Jazzzwio

How the duo came about

In 1975 Pepl's trio Hip Jargon was looking for a melody instrument, and Pepl brought in the vibraphonist Werner Pirchner, a self-taught musician like himself. At a first rehearsal as a duo they played “Stella by Starlight” and noticed immediately that they could play well together.¹ The Jazzzwio grew out of this. Nikolaus Kohler counts it among Pepl's most important groups; for Pepl himself it was not a “band”, because for him that required a complete rhythm section.²

An important figure for Pepl and the duo was the jazz presenter Walter Richard Langer, known as “Warila”, who from 1967 produced the most influential jazz programmes on ORF radio, above all on Ö3. He invited Pepl several times to his TV series “Bourbon Street” (1975 to 1979), also with Werner Pirchner; three Jazzzwio tapes from October 1979 are known from the ORF archive.³

Two friends

The Jazzzwio was more than a working partnership: Harry Pepl and Werner Pirchner were close friends and got on very well off stage too. Pirchner recalled the first rehearsal in 1975: they had got on „von der ersten Sekunde an so gut“ [“so well from the very first second”]. „Dann haben wir gleich besprochen, daß wir mit den Familien auf Urlaub fahren, damit wir dort üben können. Der Harry war irgendwo ein ganz entscheidender Weggefährte, von dem ich sehr viel gelernt hab.“ [“Then we agreed straight away that we would go on holiday with our families so that we could practise there. Harry was a really decisive companion, from whom I learned a great deal.”]⁴ The families went on holiday together, and Werner Pirchner became godfather to Harry’s son Daniel Pepl, who today looks after the musical estate.⁵ Pirchner’s brother Herbert Pirchner was part of the circle as well: he took photographs for the duo’s record covers. Heimo Steps, founder of gamsbART (Graz concert promoter), called Pepl Pirchner’s „musikalisches Alter Ego“ [“musical alter ego”] in 1985 and recalled a night after a concert at the Graz jazz club M 59 around 1977: in the empty hall the three of them philosophised over red wine about God and the world until the birds began to sing on the roof terrace at dawn.⁶

Gegenwind and Montreux

On 1 and 2 December 1979 the two recorded the album “Gegenwind” on the Bisamberg near Vienna: Pepl on Ovation guitar, Pirchner on vibraphone and marimba, and whistling. The pieces follow a pattern of freely improvised introduction, themes and solos. ECM and Enja (Munich jazz label) turned down the tape, and Mood Records (Stuttgart-based jazz and rock label) released it in 1980.⁷

On 12 July 1981 the Jazzzwio played at the Montreux Jazz Festival, on a guitar day with nine groups, preceded by Biréli Lagrène's trio and followed later in the evening by James Blood Ulmer, among others. The live recording was released as the LP “Live, Montreux '81” on WEA.⁸ In 1988 Pepl recalled: „Die waren alle begeistert. Eine Sensation eigentlich.“ [“They were all thrilled. A sensation, really.”] In 1985 Heimo Steps called the record „ein Hammer für Herz und Hirn, wenn du Herz und Hirn Amboß sein läßt“ [“a hammer for heart and brain, if you let heart and brain be the anvil”].⁶

Festivals, New York, trio

The Jazzzwio played all over Europe, including at the most important festivals. Documented are the Montreux Jazz Festival (Switzerland), a festival in Zurich (Switzerland) where the trombonist Runo Ericksson got to know the two, the Saalfelden jazz festival (Austria), Jazzfest Berlin, the German Jazz Festival Frankfurt and the NDR Jazz Workshop in Hamburg (all Germany), the Bolzano jazz festival (Italy) and Naissus Jazz in Niš (then Yugoslavia, today Serbia).⁹

In September 1980 Jack DeJohnette joined in spontaneously at the festival in Saalfelden (major jazz festival in the Salzburg region); in 1982 the joint ECM album was made, which has a page of its own: Werner Pirchner / Harry Pepl / Jack DeJohnette.¹⁰ The Jazzzwio played at the Jazzfest Berlin on 6 November 1981 (at 11 pm at the Metropol; the set list of eight pieces is preserved by the Rockpalast archive, a private fan archive on the WDR television programme Rockpalast¹¹), at the German Jazz Festival in the Alte Oper Frankfurt on 2 October 1982 and, with Steve Swallow, at the NDR Jazz Workshop (NDR: Norddeutscher Rundfunk, public broadcaster for northern Germany) with the Family of Percussion.¹² In 1985 Don Moye of the Art Ensemble of Chicago expanded the duo into a trio: an Austrian tour in March, an appearance at the “New Austria/New York” festival at the Ohio Theater in New York on 15 May, and the Bolzano Jazz Festival in July.¹³ On 12 May 1985 a live recording was made at the Miles Smiles club in Vienna with Georg Polansky on drums, which was released in 2003 as “Live At Miles Smiles”.¹⁴

