BLP 1530

 Jutta Hipp With Zoot Sims

Released - February 1957

Recording and Session Information

Van Gelder Studio, Hackensack, NJ, July 28, 1956
Jerry Lloyd, trumpet; Zoot Sims, tenor sax; Jutta Hipp, piano; Ahmed Abdul-Malik, bass; Ed Thigpen, drums.

tk.4 Violets For Your Furs
tk.6 Down Home
tk.7 Wee-Dot
tk.9 Too Close For Comfort
tk.14 Almost Like Being In Love
tk.15 Just Blues

Session Photos

Photos: © Francis Wolff/Mosaic Images 
https://www.mosaicrecordsimages.com/

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Just Blues	Zoot Sims	28/07/1956
Violets for Your Furs	Matt Dennis, Tom Adair	28/07/1956
Down Home	Jerry Lloyd	28/07/1956
Side Two
Almost Like Being in Love	Alan Jay Lerner, Frederick Loewe	28/07/1956
Wee Dot	J.J. Johnson, Leo Parker	28/07/1956
Too Close for Comfort	Jerry Bock, George David Weiss, Larry Holofcener	28/07/1956

Credits

Cover Photo:
Cover Design:	REID MILES
Engineer:	RUDY VAN GELDER
Producer:	ALFRED LION
Liner Notes:	LEONARD FEATHER

Liner Notes

WHEN the two volumes of music encased in BLP 1515 and BLP 1516 were recorded under the title Jutta Hipp at the Hickory House, the red-headed Madchen from Leipzig had only recently opened her engagement at that Fifty-Second Street emporium. It was her first bow on the New York scene after many months of suspense due to the lack of that most material of prerequisites, a Musicians' Union membership card.

There was no telling how America would take to Miss Hipp or she to America. Perhaps after a couple of nervous weeks the gig would be over and the time charged off to experience. It speaks eloquently for Jutta that no such thing happened. She stayed at the Hickory House for no less than six months - a run that might be the envy of 999 jazzmen out of a thousand in these days of one-week stands. During those spring and summer months of 1956, the German jazz queen held court for many a visiting citizen at the oval bar that surrounded her trio. When not busy chatting with Duke Ellington, Lennie Tristano, and other distinguished guests, she could be found around the corner at Basin Street, watching what the opposition was cooking up. It was during this time that she had a musical meeting of the minds with Zoot Sims, with results that can be heard here.

Zoot and Jutta were not strangers. They had met a couple of years earlier, when Zoot was touring the Continent with Stan Kenton's orchestra, and had jammed together in one of Frankfurt's hipper cellars.

For this Blue Note reunion two-thirds of the Hipp trio (the leader and her fine drummer, Ed Thigpen, who has since joined Billy Taylor) joined forces with three-fifths of the Zoot Sims Quintet. Zoot brought along his trumpeter, Jerry Lloyd, who a few years ago was on the New York music scene as Jerry Hurwitz, but of late had taken to driving a taxicab, preferring a calling that offered advancement, in a more literal sense. It is good to know that he has shifted gears and rejoined the ranks of the blowing. Ahmed Abdul-Malik, who practices bass playing as seriously as Mohammedanism, lent a solid foundation to the proceedings.

The style for the session, as might be suspected by anyone familiar with Jutta's musical and personal character, was completely without formality or restriction; improvisation is engagingly audible from start to finish on most of the tracks.

"Just Blues" is a lengthy and thorough inspection of the twelve-bar tradition in which the California-born tenor man helps himself to the first eleven choruses (and at 13 seconds to a chorus this doesn't make him a glutton) in the firmly swinging, Young-rooted but Sims-styled manner that brought him so successfully through the Herman, Goodman, and Kenton ranks. Jerry Lloyd follows with about seven choruses (we were more interested in what he had to express than in the exact numbers of measures it took him to express it), after which Jutta takes over for a few exercises in hip restraint, her style clearly reoriented by the time spent listening to Horace Silver and other modernists since her arrival in the U.S. a year ago. Ahmed walks a couple before the blues swings its way to a close.

"Violets for Your Furs," possibly better known for its Matt Dennis lyrics than for the Tom Adair melody, is Zoot and Jutta almost all the way, with Jerry coming in only briefly at the end.

"Back Home," an excursion to Indiana along a harmonically familiar trail, starts with a thematic framework, mostly in unison by the two horns, but is again primarily a workout for Zoot, Jutta, and Jerry.

"Almost Like Being in Love" gets right into a good middle-ground tempo and groove from the first bar, with Zoot swinging the melody before taking off into chord-based ad libbing, on the 40-bar chorus. Again the accent is on understatement in Lloyd's slightly Bakerish approach and in Jutta's single-note, middle-register lines, which rarely stray more than an octave or so above middle C.

