Jutta Hipp (February 4, 1925 – April 7, 2003*) was a jazz
pianist and composer who enjoyed a brief period as a promising jazz pianist for
whom a great future was predicted, until nervousness and self-effacement caused
her to abandon music.
She was one of the first wave of European musicians to
understand the bebop idiom and to play it fluently and idiomatically. On the
evidence of her few recordings, she possessed a crisp technique and a
remarkable facility for creating lucid improvised lines over the most demanding
harmonic foundations.
Jutta Hipp was born in Leipzig on February 6 1925 and
showed early talent in both music and art. It was while she was studying at the
Academy of Graphic Arts in Leipzig that she discovered jazz. This was in the
early years of the Second World War, when jazz was condemned by the Nazis as
entartete musik (degenerate music). Nevertheless, she contrived to join a
clandestine "rhythm club" and even to form a small band. They found
that they could get away with playing in public if they took care to give the
American tunes German titles. Lady Be Good, she recalled, was renamed Frau sei
gut.
At the end of the war her family managed to get out of
East Germany and settle in Munich. There she found work as a jobbing pianist,
mainly in nightclubs, where the hours were long and the pay bad. Eventually,
she began working in bands which played at American military bases, where she
occasionally had the chance to hear and learn from American jazz musicians who
had been drafted into the forces.
In 1951 Jutta Hipp joined the band led by the Austrian
saxophonist Hans Koller, one of the leading figures in European jazz at the
time, with whom she toured throughout Germany and further afield. In 1953 she
formed her own quintet and recorded an album, New Faces - New Sounds From
Germany. The next year, the touring jazz show Jazz Club USA, starring Billie
Holiday, arrived in Germany. Its master of ceremonies, the critic Leonard
Feather, heard the quintet and arranged for Jutta Hipp to visit the United
States. Under his auspices, she received a work permit and began what she
thought would be a two-week engagement, leading a trio, at the Hickory House in
Manhattan.
Here's "Ain't Misbehavin" from above album.
She proved such a success that her contract was extended
to six months. In 1956, Blue Note Records issued two live albums, and a studio
session with tenor saxophonist Zoot Sims. It was widely assumed that Jutta Hipp
was now launched on a successful career, but her self-confidence was slipping
and she was finding it
increasingly difficult to face the public. On tour, she ran into the mean and vindictive side of American showbusiness.
increasingly difficult to face the public. On tour, she ran into the mean and vindictive side of American showbusiness.
When Art Blakey asked her to sit in with his band at New
York's Cafe Bohemia, she refused, saying she was drunk, and anyway did not
think she was good enough. Blakey dragged her to the piano, and started playing
at a furious tempo which she could not handle. Blakey then addressed the
audience: "Now you see why we don't want these Europeans coming over here
and taking our jobs!"
Jutta Hipp lost control of her drinking and had numerous
unsatisfactory affairs. She gave up playing and took a job in a textile factory,
although she did take up painting watercolours. The German magazine Jazz Podium
printed a series of affectionate caricatures of well-known jazz musicians by
her in 1995. "With painting, they look at the work, not you," she
said.
So completely had Jutta Hipp vanished from sight that
Blue Note Records had no idea where to send the royalties from her three 1956
albums. The alto saxophonist Lee Konitz contacted Blue Note on her behalf in
2000, by which time the back-royalties amounted to $40,000. At that time, Hipp
was seventy-six years old, unmarried, living on Social Security and a little
union pension, with no family in America.
Jutta Hipp died at the age of 78 in the Queens apartment
where she lived alone.
(Compiled mainly from The Telegraph obit) * (some sources
give 6th or 11th April 2003)
5 comments:
For “Jutta Hipp - At the Hickory House” go here:
https://www.upload.ee/files/9522614/Jutta_Hipp_-_Hickory_House.rar.html
01 Take Me in Your Arms 4:02
02 Dear Old Stockholm 4:43
03 Billie's Bounce 4:05
04 I'll Remeber April 3:51
05 Lady Bird 3:46
06 Mad About the Boy 3:46
07 Ain't Misbehavin 5:02
08These Foolish Things 3:58
09 Jeepers Creepers 3:52
10 The Moon Was Yellow 4:52
11 Gone With the Wind 4:50
12 After Hours 4:40
13 The Squirrel 3:46
14 We'll Be Together Again 3:14
15 Horacio 3:20
16 I Married an Angel 4:22
17 Moonlight in Vermont 3:24
18 Star Eyes 3:55
19 If I Had You 4:01
20 My Heart Stood Still 4:22
at the end a very sad story of a promising artist! Thanks for the portrait, boppinbob!
Thanks, Bob. A fascinating, albeit dark story. I'd hate to think that the Art Blakey story is true, but that's because I prefer artists whose work I like to be heroes, as opposed to heartless bast*rds. More like say, Lee Konitz. Artists are, of course, human beings, and that can complicate any story. And Art Blakey may have gotten a bum rap.
Anyway, thanks for the piece. I'm looking forward to hearing the music.
Jutta Hipp • With Zoot Sims (RVG-edition) - Full Album MP3
https://ulozto.net/file/hC7TRw976/jutta-hipp-o-with-zoot-sims-rvg-edition-rar
PASSWORD - egroj
Her best album was the last one with Zoot Sims… Remarkable work… especially “Violets For Your Furs”and “Almost Like Being In Love“
Why, she stopped playing, remains a mystery from everything that I’ve read, especially that she became a recluse afterwards.
One can only imagine how difficult it could be for young woman in that business at the time… Having
been displaced twice from her birth home, she might have felt without support.
Who knows?
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