Waitaminute Man: Peter Herbolzheimer 90

HR-Bigband/Frankfurt Radio Big Band - Waitaminute

Like the lonely long distance runner splitting the finish line tape, we've reached the final post for 2025, rejoindering yesterday's about a colleague of today's, born 24 hours earlier.

In the twelve years doing this, it's rare I've come across people with the exact same birthday or born exactly a day apart when it comes to related figures like these. The closest analog to it I can get in my Indica-sized mind in this moment is that Peter Gabriel and Steve Hackett from Genesis were born on consecutive days in 1950.

Surely there are others but I'd have to look it up. And time is short, for we have funky German orchestras to absorb and shake our rumps.

Today's guy, what can I say? I love his music since the day I heard it back whenever it was, the 1990s? I don't recall, must be the Indica blearing... I mean rearing... its head again.

I've covered Peter Herbolzheimer before, but since he and Dauner joined the world on back-to-back days in 1935, and this is a milestone b'day for both, I couldn't not get all Steely Dan and do it again.

His music, if I had to pin it down, is like the James Brown 1968 band -- the one that's in the famous Boston footage from the night MLK was killed -- crossed with Count Basie in a particularly textural, danceable frame of mind.

It boils down to the melodies with almost anything, and he was a master of weaving a melodic motif through a piece in a really yummy, almost sumptuously culinary way.

He was a big dude, whom I'm sure liked to eat, and when I hear his music I feel like I'm sitting at a huge feast, about to fill myself to bursting with the finest in gourmet offering.

There's also something swinging and very noirish about his stuff, like a lot of it would work in a darkly comic, black-n-white gumshoe potboiler about a lovably alcoholic private eye investigating the murder of a heiress's poolboy. Half the tunes, you could swear you heard them in a Starsky and Hutch episode somewhere in 1975, like an Antonio Fargas cameo of the mind.

OK, clearly in that picture he's laughing at my ridiculous, probably chemically-enhanced metaphors, so let's get to the German radio complex and into the show before I qualify for medical studies that determine how much vape pen the brain can take before imploding like a supernova in reverse over here.

HR-Bigband/Frankfurt Radio Big Band 

The Music of Peter Herbolzheimer 70

HR-Sendesaal

Frankfurt, Germany

3.26.2021

01 My Kind of Sunshine

02 That Ol' Bus Smell

03 Waitaminute

04 The Meaning of the Blues

05 Mr. Clean

06 Con Alma

07 Like a Soft Breeze

08 Hi-Jack

09 Don't Speak Now

10 Blues In Latin

 

Total time: 59:07

Heinz-Dieter Sauerborn - saxophones and woodwinds

Günter Bollmann, Richard Hellenthal, Christian Jaksjö & Robert Hedemann - trombones

Frank Wellert, Thomas Vogel, Martin Auer & Martin Auer - trumpets & flugelhorns

Sebastian Scobel - piano

Martin Scales - guitar

Hans Glawischnig - bass

Jean Paul Höchstädter - drums

Alfonso Garrido - percussion

Jörg Achim Keller - conductor 

 

320/48k audio extracted from a Blu Ray YouTube Premium file of a webstream of the event

converted to 16/44 CD Audio, edited and slightly remastered by EN, December 2025

________________________________________________

HR-Bigband/Frankfurt Radio Big Band

The Music of Peter Herbolzheimer 80

HR-Sendesaal

Frankfurt, Germany

6.12.2021

01 Modus 2

02 Sweet Lorraine

03 H&H

04 Groovin' On Dr. John

05 Better Days Ahead

06 Et Altera Pars

07 Filibuster

08 Just Like That

09 La Fiesta

10 Começar de Novo

Total time: 1:02:08

Heinz-Dieter Sauerborn, Oliver Leicht, Tony Lakatos, Steffen Weber & Rainer Heute - saxophones 

Frank Wellert, Thomas Vogel, Martin Auer & Axel Schlosser - trumpets & flugelhorns

