Recently, on February 4, Leipzig-born jazz pianist Jutta Hipp would have celebrated her 100th birthday. A good 20 years after her death, the life of "Europe's First Lady in Jazz", who retired from the stage in New York at the height of her career at the end of the 1950s but remained connected to jazz for the rest of her life, is still fascinating.

Now dramaturge Patricia Hoffmann is bringing Hipp's eventful life to the stage in a mixture of theater and music - from her beginnings in the city of her birth to the intermediate stations of Munich and Frankfurt and on to the US metropolis. Hoffmann was able to secure the services of trombonist Antonia Hausmann, who - like Hipp in the 1940s - is currently a formative face of the Leipzig jazz scene.

At her side are two old acquaintances, Philipp Scholz and Bertram Burkert. Together, they will make Hipp pieces shine in new splendor - underlining the exceptional status of an icon that never wanted to be one.