Actually, my music is like a ballet. It is structured so that everyone is allowed to dance to his own music. As a composer, I provide spaces. And since everyone has a different way of dancing, the result is so much individual freedom within the collective consciousness that our interaction stimulates, sustains, and intensifies the experience.
- Gunter Hampel
While in the service during the late 1980s, I was stationed in West Germany. In order to travel through Eastern Germany to West Berlin, you needed Flag Orders. Here’s what they looked like.
At that time, being in West Berlin, surrounded by Communist–controlled East Germany felt like being on a tiny island in the middle of the ocean. I was totally amazed at how the Allies, after the war, had managed to hold on to this little island. Of course, the existence of the U.S. Army and the Berlin Airlift played an important role. However, what is far less known is the importance a small radio station played to keep this island informed and united against communist propaganda.
RIAS Berlin (Radio In the American Sector) was set up by the American military administration in 1946 as an independent counter-voice to the Soviet-controlled Berlin Radio. As “the free voice of the free world”, RIAS was intended as a broadcasting bridge to the West for West Berliners.
Eventually RIAS was jointly funded and managed by the United States and West Germany. Under the supervision of the United States Information Agency from 1965, the station was staffed almost entirely with German employees, who worked under a small American management team.
Here are two parts of a remarkable video about the history of Berlin’s legendary RIAS: Part 1 & Part 2.
In 1956, four years before the wall went up around West Berlin, RIAS recorded a series of seven mostly jazz-inspired 45rpm 7” EPs. One of these was called Berlin Jazz. On the song Studio 7, played by the RIAS - Combo, a nineteen year old young man from Göttingen, Gunter Hampel, made is recording debut playing drums.
Gunter Hampel was born in Göttingen, West Germany on August 31, 1937. He recalls, “When the war ended in 1945, the first of the American soldiers to come into our city were black G.I.s. I was strongly drawn to their music and the music being played on Voice of America. I particularly remember the effect on me - and I was no more than eight - of hearing Louis Armstrong. There was something I had never heard before in music. A freedom in the playing and the singing that was closer to me than the music with which I had grown up.”
With his own bands, he started playing all styles of jazz, from Dixieland to bebop. He also began to compose new material for them. While spending time in the Army and studying architecture, he continued to compose and play music on the side. By the early 1960s, Hampel had expanded his musician reputation throughout Europe.
In January 1965, Hampel recorded the legendary Heartplants album for the SABA label. This was a seminal recording that marked a transition from a more mainstream to a more free approach to Hampel’s music.
Heartplants is now recognized as perhaps the first European free jazz or improvisational music recording, and the quintet is considered a key group of European jazz musicians who began an emancipation from their American role models. The quintet included Alexander von Schlippenbach, a real pioneer in free improvisational orchestration, who in the autumn of 1966, on a commission received from the Berlin Jazz Festival, formed Globe Unity.
During the 1960s, the Free Jazz movement had two distinct groups. One involved the journey of the soloists like John Coltrane, Marion Brown, and Albert Ayler, who were exploratory, cerebral, and often introspective. The other was a more collective project, who were expressive, energetic, and concerned with group sound dynamics. Another distinction may be that the first group was largely American and the latter group was largely European. Alex von Schlippenbach’s Globe Unity orchestra was the first European group collective to perform improvisational music. Gunter Hampel was a member of his orchestra.
Globe Unity’s music is heavy listening. Their first recording was in December 1966 at Ariola Studio in Köln. It was released in 1967, again on the SABA label. You can listen to this album here.
Also in December of 1966, Gunter Hampel met American singer Jeanne Lee. He recalls, “Right away, she became part of our music. She just fit right in.” Like Betty Mabry’s influence on Miles Davis and Mary Parks’ influence on Albert Ayler, Jeanne Lee had an immediate impact on Gunter Hampel.
Jeanne Lee
In 1962, Jeanne Lee won an Amateur Night contest at the Apollo Theater. In that performance she was accompanied by pianist Ran Blake. As a result of this success, they recorded an album The Newest Sound Around for the RCA Victor label. I really love this version of the classic When Sunny Gets Blue.
Following the release, she traveled to Europe and met Gunter Hampel and together they formed a personal and creative union that lasted over 30 years until Jeanne Lee’s death in 2000. Their first collaboration was on Gunter Hampel Group + Jeanne Lee recorded in 1968 for the Wergo label. However, it would be their second collaboration that was their most significant.
The 8th of July 1969 was, in fact, recorded on the 8th of July 1969 at Studio Andre van de Water located in Nederhorst den Berg, the Netherlands. It was the first release on Gunter Hampel’s new independent and artist-owned record label, Birth Records.
