New Times,
New Thinking.

  1. Culture
  2. Music
29 January 2025

In search of Jutta Hipp

In 1979, a musician put out a call in a magazine. Did anyone know where the German jazz pianist of the 1950s had gone?

By Phil Hebblethwaite

In October 1979, the British-born jazz pianist Marian McPartland published an open letter in Jazz Echo magazine. She was looking for another pianist with European roots: Jutta Hipp, a German who, like McPartland, had emigrated to the States after the Second World War. McPartland wrote that Hipp performed at New York’s Hickory House jazz club in 1953 or 1954 and “right after her last engagement there she disappeared”. She added that she was rumoured to be working in a factory, having “told everybody that the music business was too hard for her”. Either that or Hipp had returned to Germany. McPartland was writing a book on female jazz musicians and she was determined to speak to her.

There were inaccuracies in McPartland’s recollections, but she’d got the gist of the story right. Hipp had indeed performed at the Hickory House, albeit not until 1956, when a six-month residency spawned two live albums for the legendary Blue Note label – At the Hickory House volumes one and two, recorded on the same night with Peter Ind on bass and Ed Thigpen on drums. However, Hipp’s career didn’t quite end there. She released another album for Blue Note a year later with the saxophonist Zoot Sims, Jutta Hipp and Zoot Sims, and continued playing live until 1960. Then, she vanished.

McPartland’s book on women in jazz never came to be, but she did briefly mention Hipp in her 1987 collection of musical portraits, Marian McPartland’s Jazz World: All in Good Time. That’s more than what can be said for Richard Havers’ 2014 doorstopper on Blue Note, Uncompromising Expressions, which failed to include Hipp at all. She’s been largely written out of American jazz history, becoming a sort of also-ran and a cult figure among record collectors. And yet Hipp was not only an exemplary musician who had a sterling career in Germany before crossing the Atlantic in 1955 – she smashed through barriers, becoming the first white woman and European instrumentalist to be signed by Blue Note, before she’d even arrived in the US. Ahead of her three albums was a 1954 ten-inch, New Faces – New Sounds from Germany, featuring eight tracks by the short-lived Jutta Hipp Quintet.

Hipp was born 100 years ago on 4 February. Her death in 2003, aged 78, was bigger news than might have been expected – the New York Times, London Times and Daily Telegraph all ran obituaries, piecing together the known details of her life with reports on what had happened to her post-1960. After McPartland’s call for information, which presumably went unanswered, Hipp was eventually tracked down by jazz historians. She gave a few interviews in the 1980s and 1990s, confirming the rumour that McPartland heard: she had taken a job in a clothing factory in Queens, New York, never playing music professionally again. Not even Blue Note knew where she was. It took until two years before her death for the label to finally give her the $35,000 she was owed in royalties.

The story of how Blue Note’s general manager Tom Evered succeeded in settling the label’s debt to Hipp was recounted by Aaron Gilbreath in a 2017 essay. The woman Evered met in Queens in 2001 lived in a small apartment with her artworks on the walls, but no piano. She seemed reluctant to talk about the old days. “I wasn’t very good,” she said, despite being acclaimed by critics and her contemporaries, including Charles Mingus. In old age, she cut an entirely different figure to the excitable 31-year-old who had sailed to New York 46 years earlier and spoken to the New Yorker after her first date at the Hickory House in 1956. “I am so excited to be here,” she said then, “and so anxious to succeed.”

Hipp covered some of her personal history in that interview, explaining how the Americans occupied her home city of Leipzig after the war. She was studying art at the time and beginning her career as a pianist in a trio. It was a fun time, she said, after the horrors of the Nazi regime. But then “the Russians moved in”.

What happened next is covered in a lavishly illustrated book that accompanied a 2015 boxset of Hipp’s recordings, The Life and Art of Jutta Hipp. It was written by the saxophonist Ilona Haberkamp, who met and interviewed Hipp in 1986. Hipp was called to join the Communist Party, so she fled to the West, working in a circus band at first, and then heading out on her own. She took whatever gigs she could get before forming a quartet with the saxophonist Hans Koller. Their quartet turned into a quintet when they added a trombone player and quickly became one of the most progressive, hardest-working and noticed jazz outfits in Germany, recording often and collaborating with bebop master Dizzy Gillespie.

