All Things Must Passport

Klaus Doldinger's Passport - Dreamware

Happy '26 to my 3 readers, and welcome to the first missive of the young year, the third consecutive in honor of three German Fusion stalwarts!

Today we're renewing our Passports with a necessary tribute to the founder of one of Europe's greatest Jazz-Rock ensembles, who sadly left this mortal coil in October, after a long career straddling the liminal borders between Bebop and the backbeat.

A classically trained player and originally primarily a tenor saxophonist, he began in the 1960s and quickly became a leading light of German Jazz.

It was in 1971, however, that he really began to achieve international acclaim, when he formed Klaus Doldinger's Passport -- usually just called Passport for short -- and began to churn out banger after banger LP with that cooking ensemble.

There are others worthy of the crown -- we spoke of Wolfgang Dauner's Et Cetera a couple of days back, and of course Ian Carr's Nucleus and Barbara Thompson's Paraphernalia are in the conversation -- but Passport might be the winner when we're talking about What's The Best European Fusion Band Ever? type questions.

Maybe the bigger query is why all those groups I just mentioned have their leader's name at the front, is that a weird coincidence or what? I thought that sort of branding was reserved for Don Kirshner's Rock Concert, but what do I know?

I should mention here, apropos of nothing, that the main drummer of 1970s Passport -- a madman named Curt Cress -- is one of the most underrated cats in music history. So blazing he makes Billy Cobham sound like Tiny Tim. He's not on today's share, having already gone solo by 1979, but rest assured he is beastly to the exponential power of devastating.

Meanwhile, back at today's honoree, he's also well-beloved for scoring two very different 1980s films: the dystopic submarine war psychodrama Das Boot and the flighty fantasy flick The Never-Ending Story. Too bad he died, because I was hoping for a sequel that melds those two movies, and he would have had to do the music.

Anyway this show I'm sharing has circulated in various less-than-complete and often crappy-sounding iterations, with most cutting out just as guitar maniac Larry Coryell arrives to sit in for the finale.

I've managed to grab an off-air cassette that contained that last bit, and spliced it onto the preFM main portion of this at the appropriate point to make the complete thing.

Another unusual side note of exactly zero significance: in the early 1980s I was a summer camp counselor at a camp in Roslyn, and every morning on the bus route where we'd pick up the kids, we'd drive right by My Father's Place, as iconic an East Coast concert spot as will ever exist. I think it may have just reopened, actually.

Klaus Doldinger's Passport

My Father's Place

Roslyn NY 

5.26.1979

01 WLIR-FM introduction by Michael Ross

02 Big Bang

03 Bird of Paradise

04 Iguaçu

05 Ataraxia pts. 1 & 2

06 Dreamware

07 Good Earth Smile

08 Gates of Paradise

09 Guna Guna/Blues for Klaus

10 sax interlude/Bahia do Sol

11 Sambukada

12 Schirokko

Total time: 1:27:52

disc break goes after Track 08

Klaus Doldinger - saxophones, clarinet & keyboards

Willy Ketzer - drums

Dieter Petereit - bass

Hendrik Schaper - keyboards

Kevin Mulligan - guitars, keyboards & vocals

Larry Coryell - guitar (Track 12)

WLIR-FM master or 1st gen pre-broadcast reels of indeterminate origin

last 2 1/2 minutes of show pitched and patched from an off-air cassette of indeterminate origin & generation

assembled, edited, repaired & remastered for unity by EN, October 2025
610 MB FLAC/direct link

Mr. Doldinger would've been 90 coming up this May, but I had this ready to go when he passed a few months ago and then other stuff happened. I didn't wanna wait another 5 months, so I paired it up with Dauner and Herbolzheimer, as that seemed an appropriate Teutonic Triple Play of German Jazz-Rock grooviness to close one year and start another.

I'll go figure out January now, but thanks to all six of you for reading, and do enjoy this retro-voyage to The Village of Old Roslyn 47 years ago, offered in homage to the late, great Klaus Doldinger! This Passport is stamped Funky.--J.

5.12.1936 - 10.16.2025