Rec.1958 / Remaster / Free MP3 Downland

For a few hours on this Friday evening Hanover became the centre of the German Jazz scene. For the first time ever a musician came to Europe whose rise to fame at home in the USA up to then and afterwards had been fairly vertical: Dave Brubeck, born on the 6th of December 1920 in the Californian beach town of Concord. The American foreign ministry had sent him on a world tour (just as they had sent Louis Armstrong) as a “Jazz ambassador”: Brubeck’s quartet travels to India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Sri Lanka, Iran, Iraq and Turkey. The European itinerary includes Poland and Germany, specifically on this 28th of February of the year 1958 a stop in Hanover. NDR sends a broadcasting van to cover this “state visit”. The venue is Niedersachsenhalle in the regional capital of Lower Saxony where, in the subsequent years, 1959 and 1960, “Jazz at the Philharmonic” was also staged, even though this hall was the somewhat less successful “little brother” of the more prestigious Stadthalle with its domed hall next door. This was reserved for the so-called classical concerts; and Jazz (let’s not forget this) at the end of the 1950s was still regarded by many as inferior music in every respect, particularly in a Germany which had just emerged from the Nazi era.

At home in the USA at this time Dave Brubeck has to cope with very different types of resistance. He is fighting with concert organisers and TV stations on behalf of the bassist who has just joined the quartet. Eugene Wright is his name and he has Afro-American roots. “Black” musicians, however, are not acceptable to American TV. On the anniversary of Dave Brubeck’s death, the day before his 92nd birthday, i.e. on the 5th of December 2012, this Eugene Wright, born in 1923 and 90 years old in May 2013, is the last surviving member of the “classical” Brubeck quartet that appeared on the 28th of February 1958 in Hanover fo.......
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