Music Is the Healing Force of the Universe: Obituary for Hans Falb (1954–2025)

Hans Falb. Photo by Elvira Faltermeier.

By Philipp Schmickl
(translated by Friederike Kulcsar, read German original)

Hans Falb, who passed away on 26 December 2025, was an extremely generous person, and he strove all his life to realise his vision of a better world. Using his café restaurant, the Jazzgalerie Nickelsdorf, as his platform, he achieved this goal through music and friendship (and, of course, with the help of good food and wine). Hans, better known as Hauna, was a complex character and sometimes not so easy to get along with – whatever you did together could take unexpected twists and turns, for the most part compassionate turns; and he knew how to put things off until the timing was surprisingly good. Over the years and decades, the many club concerts and festivals Hans organised with his friends in this manner not only created and influenced numerous networks of friendships that stretched across national and geographical boundaries, but also enabled listeners to forge a close bond with music, an improvised music that mainly but not only refers to jazz; encouraging attentiveness in a laid-back environment, nurturing a form of concentration that sets in when a concert begins: a collective listening that unites musicians and audience.

First, a few numbers: the Jazzgalerie – by which I now mean Hans and his friends – organised 48 three- to four-day festivals virtually without pay: the Nickelsdorfer Avant-Jazztage in 1978, the Konfrontationen from 1980 to 2025, Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy/Homage to Sun Ra in 2012, and The New Gardens of Harlem/Homage to Joe McPhee in 2015. About 500 club concerts took place between 1976 and 2007, with occasional gigs in the following years. From the late 1970s to the 2000s, the music programme was curated by Hans in collaboration with Reinhard Stöger (aka Grölli). Then he took over, though he would accept the suggestions of his friends, sometimes wholeheartedly, sometimes reluctantly.

Soon after the two-day opening celebration of the Jazzgalerie Nickelsdorf with still rather mainstream music in November 1976, the Jazzgalerie turned more and more towards the European and Afro-American jazz avant-garde and within a short period emerged as one of the major clubs on the continent, perhaps even beyond, for what was referred to at the time as “progressive” music – all funded for the most part by revenues from the Café Restaurant Falb. [1]

In an interview I conducted with Hans in 2013 he said, “After the 1984 festival I felt a bit exhausted and thought I’ve done a lot already, that someday I would change my life too …” Inspired by Clifford Thornton, Julius Hemphill’s album Dogon A.D. and Chris Marker’s film Sans Soleil , he travelled via Lyon to Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, at the end of 1984 and explored Western Africa for three or four months. His stories about these journeys kept returning again and again, about crossing borders, sometimes legally, sometimes clandestinely, sometimes punished with a day in prison, before being brought back to the same place he had started out. He also loved telling how once the village children stole his toothpaste to paint their faces white. Or when in the Rwenzori Mountains, if you saw people sleeping by the roadside with their heads pointing downhill instead of their feet (which was usual) it was a dead giveaway that you were in a schnapps-distilling region. Getting back to the quote from above about him wanting to change his life­­, Hans said, “… but I didn’t succeed”, a conclusion he came to soon after he returned home in the spring of 1985. “And the musicians are glad I didn’t.”

In the 40 years between this extended African trip and his journey to the hereafter, Hans Falb with the Jazzgalerie created a space that was permeated with music and a great love for the arts; a space that was inspired by the spirit of friendship and characterised by a cosmopolitan open-mindedness. I remember that in the Jazzgalerie music magazines such as Wire, Spex, Skug, Jazzlive,Jazz Podium, freiStil or Neue Zeitschrift für Musik lay side by side with various daily newspapers and the Falter, the Swiss WOZ, konkret, Le Monde Diplomatique, and Lettre International; there was a large atlas, which was consulted regularly, and books about whisky, wine, and hiking trails. With its club concerts and festivals the Jazzgalerie also brought “the world to our home”, as Grölli put it. This home in the Austrian periphery, the Jazzgalerie, which Hans shared with his many friends[2], was as unlikely a place as Fitzcarraldo’s dream of an opera house in the Peruvian rain forest. Perhaps this music world, “the world” Reinhard speaks of, was so enthusiastic about the Jazzgalerie, because it was run by a man who did a lot of things – here again Fitzcarraldo – “like a cow jumping over the church roof”. At the end of the film Fitz sells the colonial landowner the ship that he hauled in vain over the mountains on the isthmus and slips his captain the bundle of money he received demanding that he bring him not only a tailcoat, a red velvet chair, and “the best cigar in the world” but also the very opera orchestra that had made a guest appearance in Manaus to play on his ship. Applauded from the shore, the music drifts over the water, while Fitzcarraldo in tails stands proudly on the ship, smoking next to the orchestra ­­­­‑ like Hans, who very often was onstagelistening to “his” concerts, smoking, but never in tails.