Günter Bollmann, Simon Harrer, Christian Jaksjö & Robert Hedemann - trombones 

Martin Sasse - piano

Martin Scales - guitar

Hans Glawischnig - bass

Jean Paul Höchstädter - drums

Erik van Lier - conductor

320/48k audio extracted from a 4K YouTube Premium file of a webstream of the event

converted to 16/44 CD Audio, edited and slightly remastered by EN, December 2025

both concerts' spectral analysis is lossless to 20 kHz, making them equivalent to a preFM source
both shows are in the same folder, 762 MB FLAC/direct link

These sets -- performed in livestreams but minus an audience in the hall -- are almost a perfect representation of PH's universe, so it's pretty much an HR-Bigband Plays Herbolzheimer's Greatest Hits live record in everything but name.

That's it for this year, but we have yet another German funkmaster on tap for tomorrow and 2026, because who doesn't dig a tasty Teutonic Triple Play? I know Peter Herbolzheimer -- born this very day 90 years ago -- is up there with these cats digging that we remember them like Auld Lang Syne with a backbeat and a brass section. Happy New Year, everyone!--J.

12.31.1935 - 3.27.2010

Free Action News: Wolfgang Dauner 90

United Jazz + Rock Ensemble - Gone with the Weed

I almost forgot to put this up, but I remembered at the last moment.

Actually we have two guys born on consecutive days, both from the same part of the world and known for making a similar kind of noise.

I meant to post this one on its anniversary in July, but it totally slipped my mind back then as well.

All good, as soon as I discovered these cats were born 24 hours apart, 90 years ago now.

First we have Wolfgang Dauner, born this day in 1935.

Originally a trumpeter, he switched to keyboards in the 1960s. This proved prescient, and soon he was leading his own Free Jazz ensemble.

Soon, elements of the Rock music then assuming control of the world began to surface in his music.

At the start of the 1970s, he went full Fusion before there really was such a thing, founding a band part free, part funk and part what would come to be called World music.

That group was called Et Cetera -- not to be confused with the Prog band of the same name that came later --  and it became hugely influential from just the couple of albums they made.

He then made a couple of ridiculously banging solo records that hip-hoppers still bite from today, before founding the band we have in the Share folder.

I'm not sure how he got all these superstar people to be in it, but the United Jazz + Rock Ensemble (UJRE for short) contained enough European Jazz-Rock luminaries to fill a firmament.

He passed in 2020 after a long career organizing his particular brand of musical mayhem, but he'd have been 90 today, so in his eternal honor here comes some prime audiofootage of the UJRE in action.

The United Jazz + Rock Ensemble

Festival de Jazz d'Antibes

Juan-les-Pins, France

7.21.1978

01 Gone with the Weed

02 The Love that Cannot Speak its Name

03 Circus Gambet

04 Steps of M.C. Escher

05 Bebop Rock

06 South Indian Line

07 Stumbling Harry's Divorce March

Total time: 1:03:48

Ack van Rooyen - trumpet

Ian Carr - trumpet

Albert Mangelsdorff - trombone

Charlie Mariano - alto & soprano saxophones and nadaswaram

Barbara Thompson - tenor & alto saxophones and flute 

Wolfgang Dauner - piano & synthesizer

Volker Kriegel - guitar

Eberhard Weber - bass 

Jon Hiseman - drums

FM announcer is Andre Francis

Jazzrita's 16/48k digital capture of a recent INA rebroadcast stream

spectral analysis is lossless past 22 kHz, making this equivalent to a preFM source

converted to 16/44 CD Audio, edited, retracked & remastered by EN, July 2025
406 MB FLAC/direct link

We'll be back in two shakes of a lamb's tail -- or 24 hours, whichever happens first -- with the 2nd of these 90th b'day celebrations.

But let's stay in the moment of now, and pay tribute to this seminal composer, piano player and bandleader with this 63 minutes of fire from one of his greatest ensembles!--J.

12.30.1935 - 1.10.2020

Bass the Music: The Feast of St. Anthony

Norman Connors - Slew Foot (1974)

We are gathered here for the last Sunday service of the year, with something to spread some serious cheer, in celebration of a departed dear. If you liked when we did the 72-track Danny Thompson tribute a few months ago, we've got another brahmin of the bass, and another 72 slices of nice that'll satisfy just the same if not better. And in a completely different vibe, as well.

