Air Mail

How the band came about

Pepl, Puschnig and Reisinger knew each other from the Vienna Art Orchestra, the Viennese jazz big band led by Mathias Rüegg; Pepl said the band had actually come about through the Art Orchestra. The initiative came from Reisinger, and the first rehearsals took place with the bassist Jean-Paul Celea. By autumn 1983 the line-up with Mike Richmond was in place, whom Reisinger had met through Harry Sokal. Because the bassist was flown in, the band was called Air Mail.¹

Moers and Prayer For Peace

The breakthrough came on Whit Monday, 11 June 1984, at the Moers Festival, with the trumpeter Karl “Bumi” Fian as fifth man. From 2 to 4 February 1985 the band recorded “Prayer For Peace” at the Tonstudio Bauer; the producer was Burkhard Hennen, and the album was released on Moers Music. Puschnig and Richmond wrote two pieces each, Reisinger and Pepl one each: “Radlbremser”, a racing semiquaver theme that he had already wanted to play with the String Summit and for which the necessary power was only there with Air Mail.²

Rehearsing like a pop band

According to Pepl, Air Mail rehearsed „ziemlich verrückt“ [“in a pretty crazy way”]: Pepl and Puschnig played the themes in unison, and they were played to the others instead of being written out.³ Puschnig later said that he had learned from Pepl how to phrase across the bar line.⁴

Light Blues and the MIDI guitar

“Light Blues” was recorded live on 8 and 9 July 1987 at the Schlachthof Wels, with two tracks recorded in March 1988 at the ORF (Austria's public broadcaster) studio in Graz for “Jazz und Stories” with Peter Turrini, there with Robert Riegler on bass. The album was released on Amadeo (former Vienna label for jazz and classical music) in 1988 and reissued by Universal in 2001 in the Austrian Jazzart series. Here Pepl plays the Roland MIDI guitar system with flute, piano and percussion sounds, his second recording with it after “Cracked Mirrors”.⁵ The title track is called “The Halley's Comet, Light Blue Blues”; “125/250” is a version of Pepl's “Ballentine for Valentine”.⁶ When Universal reissued the album in 2001 in the Austrian Jazzart series, Otmar Klammer wrote in the Kleine Zeitung, a daily newspaper from Graz, of “the legendary ‘Light Blues’ by Harry Pepl's ‘Airmail’” and concluded: “Wonderful.”⁷

Concerts until 1993

Documented performances include the concert at the Jazzspelunke, a jazz club in Vienna, on 30 March 1985 and an ORF recording on 24 May 1986 in St. Gerold. In May and June 1986 the band toured Switzerland, Germany, France and Austria; the Gemeindeblatt für den Bezirk Landeck, a local paper in Tyrol, names the festivals in Coutances, Amiens, Maur near Zurich and Neuwied. On Saturday, 10 May, it played at the Jazz sous les pommiers festival in Coutances (Normandy, France), according to the programme text its first concert in France, on Wednesday, 14 May, at the Paris jazz club New Morning, announced there as the “Harry Pepl quartet”, and on Thursday, 19 June, at the Hotel Sonne in Landeck (Tyrol); a recording from Amiens has survived. The catalogue of the INA, the archive of French radio and television, holds a concert recording by Radio France of Thursday, 15 May 1986, in Paris and a programme by the television channel FR3 of January 1987 with Air Mail in Amiens, there with Pepl’s “The Eye of the Groundhog”.⁸ The Landeck paper announced Air Mail as “one of the best contemporary quartets on the European jazz scene”.⁹ Jazz Hot, the French jazz magazine founded in 1935, reviewed two concerts of the tour that summer: in Coutances Alain Guerrini discovered “un groupe prodigieux”, a prodigious group, and in Amiens Franck Bergerot heard “un Harry Pepl tout à fait inattendu”, an utterly unexpected Harry Pepl, in whose playing he found again the thread of a history of the guitar.¹⁰ In September 1986 Air Mail played in Turkey: on Friday, 26 September, at 10 pm at the 2nd International Bilsak Jazz Festival at the Şan Tiyatrosu in Istanbul, one evening before the quintet of Enrico Rava and Dino Saluzzi, in which Pepl also played.¹¹ The band's heyday was in the 1980s; its last concert was in 1993 at the jazz festival in Raab, which Paul Zauner organised, with Jean-Paul Celea on bass.¹² In 2006 Puschnig and Reisinger played a set of Pepl's music together with Clemens Salesny and colleagues at the Jazzwerkstatt Wien.¹³

By candlelight at the Titanic

How deeply Pepl, for all his modern, highly virtuosic playing, was rooted in the jazz guitar tradition is shown by a memory of the Viennese jazz and blues guitarist Thomas Palme. In the 1980s or early 1990s Air Mail, with Puschnig, Richmond and Reisinger, was playing at the Titanic, a fashionable club at the time in the Theobaldgasse in Vienna, Austria. In the middle of the set the power failed, and only the candles on the tables gave light. While people hectically searched for the fault, Pepl began, all alone, to play a tune by Wes Montgomery, quietly and acoustically, “spot-on in the style of Wes”, and the room quickly fell silent and reverent. For Palme the evening remains “to this day a very vivid memory of one of Austria's greatest jazz guitarists”.¹⁴

A totally hot band

In 2010 Wolfgang Reisinger recalled: „Ich habe immer wieder das Glück gehabt, mit großartigen Musikern zusammen zu treffen, von denen man wirklich viel lernen konnte und der erste in dieser Hinsicht war auf jeden Fall Harry Pepl. Der war ein wirkliches Genie und ein großartiger Gitarrist, mit einer Energie und Ernsthaftigkeit, die einem vor Augen geführt hat, wo es hin gehen kann. Die Formation mit ihm war sehr erfolgreich und wir haben auf so ziemlich allen großen Festivals gespielt.“ [“Time and again I have had the good fortune to meet great musicians from whom you could really learn a lot, and the first of them was definitely Harry Pepl. He was a real genius and a great guitarist, with an energy and seriousness that showed you where things could go. The group with him was very successful, and we played at pretty much all the big festivals.”] And: „Ich kann mich noch gut daran erinnern, wie wir einmal von der Bühne runter gegangen sind, John Scofield rauf und im Vorbeigehen hat er zu Harry gemeint, ‚I’ll kill you!’. Das sind so kleine Erlebnisse, die man nicht vergisst. Das war wirklich eine total heiße Band damals.“ [“I still remember well how we once came off the stage, John Scofield went on, and in passing he said to Harry, ‘I’ll kill you!’. Those are the little experiences you don’t forget. That really was a totally hot band back then.”] Reisinger still had tapes of a live performance that he considered „fast noch besser“ [“almost even better”] than the two studio albums.¹⁵