar Peterson , Russell Ferrante , Tom Schuman , Joe Sample , Fritz Pauer and Bill Sharpe . Through concerts (. Eg in the famous Monday set the Bonn Art and Exhibition Hall or in the Cologne clubs Herbrand and Melody ) and other club appearances and radio recordings with various jazz groups Wolfgang Mitschke could in Baden-Wuerttemberg and North Rhine-Westphalia as a jazz drummer a Make names.

He played as a drummer a. a. with the singer and drummer Grady Tate , the trumpeters Patrick Rickman and Hans-Peter Salentin , the flutists Michael Heupel and Chris Weinheimer , the guitarists Paul Shigihara and Bruno Müller , the pianists Florian Ross , Hubert Nuss , Christoph Adams and Walerie Kühl , the saxophonist Nicolas Simion , Matthias Erlewein and Wolfgang Fuhr as well as the bassists Christian Ramond , André Nendza , Martin Gjakonovski and Henning Gailing .

In addition to working as a drummer, Mitschke has also been working with the keyboard for a long time , the expressive possibilities of which he has largely developed autodidactically after initial individual lessons . In 2005 his most successful CD production to date, which can be assigned to the smooth jazz genre, Night over Berlin came out, which he recorded together with the Bonn saxophonist Jürgen Dietz on the Skip Records label . Individual tracks on this album were also included in various pop samplers, for example in 2006 in the pop sampler The 12 coolest songs of the year . Another jazz album Midnight Moods , recorded again with Jürgen Dietz and again assigned to the smooth jazz genre, was also released in 2008 by Skip Records . In 2019, Wolfgang Mitschke then switched to the record company Naxos Records, which became known mainly through the release of classic CDs, and at the beginning of June 2020 his new jazz CD entitled The Berlin Nightbirds was released on this label . This CD, with which, in addition to original compositions, mostly new and independent songs from the Great American Songbook are presented, is entirely in the tradition of the classic jazz piano. The new CD The Berlin Nightbirds was also selected as CD of the month June 2020 on the Naxos website.

Discographic notes

Latin in New York (2003)
Night Over Berlin (2005)
Midnight Moods (2008)
Berlin Nightbirds (2020)

Individual evidence

↑ Interview with Wolfgang Mitschke on smooth-jazz.de (2002)

Web links

personal data
SURNAME	Mitschke, Wolfgang
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	German jazz musician and composer
DATE OF BIRTH	March 7, 1957
PLACE OF BIRTH	Lindau (Lake Constance)

[1] Interview with Wolfgang Mitschke on smooth-jazz.de (2002)