Two months ago, today's instant saint left this rapidly disintegrating realm for higher pastures, but not before completely tearing up the rulebook for his chosen instrument and basically rewriting, rewiring and recalibrating its possibilities forevermore.

He began his impact in 1972 and 1973, when he played on -- you could say, completely recast in his image -- several iconic, smash hit songs, and then went out on tour with a Soul icon at the tender age of 21.

Seeking to reimagine the electric bass on his own terms, his frustration with what he deemed its limited range led him to begin to explore alternatives.

The session work came fast, furious and fulsome. Through the 1970s, he played on a zillion albums while he experimented with having different instruments built for him. Eventually he settled on a six-stringed custom, in of all things contrabass tuning. Which was totally unprecedented at the time for electric basses.

From then on until he passed away in October, he played on literally an unquantifiable number of recording dates across an unbelievable breadth of styles and sounds, the detail and scope of which would require an encyclopedia and not just a blog post to recount.

And Holy Santa Claus on six bicycles did he play. People have long since settled into the cliché that Jaco Pastorius is the greatest electric bass player ever to live -- and this is to take nothing away from him -- but if we wanted to know who holds that title, I'm afraid, to paraphrase Jimi Hendrix, that we just missed our last opportunity to ask Anthony Jackson.

As I was, over the last six weeks of research and audio toil, putting together what I am sharing here today, I couldn't help but be blown away and back by the sheer audacity of what he did, and the balance between face-frying technique and total support of the song that seemed to come as naturally as breathing to him.

If I were a bass teacher, the 6 1/2 hours of music across these six CDs -- 6 strings, 6 hours, 6 discs, how diabolical of me, right? -- would be the syllabus for the first 6 weeks of the course.

In doing this beast of a bass busload of bangers, I tried my best to feature an ample amount of unreissued, hard-to-find tracks -- good luck finding a lossless LP rip of Lou Courtney's 1976 disco funk crusher Buffalo Smoke, on which AJ just loses his mind! Somehow I did before I lost mine -- on which our hero goes crazier than Eddie Antar (look it up), until he's practically giving it all away.

You can see by the tracklist that even in his first dozen or so years -- before those 1980s digital candy keyboards infected music like an artificial, artisanal apricot aioli virus -- he worked with a whole slew of some of the hugest names in music, as well as a bunch of folks who made but one, killer album and then vanished into the ancestral annals of audiology.

Perhaps the hardest part of this was doing the grindwork to ensure that all 72 tracks are indeed him -- not as easy with bass players as say, singers or theriminists, for instance -- when there was ambiguity in Discogs- and Sessiondays-land.

Thankfully, Anthony Jackson -- being as prodigious and prolific a genius as shall ever exist upon his instrument -- had a tone (several, really), a six-alarm blazing technique and a sense of harmony so distinctively unique to himself, that I was able to determine it was he by the scree at the apogee of the tasty finger filigree. Wanna come see? Welcome to the Feast of St. Anthony, guaranteed to put your freaky booty in the sea.

