Benny Goodman Band 1980/81

Berlin 1980

The occasion was Helmut Schmidt's chancellor's reception as part of the Berliner Festspiele. The musicians were chosen by Kurt A. Müller (1922 to 2014), a Swiss businessman in Bangkok, Goodman's manager and long-standing friend, who later released the recordings together with Peter Schmidlin.¹ Pepl at first declined because swing was not his music; his father persuaded him. After a rehearsal on 6 November, the band played at the Philharmonie on 7 and 8 November 1980: Benny Goodman (clarinet), Harry Pepl (guitar), Don Haas (piano), Peter “Fifi” Witte (bass) and Charly Antolini (drums).² On the album, “Harry Pepl's Blues” is the only track with just one composer credited: an extended, evidently spontaneously improvised blues for which Goodman announced Pepl's solo without it having been agreed.³ 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”.⁴ The concerts were first released in 1993 on CD 4 of the blue Goodman box set “B.G. World-Wide” and in 1996 as the single CD “Berlin 1980”, both on TCB Records (Swiss jazz label).⁵

A detour to the King of Swing

Around 1980 Harry Pepl was successful with his own, decidedly modern music: with Werner Pirchner, the Austrian composer and vibraphonist, he played in the Jazzzwio, which Jack DeJohnette spontaneously joined on stage at the Saalfelden jazz festival in September 1980 and which appeared at the Montreux Jazz Festival in July 1981 (“Live, Montreux '81”).⁶ Swing was not his music. When the request came from Berlin, his first thought was: “what am I supposed to do with Benny, I was right in the middle of completely different music”.⁷ He could not prepare for the repertoire: “I only knew the tunes from The Benny Goodman Story, which I could still somehow hear ringing in my ears. There was no sheet music, nothing at all. So I didn't know a single tune, and Benny didn't give us a programme or anything.”⁸ That he stepped in like this, almost on the side, with the “King of Swing” and thrilled him impressed many jazz guitarists and musicians, as Daniel Pepl reports.⁹

The letter from Bangkok

A week after the concerts, on Saturday, 15 November 1980, a letter from Bangkok arrived in Hernstein, Lower Austria, Austria. According to the family archive, the sender was Goodman's manager Kurt A. Müller: the Swiss businessman living in Bangkok, a long-standing friend of Goodman and a collector, who co-organised the concerts, chose the European musicians, made the recordings and took photographs. Looking back, Pepl called him Goodman's “manager, or a friend”.¹⁰ The letter records: “After the second concert Benny Goodman was full of praise for you and your colleagues.” Anyone who played with Goodman had to be good, it says, because he was an absolute perfectionist. And further: “When you took off with your solo at the start of the second concert, Benny really got going, in a way I had not seen him for many years”; Charly Antolini, Peter Witte and Don Haas swung along, and the whole quintet jammed as it had only done in Goodman's early years. The second concert took place on Saturday, 8 November 1980. The account matches the passage in the liner notes according to which Goodman announced a guitar solo without warning and Pepl improvised the blues that went on the record as “Harry Pepl's Blues”.⁴ Goodman's only regret was that Pepl did not play a “natural”, that is acoustic, guitar; he would have liked that even better. The audience went wild, as the tape recordings showed. Müller announced photos and asked for a tape of swinging music, which he wanted to copy for Goodman.¹¹

In honour of Helmut Schmidt

According to family tradition, the Berlin concerts were held in honour of the West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, a great admirer of Goodman. Pepl himself spoke of “Helmut Schmidt's party” after the concert, and Nikolaus Kohler writes that Schmidt had wished for the concert as part of a chancellor's reception in his honour.¹² According to France Musique (the classical and jazz station of Radio France), Schmidt attended the first of the two concerts.¹³ Two days earlier, on 5 November 1980, the Bundestag had re-elected him chancellor.¹⁴ A photo from the estate shows Goodman in conversation with Schmidt. For the evening Pepl swapped the leather jacket of the rehearsals for a dinner jacket: “and in the evening straight away all elegant, with a bow tie”.¹⁵

From this time comes an anecdote that Harry Pepl told in the family: the Austrian actor and director Otto Schenk (1930 to 2025) spoke only English with him, because he took him for an American.¹⁶

Rome and Copenhagen 1981

In Rome in 1981 the band recorded jazz versions of Riz Ortolani's film score for Dino Risi's film “Fantasma d'Amore” with Romy Schneider and Marcello Mastroianni; for this Pepl borrowed a Gibson from a music shop.¹⁷ In September 1981 a television concert followed at the Tivoli in Copenhagen with the guests Jimmy Maxwell (trumpet) and Svend Asmussen (violin), released in 2003 as “Farewell” on DVD and CD. It was Pepl's last collaboration with Goodman; he declined a further concert in Vienna.¹⁸

Swing with a small amplifier

For Goodman, Pepl changed his sound: no reverb, no delay, a small amplifier, „wie der Großvater von Charlie Christian“ [“like Charlie Christian's grandfather”]. In the process he learned to play swing, but saw no effect on his later playing.¹⁹ After Berlin, Goodman sent him a photo of a rehearsal on the stage of the Philharmonie with a dedication; it is in the family archive.²⁰ On a second rehearsal photo from Berlin, Goodman wrote “To Harry, my best, Benny”.²¹