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Interviews
Franz Koglmann: Viewing Jazz through Other Arts
Eyal Hareuveni
Eyal Hareuveni is an Israeli journalist who lives in Jerusalem.“ Jazz is... a creation of the Twentieth Century, maybe the greatest of that century, but its finished more or less. But jazz lives in other kinds of music... and this is the way that [it] goes on. ”
The music of Viennese composer/trumpeter/flugelhornist Franz Koglmann sounds like no other. He manages to marry his love for the West Coast cool jazz with elements from European modern and classic music composers, especially Franz Schubert, Alban Berg and Anton von Webern. His thematic compositions, recorded almost solely for the Swiss, Basel-based HatHut and for the German, Frankfurt-based Between the Lines labels, are complex. Quite often ironic and melancholic, always playful, detached from sentimentality but still very emotional, and usually demanding.
The ideal Koglmann listener has to be open-minded and well-versed with modern poetry, visual arts, films, philosophy, architecture and popular culture, and one that is fascinated with the multiple intertextualities in these forms of arts. A Koglmann listener would reject the strict genre definitions that legions of Wynton Marsalis' neo-conservative disciples are trying to lock jazz into them, and indeed, Koglmann is a blunt critic of the Marsalis phenomenon.
I spoke with Koglmann in Jerusalem, two days after his performance in the Tel Aviv Jazz Festival. His partner, Ingrid Karl, the director of the Wiener Musik Galerie, assisted throughout this interview.
The Beginning
"My first influences were my mother, who was a singer in a choir, and my grandfather, from my mother's side, who was a very good accordion player who came to Vienna from Prague. My mother was also at a choir when I was a child. So I started to play accordion at the age of five, classical oriented, but I heard a lot of dance-style music, in the style of Glenn Miller; I heard Louie Armstrong two times live in Vienna.
"The wish of my parents was that I'll have a normal profession so I learnt to be a book binder, but at the same time I started the trumpet at the conservatory in Vienna, in a very classic way. There was an important musician at this time in Vienna, the pianist Friedrich Gulda, maybe the best one who played Mozart, and he played jazz. This was the first time that I saw a musician who played classical music and jazz. He was a great influence for me and for a lot of my colleagues. For Gulda, jazz and classical music were not opposites, they were part of a one world.
"As a young trumpeter I played on one hand a lot of classic music, especially in churches, all the masses every Sunday, Haydn, Mozart's Requiem. And on the other hand I played a lot of jazz oriented dance music, in ballrooms and bars. Mostly I was the arranger of the band and every week I had to transcribe the newest hits for the band.
"Then the conservatory founded a jazz department, and I was one of the first students. We learned a lot of bebop and arranging for big bands, for example in the way of Neal Hefti, who was one of the great Count Basie, Atomic Mr. Basie. In 1972 I went to the States because I wanted to consult a famous teacher for brass instruments in Philadelphia, Donald S. Reinhardt, and at time I saw a lot of famous musicians in New York, Thelonious Monk at the Village's Vanguard; I sat in with Archie Shepp in Slugs. When I came back to Vienna I did not want to go back to the jazz department, where we learnt to copy all the American jazz. After my USA experiences I really wanted to stop copying the originals."
Flirtation with Free Jazz
As an artistic director for the Between the Lines label, Koglmann managed to redeem his two out-of-print first solo records with the late saxophonist Steve Lacy and trumpeter Bill Dixon, for his own independent label Pipe, and re-release them as Opium. At that time, the beginning of the '70s produced these recordings, "hand-painted all 500 covers myself, placed an ad in the Jazzpodium journal and everything practically sold at once."
"I heard Lacy in Paris and was very impressed. I thought that it's time to make my own record. I asked Lacy, who did not know me of course, but was interested and came to Vienna and we recorded Flaps. I founded my own label, Pipe, because no label in Vienna was interested in releasing my records. And from this point I did a lot of work with Lacy, the Opium For Franz record with Bill Dixon and later on for the Hat Hut label and we did many concerts and festivals."
AAJ: How did Lacy influence you? What was it about his attitude to music?
FK: What I liked as a player was that he played extremely clear lines, like a drawing. He absolutely separated himself the stupid jazz licks. He could play the licks, of course. He was an incredible modern jazz player, all the tricks and licks, but he forgot it. He learned a lot from Monk, but not as an improviser, only the themes, since he was the second saxophonist in the band and he played only the theme at the beginning and at the end. He learnt from Monk to go in his own absolute way. You can listen to his early records with Cecil Taylor, going out from the normal jazz licks. I liked the clearness. This became important for me, the essence of his thinking.
AAJ: How did you came across Dixon?