Various Artists

The Feast of St. Anthony

sessions of Anthony Jackson

1972-1985

CD1

01 The O'Jays - For the Love of Money (1973)

02 Al Di Meola - Electric Rendezvous (1982)

03 Garland Jeffreys - Ghost Writer (1977)

04 Chick Corea - Nite Sprite (1976)

05 David Spinozza - High Button Shoes (1978)

06 Paul Simon - Oh, Marion (1980)

07 Barry Miles - The Big A (1977)

08 Stephane Grappelli - Uptown Dance (1978)

09 Maxine Nightingale - Get It Up for Love (1977)

10 Funk Factory - Next Please (1975)

11 Buddy Rich - Billie's Bounce (1974)

12 Chaka Khan - Move Me No Mountain (1980)

CD2

13 Charles Sullivan - Field Holler (1974)

14 David Matthews with Whirlwind - Shoogie Wanna Boogie (1976)

15 Lalo Schifrin - Towering Toccata (1977)

16 Jess Roden - Misty Roses (1977)

17 Carol Townes & Fifth Avenue - Bring Your Body (1976)

18 Grady Tate - Ain't No Love In the Heart of the City (1977)

19 Norman Connors - Slew Foot (1974)

20 Randy Crawford - I'm Easy (1976)

21 Masabumi Kikuchi - La Moca Esta Dormindo (1976)

22 Frank Weber - Complicated Times (1978)

23 Dave Grusin - Montage (1977)

24 Gato Barbieri - Gods and Astronauts (Errare Humanum Est) (1979)

25 Russell Morris - Superman (1976)

CD3

26 Jun Fukamachi - Neutrino (1977)

27 Carlos Garnett - Let This Melody Ring On (1975)

28 Doc Severinsen - Fernando's Fantasy (1977)

29 Lee Ritenour - Captain Fingers (1977)

30 Billy Paul - Am I Black Enough for You? (1972)

31 Catalyst - Catalyst Is Coming (1972)

32 Eric Gale - Ginseng Woman (1977)

33 Quincy Jones - Love, I Never Had It So Good (1978)

34 Sonny Fortune - Turning It Over (1978)

35 Dave Valentin - Patterns for the Sky (1978)

CD4

36 Pee Wee Ellis - Gotcha! (1977)

37 Sadao Watanabe - The Chaser (1977)

38 Phyllis Hyman - The Night Bird Gets the Love (1977)

39 Steve Khan & Eyewitness - Guy Lafleur (1983)

40 Earl Klugh - This Time (1977)

41 José Mangual - Black & Brown Boogie (1977)

42 William Eaton - Struggle Buggy (Characters) (1977)

43 David Sanborn - Heba (1978)

44 Joe Farrell - Disco Dust (1977)

45 Willy Bridges - Taking Care of Business (1977)

46 Donald Fagen - I.G.Y. (1982)

CD5

47 Michal Urbaniak - Chinatown (1975)

48 Tania Maria - Made In New York (1985)

49 Grover Washington, Jr. - A Secret Place (1976)

50 Gene Dunlap - Party In Me (1981)

51 Lonnie Liston Smith - City of Lights (1984)

52 Noel Pointer - Superwoman (Where Were You When I Needed You) (1976)

53 Ullanda McCullough - Time for You and Me (1979)

54 John Scofield - Who's Who (1979)

55 Thijs van Leer - Pastorale (1978)

56 Steely Dan - My Rival (1980)

57 Roberta Flack - Why Don't You Move In with Me? (1977)

58 Warren Bernhardt - Manhattan Update (1980)

CD6

59 Jeremy Steig - Ouanga (1975)

60 Teena Marie - Playboy (1983)

61 Deodato - Amani (1976)

62 Masaru Imada - Tropical Butterfly (1982)

63 William Salter - Lena (1977)

64 Gene Harris - Stranger In Paradise (1977)

65 Terumasa Hino - Hino's Reggae (1979)

66 The Writers - Star Black (1978)

67 Perry Botkin, Jr. - Lady Ice (1977)

68 Harvey Mason - Phantazia (1977)

69 Sergio Mendes & The New Brasil '77 - The Real Thing (1977)

70 Urbie Green - Mertensia (1977)

71 Wlodek Gulgowski - Soundcheck (1976)

72 Lou Courtney - Danger (Watch Your Step) (1976)

Total time: 6:41:18

compendium of sessions featuring the iconic bass player Anthony Jackson, covering his initial dozen years active

selected, assembled and remastered for unity by EN, November/December 2025
2.48 GB FLAC/direct link

It may not be perfect -- I denoised a ton of vinyl for this for the cratedigger-rare cuts -- but it's a stone cold masterclass in The Low End Theory from one of the most qualified instructors ever to supply the bottom to the beats.

I have two more Teutonic taste treats on tap for the last two days of '25, so stay tuned to this channel for instructions on where to take shelter. And all the thanks to Anthony Jackson -- he's why there are basses with more than four measly strings, you know -- for a lifetime of rattling the cabinets of conformity. Happy Feastings!--J.

6.23.1952 - 10.19.2025