MPS-Music Production Schwarzwald
The Most Perfect Sound....
To me, there are two great European jazz labels, ECM and MPS. Our journey this week starts with MPS….
The story of Hans Georg Brunner-Schwer and his legendary record label MPS begins in the "waterfall town" Triberg, a small Black Forest town not far from Villingen, Germany.
In 1835, Joseph Benedikt Schwer founded a watch factory there, which in 1865 became Schwarzwälder Apparate Bau Anstalt - SABA.
When Hermann Schwer, Joseph Schwer's grandson, took over the factory in 1905, it already had 20 employees and was expanding rapidly. However, the production of watches had become unprofitable for the small business in view of competition from the large factories. As a result, they began to manufacture primarily bicycle clamps in a wide variety of designs. They also manufactured door bells, razors, and letter scales.
As the business grew, in the spring of 1918 Hermann acquired Waldmühle in Villingen, which had a long history first as a grain mill, then as a hotel.
In the period that followed, under the brand name SABA, registered in 1923, the company continued to grow to an unimaginable size primarily as a supplier of radio technology products.
The establishment of a recording studio
As part of SABA's focus on the production of radio receivers, Hermann Schwer also set up a studio on the upper floor of a building on the factory premises, which at the time reflected what was probably the most modern recording technology in the world.
In the mid-1950s, the studio later relocated to its own building after the company began producing music chests under the label SABA-Schallplatten.
However, it was co-owner Hans Georg Brunner-Schwer (HGBS) who was most responsible for building the musical juggernaut. HGBS was not only an ardent audio engineer, he was also an amateur pianist crazy about music.
In 1958 he built a recording studio above the living room in his villa and in 1962 released his first record under the SABA label. His SABA studio contained the most sophisticated audio equipment available at that time. One of the features of all his recordings is superior sound quality.
Here is the first SABA release, Jazz-Studio H.G.B.S. Number One:
I like this track off that first album, Love in Summer:
HGBS would go on to release about 40 albums on the SABA label up until 1968, when he left SABA to found the independent label MPS - Musik Produktion Schwarzwald.
I first heard about the MPS label through Sun Ra’s live album It’s After the End of the World recorded live in 1970 at the Donaueschingen and Berlin Festivals. From there I discovered a number of great albums on the earlier SABA and later MPS labels. For example, I discovered Nathan Davis' Happy Girl released in 1965. Here is Theme From Zoltan:
…and the George Russell Sextet with guest artist - Don Cherry – At Beethoven Hall in Stuttgart in 1965.
…and Alex von Schlippenbach’s Globe Unity recorded and released by SABA in 1966.
Globe Unity was formed in autumn 1966 with a commission received by Alex von Schlippenbach from the Berlin Jazz Festival. According to Schlippenbach, “We did three days of rehearsal in Köln and performed my composition entitled Globe Unity at the Philharmonie in Berlin on 3rd November. The piece was released on SABA the same year.” Speaking of Globe Unity’s synthesis of American and European sensibilities, bassist Peter Kowald said, "We had heard the early Sun Ra records on ESP here, and then we had loved Mingus' large group, and stuff like that, so somehow Alex had the courage at the time to say, ‘Now we'll do our orchestra with this music,’”
German journalist and producer Joachim-Ernst Berendt, who after World War II helped found the Südwestfunk radio network, played a big role in the recording of Globe Unity and the development of jazz in Germany. He would go on to produce many of the MPS recordings and helped establish SABA and MPS as an important local and international jazz force.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, HGBS entered into a licensing agreement to distribute Prestige recordings simultaneously in Europe, which brought in American jazz music to Germany. Here is the purple SABA/Prestige label, in this case a stereo recording remastered locally and not from Prestige stampers.
While MPS went on become Germany’s first important jazz label, another important German jazz label was working in its shadow. Founded in Munich in 1968 by Bertold Hummel, the Calig label became a strange but important outlet for German free improvisational music.
Calig
Bertold Hummel studied cello from 1947 to 1954 at the University of Music in Freiburg with the Latvian cellist Atis Teichmanis. He also studied with Emil Seiler, who encouraging him to seek his real talent in chamber music rather than virtuosity.
In the late 1940s, Bertold Hummel founded the Maas Trio with Emil Maas (violin) and the composer Friedrich Zehm (piano).
In 1963, he was appointed composition teacher at the Music Institute in Würzburg, where he conducted the Studio for New Music until 1988. While there under the pseudonym Nico Martin, he arranged and edited twelve religious chansons by the two charismatic clergymen Otto Riedel (1930 - 2016) and Jacques Wothké (1917 - 2010). They were released on his Hummel’s own Calig record label on three 7” EPs in 1964 and 1965. Here is the first:
From these auspicious beginnings, Calig embraced the new music of the free improvisationalists and in the fall of 1968 recorded their first jazz album: Marion Brown Quintet’s Gesprächsfetzen recorded live at Munich’s Modernes Theater:
On the liner notes of this album, Hummel writes about the “new development of Free Jazz.”
Here the release from the musically constricting principles of jazz is a consistent and definitive success. Now the possibility arises of utilising all elements of music development hitherto. No restrictions to major - minor systems, to tones and semitones, to tonality and atonality - no distinctions are drawn between beauty and cacophony, impression and expression etc. - but all these elements are present and are handled in a completely unorthodox way. So that evolution takes the place of revolution.
I think one of the most amazing things about the Calig label is that on their second jazz album, Bob Degen Trio’s Celebrations, Manfred Eicher played bass. As far as I can tell, this is Eicher’s only recording.
Eicher was studying classical bass at Berlin’s Music Academy, but how he got hooked up with Bertolt Hummel is a mystery. After the Degen album, Eicher gave up the bass and went on to produce the next two Calig jazz releases: Wolfgang Dauner / Eberhard Weber / Jürgen Karg / Fred Braceful and then Peter Brotzmann’s epic Nipples.
When I think of all the ECM music Eicher would go on to produce, Brötzmann’s Nipples is like no other. I wonder if he actually liked the music. I also think it is no wonder that following the 1969 Nipples release he left Calig to form his own label, the now legendary ECM - Edition of Contemporary Music. It was from these humble beginnings in southern Germany that the seeds were sown for the emergence of ECM, one of the most important jazz labels of all time.
Here’s one more for the road. Albert Mangeldorff’s 1970 quartet recording of Wide Open.
Next week, on that Big River called Jazz, we’ll stay in Munich to discover the beginnings of Manfred Eicher’s legendary ECM record label.
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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….