Harry Pepl's Lonely Single Swinger Band

How it came about

After two brain haemorrhages, in 1989 and 1994, Pepl withdrew completely from life on tour and from public view from 1994/95. For him this was deeply painful and tragic, yet he made the best of it for himself. First he played the piano, because the guitar had now become too analytical for him: on it, he said, he had only „den analytischen Blick auf Technik und Fingersätze“ [“the analytical view of technique and fingerings”] and was „nicht mehr frei genug“ [“no longer free enough”].¹ This led to the piano albums “Consequence” and “Flow”. Then, in the basement studio in Hernstein, Lower Austria, he found a logic of his own with the Lonely Single Swinger Band: a band in which he played all the instruments himself and improvised in interplay with himself. In this way he remained highly productive until 2005.²

He was helped by his younger son Daniel Pepl, who was living at home at the time, studying in Vienna and exploring music production himself. From 1995/1996 until his father's death he assisted as sound engineer with recording, mixing and mastering; the mixing and mastering Harry Pepl then did himself.³

The name

Pepl explained the name, in essence, by saying that all the pieces were somehow single and sad, and that it swings, or doesn't swing, as well.⁴

How the recordings were made

Usually Pepl first recorded the drums live, then semi-acoustic guitar and double bass, which he played as a sample via the MIDI guitar, then piano or keyboard and vocals; this produced mainly trios and quartets, with all the instruments played by him.⁵ The method is Real-time Composing: improvised tracks, recorded in response to one another, without notation. He gave the titles immediately after recording, rated some pieces with stars, and burned a selection onto CDs, for example the „Weihnachts-CD 1999“ [“Christmas CD 1999”] with “Frischwärts”, “Colon Meets Jane” and “Fugendichtung”.⁶ Kohler describes a wide range: piano pieces with and without drums, chamber music, contemporary classical music, „Normaljazz“ [“normal jazz”], beautiful melodies, soundscapes and guitar trios.⁷ In August 2004, for example, “Dedicated to Michel Noiret's Stockhausen” was created, inspired by an ARTE film about the dancer Michèle Noiret.⁸

The result seems paradoxical: the tracks were made one after another and alone, and yet they sound as if an improvising jazz band were just coming in together, building in density and reacting to each other in the moment. Heckel distinguishes this from earlier overdub recordings, such as those by the American pianist Lennie Tristano or Bill Evans’ “Conversations with Myself” (1963): Pepl reacted to himself over several successive takes, thus adding virtual fellow musicians.⁹ Daniel Pepl hears in it almost the Wayne Shorter Quartet with Danilo Pérez, John Patitucci and Brian Blade, the American saxophonist’s band from 2000 onwards, known for its collective, floating build-ups of density.¹⁰ A detailed appraisal is on the page The paradox of simultaneity.

What has survived

The material was created and kept in the house in Hernstein, Lower Austria, on ADAT and hard disk; today it is held by his son Daniel Pepl in Vienna. From 1995 to 2005 Pepl recorded every day, first on ADAT, the digital multitrack tape format, from 2002 also directly by hard-disk recording; guitar, bass, piano and drums are available as separate tracks or instrument groups (stems).¹¹ Pepl documented his recordings himself like an archivist: he gave the pieces titles straight after recording, burned finished mixes to CD and rated many of them with stars.¹² In ring binders he noted, using a system of one to five stars, the day, month and year, which tracks, which mix and sometimes the title. He always named the ADAT tracks by the same logic: drums sum, bass, guitar and piano, four stereo tracks. Recording ran through the Yamaha 03D digital mixing desk onto ADAT; via Steinberg timecode he synchronised an Apple computer that drove MIDI instruments in parallel, and stored the mix digitally on DAT, later on a CD recorder. From 2002 he recorded directly to a PC by hard-disk recording.¹³ The exact equipment chain and signal flow are currently being documented. Stefan Heckel examined “Frischwärts” (1999) in detail in his dissertation.¹⁴

Releases and the stage

The music was first heard live in 2004 in the “Habanero Slideshow” by the jazz photographer Rainer Rygalyk, named after the fiery habanero chillies Pepl loved to cook with: on 17 September at the Blue Tomato, a jazz club in Vienna, Austria, and on 4 November at the Salzburger Jazzherbst (jazz festival in Salzburg, Austria) in the regional studio of the ORF (Austria's public broadcaster) in Salzburg. Young horn players improvised to Pepl's tracks and Rygalyk's pictures, in Salzburg Lorenz Raab (trumpet), Wolfgang Schiftner and Clemens Salesny (saxophone), with Pepl present. The APA (Austria Presse Agentur, Austria's national news agency) called the show “the second truly risky project” among the festival's Austrian concerts.¹⁵¹⁶

At the rehearsal Pepl explained his music and his concepts to Raab, Schiftner and Salesny. Clemens Salesny later became the central figure of the live performances: since 2015 he has shaped the projects built on Pepl's original tracks together with Martin Bayer, and he leads the live line-up.¹⁷

For the tenth anniversary of his death, the double CD was released in 2015, the first CD of which contains recordings of the Lonely Single Swinger Band. At the Austrian Soundcheck at the Orpheum, a concert venue, in Graz, Austria, in November 2015, where a quartet around Clemens Salesny played with these recordings, Pepl was, in the words of the Kronen Zeitung, Austria’s largest-circulation daily, “virtually present as a multi-instrumentalist, with those late recordings from his home studio in which he pushed through to pure, intuitive expressive sound”.¹⁸ Fullmax Recordings released the EP “Lonely Single Swinger Band (Art of Trio, Vol. 1)” in 2019 and “Harry Pepl's Lonely Single Swinger Band (Volume One)” in 2020. Since 2018 the live formation has played with the original tracks. After its concert at the Austrian Soundcheck at Tube’s, a music bar in Graz, in November 2018, Otmar Klammer wrote in the Kleine Zeitung, a daily newspaper from Graz: “The real fifth man, who once composed this music in real time on countless instruments, will in a few days already have been sorely missed for 13 years.”¹⁹ Its album “Live” came second in the Best Album category at the Austrian Jazz Award 2025 (award for jazz from Austria).