Jutta Hipp

Creative jazz pianist who lost all confidence in herself

Jutta Hipp, jazz pianist: born Leipzig, Germany 4 February 1925; died New York 7 April 2003.

In jazz there isn't much room for self-effacement. Jutta Hipp proved that over a professional life that began in Germany as a jazz star with great prospects and ended in relative penury in New York.

Such was her lack of respect for her own talent that she never thought that the three jazz albums she had made for Blue Note records would earn royalties for her over the years. In 1980 her friend the alto saxophonist Lee Konitz told the company where she lived, and Blue Note was finally able to pay her $40,000 in royalties going back to the Fifties.

Born in Leipzig in 1925, she had in 1940 joined that rarity in Hitler's Germany, a Hot Club, where she was drawn to records by Count Basie, Jimmy Lunceford and Billie Holiday. She had begun studying piano at the age of nine and was torn between music and her studies at the Academy of Arts in Leipzig, where she had shown herself to be a painter of considerable talent.

Jutta Hipp gained her jazz experience playing in jam sessions at the Hot Club and at the end of the Second World War, when the Russians arrived in the city, she applied for a West German work permit and moved with her family to Munich. At first she took any work that she could get, playing in a circus and cocktail lounges, before finding her feet as a creative jazz pianist.

By now she had listened to the American pianists such as Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk and blended their playing into her own gifted and inventive style. She played mostly for American GIs, but was disappointed when she found out that, contrary to her expectations of a new musical camaraderie, they were not all jazz enthusiasts. "Most of them liked country music," she reflected dolefully. "I played for anyone that would hire me," she said,

and sometimes, when our band finished, I stayed on to play with the next one. It was important to me to be accepted not just as "a girl", but as an equal to other musicians doing the things I like.

Hipp joined the group led by the Austrian tenor player Hans Koller in 1950 and stayed with him until 1953, when she formed her own bebop trio, and for the next eight years played professionally in Munich and Frankfurt and travelled around Europe. She made her first recordings with Koller and some of the emerging German individualists such as Albert Mangelsdorff and Joki Freund.

The American critic Leonard Feather, on tour in Germany in 1954, was impressed when he heard Jutta Hipp play, and when he returned to New York arranged a job for her at the city's Hickory House. She worked there for six months and during this time made the three albums for Blue Note, one of them with the tenor saxophonist Zoot Sims. "I was scared to death," she recalled.

It was an emotion that seemed to persist, for she lost confidence in herself and in 1958 gave up playing altogether. She continued to paint and, although her portraits of fellow jazzmen were in demand, kept her art as a hobby. She earned her living as a seamstress, and, although she kept a lot of her jazz friends, notably Lee Konitz and his wife, she never played again.

Steve Voce