Subscribe to The New Statesman today for only £1 per week

“Thinking back how I lived in those days… it’s crazy!” Hipp told Haberkamp. “It was really just to survive!” Despite her growing fame, she was struggling to make ends meet and she endured hardship in her personal life, too. A relationship with an African-American GI resulted in a child, Lionel, born in 1948. He was forced by regulations to live in an orphanage for mixed-race children until Hipp put him up for adoption ahead of moving to the US.

[See also: How I finally learned to love jazz music]

Hipp formed her own quintet in 1953, by which time she’d become known as Europe’s First Lady of Jazz, attracting the attention of the British-born, New York-based impresario and composer Leonard Feather, who brought her to America in November 1955. Her first night in New York seems almost unbelievable. She saw Miles Davis play (“I was disappointed,” she wrote in a letter), met the pianist Erroll Garner – a huge influence on her style – and chatted with Steve Allen, the comedian and composer, who promised Hipp a slot on his late-night TV programme, The Tonight Show.

Allen stayed true to his word, but New York did not turn out to be the dream that Hipp imagined. A musical purist who suffered from stage fright and hated being in the limelight, she resented being marketed by Feather as a rising star with the looks to match. She expected connoisseurs in the jazz clubs, only to find they were often frequented by drunks on a night out, talking over the music. Her set at the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival, playing on a bill that included such titans as Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis and Charles Mingus, was curtailed after three numbers due to bad weather. Even her appearance on The Tonight Show became a nightmare after her handbag was stolen from the backstage area, complete with her papers, passport and many treasured personal items.

Hipp had been in New York for less than a year by the time she recorded her final album, Jutta Hipp and Zoot Sims, at Rudy Van Gelder’s famous studio in Hackensack, New Jersey. Sims was late, throwing Hipp into a such a state of anxiety that she thought she’d be unable to play. She’d begun to feel that she wasn’t cut out for the American music business and the expectations placed on how she, as a woman, should behave to get ahead. She started drinking heavily and playing at smaller clubs in Brooklyn and Queens, where she felt more naturally at home. But she was trying to make a living at a time when rock ’n’ roll had begun to explode and jazz was losing its edge. Gigs were harder to come by and clubs were beginning to close. By the time she dropped out in 1960, she wasn’t just on the breadline, she was facing homelessness. The job she took at the garment factory saved her, she later said, as did getting sober.

It’s often said that Hipp refusing Feather’s advances – both romantic and to record some of his songs – began the process of Hipp being forced out of music, but Haberkamp thinks it’s more complicated than that. Hipp, she wrote, was battling several things at once: “Overrating of her skills, which increases her feeling of inferiority; her stage fright and her consumption of alcohol; the ignorance of the audience and the discrimination of a white female jazz pianist in a black male domain.” She became an adversary of the drummer Art Blakey, who publicly humiliated Hipp by demanding she play – drunk – at one of his shows, and also met the notorious ire of Miles Davis, who yelled, “Get the hell out of my face!” at her when she tried to speak to him in a New York club.

But she did find an ally in Charles Mingus, who she jammed with informally towards the end of her career. The collaboration came to nothing, but Mingus can be heard in a 1968 documentary – eight years after Hipp had quit – saying, “She’s a great piano player.” It leaves a tantalising thought: what if Mingus had taken her under his wing and encouraged her talent? Would there have been many more Hipp recordings?

I emailed Haberkamp to ask for her opinion and she replied: “I think her career would have gone in another direction if Mingus had asked her to join his band. She felt all right if she was accepted by black male jazz musicians. To live a jazz life in New York in the late 1950s was hard if you were a woman. You needed someone to support you, and Jutta was alone.”

[See also: The end of Generation Rock]

Content from our partners
The future of exams
Skills are the key to economic growth
Skills Transition is investing in UK skills and jobs

Topics in this article : ,

This article appears in the 29 Jan 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Class War