B.G. World-Wide

The box set was released in 1993 by TCB Records (Swiss jazz label) in two double CD cases; each CD bears the imprint “B.G. World-Wide, Previously Unreleased”.¹ The Berlin recordings thus came out three years before the single CD “Berlin 1980” (1996). CD 4 (“Berlin 1980”, 57:50) contains 14 tracks from the concerts of 7 and 8 November 1980 at the Berlin Philharmonie, played by the Benny Goodman Quintet: Goodman (clarinet, leader), Harry Pepl (guitar), Don Haas (piano), Peter “Fifi” Witte (bass) and Charly Antolini (drums). The third track is “Harry Pepl's Blues” (4:39), the only piece of the evening credited in the booklet to “(Pepl)” alone as composer.²

A blues off the cuff: In Berlin, Goodman introduced the band and, without any prior arrangement, announced a guitar solo. Tony Middleton's liner notes put it this way: “this introduction also contained a shock for guitarist Harry Pepl as Benny announces a guitar solo”.³ Pepl himself did not take it as a shock: he immediately started improvising and soon found his way into a blues form, which the others joined one by one. This is how the extended, spontaneously improvised blues came about that made it onto the record as “Harry Pepl's Blues”, with Pepl as composer.⁴

The other three CDs contain concerts without Pepl: Bangkok 1956, Basel 1959 and Santiago de Chile 1961. Recorded by Kurt A. Mueller, remastered by Jack Towers, executive producers Kurt A. Mueller and Peter Schmidlin, liner notes by Tony Middleton and Kurt Weil.¹ On the CD 4 inlay the name is printed as “Harry Peppl”, in the booklet correctly as “Harry Pepl”. In 2021 Daniel Pepl cited the box to the LSG (Austria's collecting society for the neighbouring rights of performers and record producers) as an example of his father's participation.