"Wee Dot" is an up-tempo blues theme written back in the late-'40s by Jay Jay Johnson. After 24 bars of theme the solo spotlight is on Zoot from choruses 3 through 10, on Jutta for the next eight, and Jerry for six more, but everyone comes back for another taste before going out on chorus 37 (this time we did happen to keep count). "Too Close for Comfort" is, of course, the recent hit from Broadway's Mr. Wonderful. I suspect that Sammy Davis is going to get a big kick out of this, the first recorded cool jazz version. It hits a nice medium pace with Zoot in charge at the outset, followed by Jutta and Jerry in a mood that seemed to me slightly more assertive than some of the other performances in this set.

The total effect to be observed on these sides is similar to what you would experience if you happened to drop in one night at Basin Street or the Bohemia and found Jutta Hipp sitting in with Zoot's combo. The same laisser-souffler (or man, let's blow) spirit; the same concentration on individual expression. In fact, everything is there but the audience applause; it only remains to be hoped that you' Il feel like providing it yourself.

- LEONARD FEATHER

Cover Design by REID MILES
Recording by RUDY VAN GELDER

RVG CD Reissue Liner Notes

A NEW LOOK AT JUTTA HIPP WITH ZOOT SIMS

Thanks to the efforts of Sally Placksin, who interviewed Jutta Hipp when the pianist's debut recordings were reissued in 1989, and Katja von Schuttenbach, who summarized her Masters' Thesis on Hipp in the July/August 2006 issue of Germany's Jazz Podium, we can now supplement the biographical information on this most elusive figure.

Hipp was born in Leipzig, Germany in 1925 and developed a love for both jazz and painting as a child. She was a student of her home town's Academy of Graphic Arts when World War Il commenced, and by her own account would ignore air raids signals to listen to forbidden Allied radio broadcasts. When Soviet troops occupied Leipzig at the end of the war, Hipp and her family escaped to West Germany, ultimately settling in Frankfort. She began her musical career in GI service clubs before joining the group of saxophonist Hans Roller. Like many young European players of the time, Hipp became influenced by the work of Lennie Tristano, and the quintet she assembled in 1954 had the alto-tenor front line that had been popularized by Tristano, Lee Konitz, and Warne Marsh.

This was the band that Leonard Feather heard in a Duisburg nightclub early that year. As a longtime champion of both female and European musicians, Feather quickly became determined to share his discovery. He arranged for Hipp's group to record an album that appeared in Blue Note's 10" LP series New Faces—New Sounds, and then late in 1955 assisted Hipp in immigrating to the US, upon securing Musicians' Union membership, Hipp began a Hickory House gig that produced two live Blue Note albums in April 1956, recordings that found Horace Silver emerging as another major influence on her playing.

The present encounter with tenor giant Zoot Sims features less of the Tristano feeling that imbued Hipp's Blue Note 10" (traces remain in the accents on her "Down Home" solo, which is played over the "Indiana" chord sequence that was a Tristano favorite) and more of the loose, jamming atmosphere of her 1955 encounter with Swedish baritone saxophonist Lars Gullin. The setting is ideal tor the informal eloquence of Sims, who dominates each track with his loose, life-affirming flow of invention. Sims is inspired by Lester Young, whose "Blue Lester" gets a nod during the tenor solos of "Just Blues," "Wee Dot, " and even the non-blues "Too Close for Comfort"; but he gets deeper into his own space on "These Foolish Things," another Young favorite and one of two bonus tracks. As both a Tristano inspiration and one of Silver's earliest employers, Young provides an ideal aura for Hipp to operate under.

Trumpeter Jerry Lloyd (Hurwitz), another of modern jazz's obscure figures, was around in the late-1940s to absorb the influence of early Miles Davis, and appeared sporadically on disc between 1949 and 1957, primarily with Sims, George Wallington, and Gerry Mulligan. His trumpet is in the tight, mid-range style of such other brass players in the Sims/Mulligan orbit as Chet Baker, Jon Eardley, and Don Ferrara. Remembered as much for his writing as his playing, Lloyd composed "Down Home" and is also probably responsible for the line that the group plays over the chord changes of "'S Wonderful."

After three albums on a major label within eight months of her arrival, and amidst the foreign-female-pianist hype that also surrounded Marian McPartland and Toshiko Akiyoshi at the time, Hipp appeared poised for a long and successful career; but things quickly fell apart. Feather's patronage ended, in part because she (unlike many others he championed) refused to record his original compositions, and the break left Hipp without a business adviser. A combination of stage fright and alcohol abuse also made it increasingly difficult for her to perform. Hipp toured the southern US in the unlikely setting of R&B tenor saxophonist Jesse Powell's band, an experience she later described as the most fun of her career; but by 1958 she had stopped playing piano and returned to painting, supporting herself for 35 years as a seamstress in a clothing factory. While she would occasionally send caricatures and photographs of musicians to Jazz Podium and contributed a drawing to the walls of the Village Vanguard, she had little contact with the jazz world beyond a circle of friends from her European years that included guitarist Atilla Zoller (her onetime fiancé) and writer Dan Morgenstern.

In 2001, two years before her death, Blue Note located Hipp in the Queens apartment where she had lived quietly for decades. When label representatives visited to deliver a check for $40,000 in back royalties, she enthusiastically displayed her works of visual art, but declined to talk about music.

— Bob Blumenthal, 2007