Winged By Distance

Among jazz fans, you can have a lot of fun arguing whether "European Jazz" is a useful counterpoint to the American tradition, an original supplement thereto or "is worth less than American jazz on the market" as it can be read in a Wikipedia forum. There is no doubt that there have been and are gifted musicians on the European side of the Atlantic, who have molded and formed jazz for decades. They have developed very unique playing styles by merging European music traditions with American influences. To give these pioneers of European jazz a stage was the idea for the series of articles "European Jazz Legends", which has been launched in the magazine Jazz thing in their 100th issue in September 2013. We can now look back on 10 issues. The symbolic stage has now become a real one, and it is in Gütersloh in the middle of Europe. Accompanying each edition of our magazine appearing five times a year, a concert planned especially for this occasion is being organized in cooperation with our label Intuition, the city of Gütersloh and National Public Radio WDR 3 with current protagonists of the series, hosted by Jazz thing author Götz Bühler. Each concert including panel discussion with Götz Bühler will be broadcast by WDR 3 at a later time, and the musical highlights of the concert will be released on a CD. In other words, five concerts and five CDs in the series "European Jazz Legends" are planned for each year in the future. In addition, a book will be published, for which the article from the magazine will be revised and supplemented, among other things, to provide impressions from the concerts and discussions. The CD of Dieter Glawischnig is the first publication in the "European Jazz Legends" series. We from Intuition are very proud of this and would like to thank all partners and especially the musicians – and hope that you enjoy this new series. "Dieter Glawischnig, born in Graz in 1938, is still alive (March 2015)", according to the short biography that he wrote himself. It should be added that this Austrian musician, composer, educator and musicologist is successful in all four fields. He was already a pianist as a child, a trumpet player as a teenager in addition, band co-founder for the first time at the age of 26 and back on the piano in the meantime. His groups were called Neighbours, with whom he recorded with Anthony Braxton, Fred Anderson and Albert Mangelsdorff, among others, and much later Cercle, including with Tony Oxley. He had already advanced then from repetiteur at the Graz Opera Hall to conductor of the jazz department at the music college there and even brought jazz to the "Music and Theater College" in Hamburg. He was the conductor of the NDR Big Band in the Hanseatic city for 28 years starting from 1980. The holder of the "Austrian Cross of Honor for Science and Art, 1st Class" has composed numerous "great compositions in the tradition of committed music, which uses jazz as powerful transport means for the texts", e.g., with the poet Ernst Jandl "Laut und Luise" and "Jedes Ich Nackt", but also "Grimm’s Märchen nach Janosch" or "Die dunkle Seite des Würfels" based as texts by Gunter Falk. Productions with Chet Baker, Albert Mangelsdorff, Abdullah Ibrahim, Martial Solal and Nils Wogram round out the work of this European jazz legend. Dieter Glawischnig can be heard live in a trio with his son Hans on bass and Manfred Schoof on trumpet and flugelhorn on this CD.