This year, jazz pianist Jutta Hipp would have been 100 years old. For a long time, she was forgotten - only in recent years has she been gradually rediscovered. Who was the Leipzig-born pianist who made a career for herself in New York's vibrant jazz scene in the 1950s?

The record label Blue Note Records was founded in New York in 1939 by Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff, who had fled Germany to escape the Nazi regime. Over the years, they released recordings by artists such as Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers, Herbie Hancock, Sheila Jordan, Thelonious Monk, Horace Silver and Wayne Shorter, gaining a great deal of prestige in the jazz scene. In 1956, Leipzig-born Jutta Hipp also recorded three albums for Blue Note Records, to which she had shortly before signed as the first European jazz musician and second white musician in the history of the label, and in the same year she performed alongside Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong at the Newport Jazz Festival. Shortly afterwards, she gave up music, began working as a seamstress in a factory in Queens in 1958 and finally died of pancreatic cancer in April 2003 in her apartment in the New York borough of Queens, where, according to her biographer Ilona Haberkamp, there had long since been no piano.

A new sound from Germany

Hipp's relationship with her former patron Leonard Feather may have been symbolic of the strains on the music scene, which are considered one of the possible reasons behind this development. As a successful jazz musician, author and music critic, he used his influence at the time to pave the way for Hipp on the stages of the USA. At his behest, the album "New Faces - New Sounds from Germany" by the Jutta Hipp Quintet had already been distributed by Blue Note Records since 1954. However, the fact that she was signed four months after her arrival in New York in 1955 was solely due to her talent. In "Blue Note Records: The Biography", Richard Cook vividly describes how Lion and Wolff, as ardent jazz fans, only signed artists who convinced them personally. 

This makes the end of this chapter in Hipp's life all the more tragic. As Katja von Schuttenbach explains in her master's thesis on Jutta Hipp, Feather harassed the artist shortly after her arrival in New York, both sexually and with regard to her choice of pieces. Hipp neither wanted to record Feather's compositions nor start an affair with the married man. The latter felt offended and withdrew his support. Hipp ended her six-month engagement at the Hickory House Club in the summer of 1956 and her musical work left no more traces in the media. However, Feathers later wrote highly disrespectfully about Hipp, claiming, for example, that Horace Silver's musical influence had ruined her playing. 

Hipp, who attached great importance to protecting her privacy, only mentioned publicly once - during an interview in 1998 - that this had been a bad time that she did not want to be reminded of. So she left her jazz career behind her around 1957 and began working as a seamstress. The modest but reliable income secured her livelihood and Hipp, who had been a student at the State Academy of Graphic Arts and Book Crafts in Leipzig from 1942 to 1945, from then on lived out her creativity in painting. She captured various motifs in watercolors, but also drew caricatures of other jazz musicians. 

As a fan, she nevertheless remained loyal to jazz, attending jazz concerts until shortly before her death and photographing artists she considered particularly talented. She then sent these pictures to German magazines with notes about the musical talent of those photographed - like a well-meaning, anonymous PR manager. It was this passion for the scene that originally led her to become a jazz pianist herself.

The beginnings in Leipzig

Although the Leipzig native left her hometown at an early age, her time there was formative for her. Born in the trade fair city in the mid-1920s, she attended the Rudolf Hildebrand School in Connewitz and was taught classical piano for four years, starting at the age of nine. After dropping out of lessons at her own request, it was her interest in jazz music that brought her back to the piano. She played in the illegal Leipzig Hot Jazz Club as a member of an amateur band during the Second World War. Her role models included Fats Waller, Art Tatum and Teddy Wilson. During the brief US occupation of Leipzig after the end of the war, jazz was omnipresent, whether at the headquarters of the US troops, on the AFN soldiers' radio station or on small stages: It was now being played legally again all over the city. At this time, Hipp recorded demos at Leipzig's Lime City Jazz Club - also known for Rolf Kühn's work - which were released in 2015. Over the course of the 1950s, jazz became popular throughout Germany and with it Hipp and her piano playing.

Some of her long-time colleagues from the clothing factory only found out about Hipp's former life as a musician through her obituary. However, she was in contact with special jazz trailblazers throughout her life.

Laura Gerlach