Aaron Gilbreath | This Is: Essays on Jazz | Outpost19 | August 2017 | 21 minutes (5,900 words)
In 1960, four years after the venerable Blue Note Records signed pianist Jutta Hipp to their label, she stopped performing music entirely. Back in her native Germany, Hipp’s swinging, percussive style had earned her the title of Europe’s First Lady of Jazz. When she’d moved to New York in 1955, she started working at a garment factory in Queens to supplement her recording and performing income. She played clubs around the City. She toured. Then, with six albums to her name and no official explanation, she quit. She never performed publicly again, and she told so few people about her life in music that most of her factory coworkers and friends only discovered it from her obituary. For the next forty-one years, Jutta patched garments for a living, painted, drew and took photos for…
View original post 5,934 more words
What a great article on the Hipp-est lady of jazz! A remarkable story.I hate to nit pick but the article mentioned that Serge Chaloff recorded for Blue Note. That is news to me! Please send info, keep swinging Art
Hi Art, thanks for the good words on the article! I’m glad you enjoyed it. And thanks for pointing out my error about Chaloff. Seems that artifact of an older version slipped back into this updated version. Fixed!
Greatly enjoyed your piece on Jutta Hipp, enough to make me seek out the book whence it comes. Given the space you devoted to beautifully bringing Hipp to life, something missing which merits more mention than 10 words are those 3 albums she made as a leader in Germany prior to becoming associated with Blue Note and moving to the USA. For those albums, she worked with other major figures in the evolution of the then-nascent German jazz scene, including Joki Freund and both of the Mangelsdorff brothers, Emil and Albert. Joki and Emil also appear on her first Blue Note album. Even if only in retrospect, she is more than a footnote in the history of German jazz, and her place in that pantheon was hardly earned by gender.
Hi Patrick, I’m so glad you enjoyed the piece! My book is out now, here http://outpost19.com/ThisIs/ Thanks so much for reading it, and also for this additional info about Hipp’s pivotal role in Germany’s jazz history and contribution to its present scene. I agree.