The first album from Jutta Hipp quintet on Blue Note, published in 1954.
Foto: Blues Note Records
The fact that Jutta Hipp’s life has not yet been filmed is very surprised. She was one of the first jazz pianists ever. With her, she could be told about the rise and fall of an underdog, with some unexpected twists. The clarinetist Rolf Kühn, also from Leipzig, once said she was hip hip.
Jutta Hipp was born on February 4, 1925 in the then culturally flourishing Leipzig. She gets classic piano lessons early on. At the age of 15, she comes into contact with jazz for the first time, more or less secret. Because the music is considered “degenerate” among the Nazis. Nevertheless, she already plays in an amateur jazz band in the illegal hot club Leipzig at the time. During the day she studies graphics at the HGB.
And even after the war, jazz is considered a genuinely American music in the then SBZ as not opportune. Hipp moved to the Tegernsee in Bavaria in 1946. There she appears in dance restaurants and officers clubs in front of US GIS, who are enthusiastic about Hipps joy and virtuosity. After a liaison with an African American US soldier, she gets her son Lionel. But mother – moreover of a black child – and be a freelance artist in one? Then unthinkable. And so she gives Lionel shortly after birth.
When Jutta Hipp went to Frankfurt am Main in 1952 to participate in the band of the Austrian saxophonist Hans Koller, she is considered one of the most talented jazz pianists in Europe. In 1953 she founded her own quintet and performs at the first German Jazz Festival. But in the mid -1950s she moved to the International Epicenter of Jazz, to New York. At the conveying of the influential jazz journalist and producer Leonard Feather, she signed the legendary Jazz label Blue Note, which was founded in 1939 by the two German-Jewish jazz enthusiasts Alfred Lion and Francis Wolf after their escape from Germany. Hipp is the first European woman on Blue Note.
In New York, too, it is initially enthusiastic about “Europe’s First Lady of Jazz”. Funded by pianist Horace Silver, she develops a cool jazz accelerated towards Bebop. It is the highlight of your career, but it only takes a short time. The engagements decrease, because musical competition in the US metropolis is much greater than in Germany, where jazz is still an absolute niche product at that time. There are also stage fright and fears of existence, which in turn tries to get excessive alcohol consumption.
There is also an incident from 1956, from which one can assume that he also fueled her uncertainties: The great jazz drummer Art Blakey brings her to the stage during an appearance and challenges her for a joint impro-contribution. Hipp, already drunk noticeably, gets into it, but can no longer hold the hell pace specified by Blakey after just a few bars. Thereupon she was exposed by Blakey, who was actually considered a jazz teacher: “Now you see, we don’t want people people from Germany over here and take our jobs away.”
Finally, Hipp accepted a job as a seamstress in a clothing factory in the Queens district at the end of the 1950s. In jazz clubs it only occurs occasionally on weekends. In 1960 she turned away from the stage completely and ends her music career. From then on, painting will be its new artistic passion. When her future biographer Ilona Haberkamp visits Hipp in her New York apartment in 1986, she is surprised that she no longer finds a piano. “What should I do if I don’t play anymore?” Replates Hipp. Nevertheless, she takes photos of jazz musicians in small clubs, some of which are printed in jazz magazines. When she died of cancer in New York in 2003, hardly anyone knows that she had once been a well -known jazz musician. Only nerds and ausken can do something with their name, in 2011 she appeared in a novel by Thomas Meinecke, for example. In 2022 the biography “Suddenly Hip (P)” by Ilona Haberkamp will appear.
Interest in her seems to grow slowly, also in her hometown Leipzig, which she left at the age of 21. In the southeast of the city there has been a Jutta Hipp-Weg since 2011 and the “Jutta Hipp Prize” has been awarded by the Jazz Association of Saxony since 2023. Well, on the occasion of your 100th birthday, a plaque is also inaugurated in honor of Hipp. Maybe there is also a Netflix series about this great pianist at some point?