This album represents the first collaboration between American Free Jazz and European Improvisation. Three White Europeans: Hampel and two Dutchmen Willem Breuker on saxophones and Arjen Gorter on bass; and three Black Americans: two AACM members Anthony Braxton on saxophones and Steve McCall on drums; and singer Jeanne Lee. This union of musicians came together in the Netherlands to fuse two similar but different musical genres.
In a 1978 New York interview for CODA magazine, Willem Breuker and Boy Raaymakers help us understand the importance of this musical collaboration:
CODA: In the past, it’s been the other way around. American improvisors were very much accepted in Europe, but not many Europeans came here.
Willem Breuker: No, but I also know that the American improvising musicians don’t accept us at all. Except Anthony Braxton.
CODA: I think that the Black musicians developed this art out of a very sad and unique background, so they feel an obvious claim to this heritage, and they perhaps feel bitter that a European could claim the same thing. But you feel that you’re not particularly influenced by Americans?
WB: My feeling is that I learned a lot from them, and every day I say, “Thank you very much, because what you gave me enables me to do the things I’m doing now.”
CODA: But in any case your music doesn’t sound like American music. I’ve heard it several times. I’ve heard lots of Dutch and lots of Americans. They don’t sound like Americans. But they do play improvised music.
WB: And that’s something I think what we’ve been finding out in the last ten years. That’s something Anthony Braxton understands. When I did that first thing with him, on that Gunter Hampel record, The 8th of July 1969, he was immediately impressed. He said, “There’s something happening!” Because he’s an open guy, he accepted it. Up until then he had thought too that there was just an American thing and that Europeans were just imitating or following…. But for myself, I had no idea about that, I was just playing what I had to play at the time. Because what else is there to do? I didn’t want to be in a jazz school learning to play all these chords, all this shit, you know…. What to do with that? I just wanted to play what I have to tell, and when that’s not possible, I stop.
Boy Raaymakers: There was one time in Holland when people were talking about “this is jazz” and “this is not jazz”. And then we started to call the music we played “improvised music” or “free music”, because we really didn’t want to have discussions about what was “jazz” and what was not.
WB: A lot of people claimed, “We are jazz musicians, and what you are doing is not jazz.” So we say, “Okay, okay, you are jazz musicians; we will make improvised music.”
I think it is important that both Gunter Hampel and Willem Breuker acknowledged the influence of American jazz music; however, it is also important to note that they were both playing their own form of free or improvised music even before Ornette Coleman’s records were released on Contemporary and Atlantic records.
By the early 1970s, Gunter Hampel began to expand beyond the small-combo settings and established his own big band, and I think his big band groups inspired some of his best music.
In 1972, Gunter Hampel created the Galaxie Dream Band.
Here is a 1972 video of a Galaxie Band concert presented by the NDR (Norddeutscher Rundfunk) Jazz Workshop. These workshops were started in 1958 by the famous avant-garde composer Rolf Liebermann and producer, actor Hans Gertberg. During these workshops, they invited famous jazz musicians for several days to rehearse new arrangements followed by a final radio and/or TV concert.
Gunter Hampel’s big band continued to perform and record throughout the 1970s and 1980s. His 1981 Birth Records release Cavana is one of my all-time favorite big band albums. I encourage you to play the entire album. In fact, play it two or three times. It moves out there from time to time, but it gets better with each playing - particularly side 2:
Here’s one more for the road, Sonnenschein off Ruomi (Songs For My Sun-Son) from Hampel’s 1974 Galaxie Dream Band released on his Birth Records.
Gunter Hampel, at 84 years old, is still active in the jazz and dance community. His legacy will stand as an important musician who bridged the gap between American and European jazz musicians and helped breakdown some of the barriers surrounding jazz music.
In an interview with Nat Hentoff, Gunter Hampel shared these words: “Each listener brings his own life, his own experiences to whatever he hears; and what I hope is that each listener will find his own embodiment in my music. I am here to offer music, and all I can say is listen to it and forget about all the styles and all the classifications. Don’t put a label on it. We don’t as musicians. We meet each other and the music follows.”
Next week, on that Big River called Jazz, we’ll stay in Europe and paddle the canals of the Netherlands to take a deeper look at the independent record labels like ICP, FMP, and BVHaast, that, along with Gunter Hampel’s Birth Records, pioneered improvised music….
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Feel free to contact me at any time to talk shop. I welcome and encourage that….
Until then, keep on walking….