The String Summit

The New Jazz Meeting was founded in 1966 as the Free Jazz Meeting in Baden-Baden, Germany, by Joachim-Ernst Berendt, jazz editor of Südwestfunk, the public broadcaster for south-western Germany; SWR still calls it a legendary “sound laboratory”, with room for encounters between improvisers “who have not yet met” (translated from the German). The String Summit of 1980 was one of a series of such summits for individual groups of instruments; according to SWR there were Trumpet, Clarinet, String and Vocal Summits and, in 1983, a Percussion Summit.¹ According to MPS the line-up came from seven European countries and the USA.²

Pepl can be heard on four pieces of the album “One World In Eight”, one of them in a duo with Wolfgang Dauner: “Hargang”. His piece “Radlbremser” proved too difficult for the ensemble; he later played it with Air Mail.