The evening in New York was more than a guest appearance. The festival “Beyond the Sound of Music. New Austria / New York” (15 to 19 May 1985), staged by steirischer herbst (Styrian Autumn, the festival of contemporary art in Graz, Austria) with the Austrian Institute and the New York art space The Kitchen to mark the 40th anniversary of Austria’s regained independence, brought contemporary Austrian art to New York, and the Jazzzwio opened it. Festival director Peter Vujica saw the trip as a return visit: Laurie Anderson, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Robert Wilson, Nam June Paik and the Art Ensemble of Chicago had all been guests in Graz before.¹⁵ Besides Pepl, Pirchner and Moye the programme featured the writers H. C. Artmann (Viennese poet), Wolfgang Bauer (Graz playwright), Alfred Kolleritsch (editor of the Graz literary magazine manuskripte), Ingeborg Day and Jürg Laederach, whose readings were presented by the American novelists John Irving and Walter Abish, the Viennese composer Otto M. Zykan, the sculptor Hartmut Skerbisch, Heinz Cibulka, Othmar Krenn, the composer Dieter Kaufmann with the K und K Experimentalstudio, the filmmaker Ernst Schmidt Jr. and the Graz group Blizz Frizz with the New York guitarist Rhys Chatham, as well as 13 architects and six photographers. The programme shows Pepl with his guitar, Pirchner at the vibraphone and Moye in stage costume.¹⁶

Air, Love & Vitamins as a duo

Pepl's best-known composition “Air, Love & Vitamins”, today a standard of Austrian jazz, first appeared in 1983 as a trio recording with Jack DeJohnette on ECM. In the same year the Jazzzwio played the piece as a duo at the Szene Wien, a concert venue, in Vienna, Austria, for “Ohne Maulkorb”, ORF’s youth programme (ORF, Austria’s public broadcaster).

Jazzzwio: “Air, Love & Vitamins”, ORF 1983

To play it, the video is loaded from YouTube. Data is transferred to YouTube (Google) in the process.

Load video Watch on YouTube

The end

The Jazzzwio played its last documented concerts in October 1985: on Wednesday, 23 October, in Kindberg (Styria, Austria) in the “Mürztaler Werkstatt” series of the steirischer herbst festival, on Thursday, 24 October, with an unnamed guest at the Katholisches Studentenhaus Münzgraben in Graz, and on 28 October in Niš, there with Barry Altschul and Walter Schmocker.¹⁷ Kohler also names a concert on 10 October 1985 in Graz, which is not listed in the festival’s archive. After that the two went their own ways, and Pirchner turned mainly to composition. Elfriede Pirchner describes the end as an amicable, organic process.¹⁸ Werner Pirchner died in 2001. When Pepl died in December 2005, the obituaries paid tribute to the duo once more. Ralf Dombrowski wrote in the Süddeutsche Zeitung: “In dialogue the two took the small chamber-jazz form to a previously unimagined communicative intensity.”¹⁹ In the Kleine Zeitung, a daily newspaper from Graz, Michael Tschida recalled the pair's delight in the comic and wrote: “The comic in jazz was never more serious.”²⁰

The recordings today

In 2009 Universal released “Live In Concerts” with the concerts from Montreux 1981 and Innsbruck 1984 on CD and DVD. Daniel Pepl had prepared the tapes and the video between summer 2007 and autumn 2008.²¹ The critics called the edition a classic of Austrian jazz. In 2007 the Christian Muthspiel Trio dedicated the album “Against The Wind” to the repertoire of Pirchner and Pepl. On Monday, 23 December 2013, the vibraphonist Matthias Legner and the bassist Clemens Rofner, as “Jazzzwio Legner-Rofner”, presented selected pieces by the duo at the Gemeindemuseum Absam (Tyrol), to bring „die leider oft übersehenen Pepl-Pirchner-Jazztunes zeitgemäß in Erinnerung“ [“the sadly often overlooked Pepl-Pirchner jazz tunes back to mind in a contemporary way”].²²

For the brothers Wolfgang and Christian Muthspiel, the Jazzzwio was an early impulse. „Wenn Pirchner/Pepl gespielt haben, war das ein Ereignis“ [“When Pirchner/Pepl played, it was an event”], Wolfgang Muthspiel recalled of a concert in Graz in 1982. „Ich habe persönlich noch sehr gut Pepls lawinenartige Improvisationen in Erinnerung, wo es immer irgendwie ‚gefährlich‘, heiß wurde. Seine immense rhythmische Kraft war unglaublich.“ [“I personally still remember Pepl’s avalanche-like improvisations very well, where things always somehow got ‘dangerous’, hot. His immense rhythmic power was unbelievable.”] He studied with Pepl in Graz until he moved to the New England Conservatory in Boston in 1986.²³ Christian Muthspiel added: „Durch das ‚Jazz-Zwio‘ erfuhr ich, dass man in dieser Musik tatsächlich genau das machen konnte, was man selbst wollte.“ [“Through the ‘Jazz-Zwio’ I learned that in this music you really could do exactly what you wanted yourself.”] In 2001/02 the brothers toured Austria with the programme “Muthspiel & Muthspiel play Pepl-Pirchner”, as a tribute to the duo and to Pirchner, who had died in 2001.²⁴