OBIT Bebop Pianist Jutta Hipp, NY SUN
Hyfler/Rosner
Hipp did of Lionel Hampton.
Bebop Pianist Jutta Hipp, 78, Elite Player Who Dropped Out of Jazz
By STEPHEN MILLER Staff Reporter of the Sun
The Talk of the Town section of the New Yorker of March 31, 1956, found
the German bebop pianist Jutta Hipp in good form at the Hickory House, one
of a number of music clubs that dotted West 52 nd Street in those days. The
New Yorker writer described Hipp as dressed in jeans and a checked shirt,
with "stupendous auburn pigtails hanging down her back." She was a small
woman making a big sound.
The Hickory House, where Hipp cut two live discs, was a favored haunt of
such jazz greats as Horace Silver and Duke Ellington, who was said to like
the steaks there. Ellington came there for Hipp's hot chops, too, according
to liner notes on one of her live recordings, written by the critic and
impresario Leonard Feather.
But as popular as her renditions of standards like "Mad About the Boy"
and "These Foolish Things" were with the smart set, she was completely out
of the business within two years. A naturally shy person, she couldn't stand
being onstage.
"I remember hearing that she was going to quit and thinking it was
terrible that anybody would do anything like that, turn their back on jazz,"
Marion McPartland, the jazz pianist, told The New York Sun. "She was an
extremely talented woman," said Ms. McPartland, who knew Hipp and saw her
play at Hickory House.
Before retreating into silence, Hipp produced five albums, the last with
saxophonist Zoot Simms.
Born in Leipzig, she studied classical piano as a child and discovered an
interest in jazz around the time World War II broke out. In the Ken Burns
series, "Jazz," she was quoted as saying, "You won't be able to understand
this because you were born [in America], but to us, jazz is some kind of
religion. We really had to fight for it, and I remember nights when we didn'
t go down to the bomb shelter because we listened to [jazz] records. We just
had the feeling that you were not our enemies, and even though the bombs
crashed around us...we felt safe."
Starting after the war, she began playing piano in music halls to
entertain the occupying forces, and within a few years had a wide reputation
in a devastated country that was hungry for culture. She toured with Dizzy
Gillespie and others in Germany, Sweden, and elsewhere. "It was like she was
almost the only one on [jazz] piano in Germany," the late bass and guitar
player Attila Zoller told Cadence Jazz Magazine. "There weren't a few good
players. I mean, none played the caliber that she did."
It was Leonard Feather who discovered her in Germany and lured her to
America. In the Hickory House liner notes he wrote of how difficult it had
been for the shy Hipp to force herself to perform for the greatest jazz
players of the age. Yet within a few months, he wrote, "America is taking to
Miss Hipp, and I'm hip Miss Hipp likes America." She was to stay in this
country for the rest of her days.
Dan Morgenstern, director of the Rutgers Institute of Jazz Studies,
recalls watching her play in an officers' club while he was in the Army
stationed in Frankfurt, in 1952. In later years he befriended Hipp in
America, and told her how he had seen her play. "She was very talented," he
said. The two stayed in contact, and the institute compiled a fat folder of
archival materials, including letters and an article from the Des Moines
Register about her and the Japanese jazz pianist Toshiko Akiyoshi coming to
town to perform. They were two cool ladies of jazz from the opposite ends of
the earth.
After she stopped performing, Hipp apparently left music behind almost
completely, maintaining friendships with a few people she'd known in the old
days but keeping her privacy intensely. Ms. McPartland said she had once
asked her to appear on her radio show "Piano Jazz," but Hipp demurred. When
she visited her at her Long Island City apartment, Ms. McPartland did not
recall seeing a piano.
She lived in the same tiny apartment until the end of her life. She made
her living as a seamstress.
She kept in touch with Mr. Morgenstern, sending him letters of
reminiscence and copies of the contributions she sometimes made to small
poetry magazines. She occasionally drew caricatures that appeared on the
cover of Jazz News. She also painted, and a show of her work ran at the
Langston Hughes Community Library and Cultural Center in Corona in 2001.
Jutta Hipp
Born February 4, 1925, in Leipzig, Germany, died April 6, 2003, in Long
Island City. There are no known survivors.
Russ
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