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Jazzkeller card front
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Jazzkeller card back
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Frankfurt was the Jazz capital of Germany and the
real jazz club in
Frankfurt was the
domicile du jazz, a.k.a. Jazzkeller, at Kleine
Bockenheimer Straße 18a, an intimate members-only cavern concealed
behind a completely nondescript and unmarked door in a dark alley in the
financial district, and down lots of stairs, where the world's greatest jazz
artists would jam into the morning after a concert at the Kongresshalle.
You had to show a membership card to enter; somehow, I had one.
Frankfurt was a Mecca for jazz artists in the 1960s, especially Black
artists, who felt more welcome in Germany than in their own country. At the
Kongresshalle I saw Dizzy Gillespie, Gerry Mulligan, Coleman Hawkins, Ben
Webster, Joe Jones, Art Farmer, Art Blakey, I forget who else. Many other
greats peformed there including Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Ella
Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Lester Young, Charles Mingus, Miles Davis, John
Coltrane, Roy Eldridge, Hank Jones, Max Roach, Ray Brown, Oscar Peterson,
Stan Getz, and Jutta Hipp[5], to name just a
few. I saw Dizzy Gillespie and Gerry Mulligan up close at the Jazzkeller,
sitting in the corner right next to them like the people on the right in
photo.
As of 11 May 2020, the Jazz Keller still
exists!
References:
- Book: Michael J. Budds, Jazz and
the Germans, Pendragon Press (2002). Includes a chapter by Carlo
Bohländer, who founded the Jazz Keller in 1952: "Over the subsequent
forty-three years the Jazzkeller, Frankfurt's Village Vanguard, has played
host to most of the world's greatest jazz musicians." He concludes with
this: "Because my jazz activities had been highly illegal during Nazi times,
the city of Frankfurt am Main decorated me in 1994 with its Johanna Kirchner
Medaille, a special recognition honoring the resistance to the Nazi
dictatorship."
- Book: Michael
Rauhut, One
Sound, Two Worlds: The Blues in a Divided Germany 1945-1990,
Berghahn Books (2019). Includes material on the Frankfurt jazz scene.
- Film: Carlo, keep
swingin', A Movie by Elizabeth Ok. Available on DVD at Amazon.com.
- Heidi Laird, The
Frankfurt Kitchen: Forty-One Stories of Growing Up in Post World War II
West Germany, Fulton Books (2021), pp. pp.249-248.
- Aaron Gilbreath,
The
Brief Career and Self-Imposed Exile of Jutta Hipp, Jazz Pianist,
This Is: Essays on Jazz,
Outpost19, https://longreads.com,
August 2017 (accessed 16 March 2022)