The Konfrontationen with its combinations of tone colours and shades of language was an outstanding festival. [3] Inspired by Hans’s ideas of a better world, the Jazzgalerie and the music played and improvised there opened and shaped a space of expanded possibilities and anarchic structures directed against the dominant hierarchies. Hans conceived the festivals so that everyone felt at ease, as he put it, while they “got something complex poured into their hearts” (from the same interview). Over time the festival took on a life of its own. What we call diversity today was understood as unityfrom the very beginning: unity of arts, unity of place, and unity of people. Anti- and postcolonial thought embraced the sound of modernism ; minimalist textures from the Vienna-Berlin axis were rung in and out by church bells; and my personal highlight on festival afternoons: the sound of the schnitzel mallet and the piano tuner amid the mixture of languages. In the Jazzgalerie and at the festivals, sensibility and intellect have always inspired one another just as music inspires friendship and vice versa. In conjunction with playing and listening, eating and drinking, dancing and kissing. 

Hamid Drake and Hans Falb. Photo by Elvira Faltermeier

Usually open deep into the night, the Jazzgalerie was not only a door to the world and to different music communities, but has also always been a place of safety for friends and strangers, for the newly arrived, for us young people or those who felt a bit misunderstood by their folks. If you didn’t want to go home, you could sit with Hauna at the bar, listen to music and then sleep over in the club. Those in need of money could work, eat and drink there. It was a safe space for marginalised people in particular, which became even more apparent in 2015 when 300,000 refugees crossed the border at Nickelsdorf, and for some of the few who stayed in the village the Jazzgalerie became the place where they weren’t treated paternalistically but could work as equal human beings in the kitchen or serving guests. One of them, Ali, said on the day before Hans’s funeral, “Hauna had a warm heart.” I think that in his café restaurant in the European periphery he practised the hospitality I knew from the stories of his journeys in Western and later Central Africa.

Such places have but a small chance of economic survival, as the insolvencies and eventually the loss of the restaurant demonstrated. The first big insolvency in 2007/2008 also affected the festival. However, the end of the Konfrontationen was prevented by the dense, transcontinental network of music and friendship, and the association Impro 2000 was re-organised. This resulted in the organisational separation of restaurant and musical activities. Due to the first corona lockdowns in March 2020, and Hans reaching retirement age, the Jazzgalerie restaurant was closed but remained his living room where he met his friends and where he ate and drank. It remained his office where he made his phone calls, wrote an e-mail every now and then, and where he could listen and re-listen to the records and CDs that people sent to him. It was the place where he had put together the music programmes with his friends since 1976 and later single-handedly. In June 2025 he had to vacate his living room, as there were new tenants and plans for the restaurant. Being already very weak, he moved into the two rooms adjoining the restaurant, which up to then had served him as bedroom and archive (the festival office). He refused to move out completely. He also refused any medical aid. Despite the adverse circumstances – he believed you have to adapt to such changes, but not without complaining about the music in the yard – he always talked about his difficulties as if they were adventure stories. Hans never saw himself as a victim of the economic and socio-political changes, but always as an adventurer. No matter how much his situation deteriorated, he recognised and lived the poetry of his life. In Lyon, on November 28, 1984, just before his flight to Ouagadougou, looking at the reflections of the advertisements in the Rhône or Saône, he wrote in his travel diary: “CARDENAL comes to my mind, and if I had to bear witness to my time, I would say: it was barbaric and primitive, but poetic.”

As in Grimms’ fairy tale Hans in Luck, Hans Falb had got a lump of gold in 1976: the restaurant offered wealth and promising perspectives. But step by step he traded away this wealth with its perspectives; unlike in the fairy tale, the wealth Hans traded away turned into friendship and music – a music that in turn can never be recaptured. Hans liked to quote Eric Dolphy, who is reported to have said, “When you hear music, after it’s over, it’s gone in the air.” Hans Falb in Luck successfully traded away all material wealth. At the end of the fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm it says, “With a light heart and free from every burden he kept going until he was at home with his mother.”

Photo by Elvira Faltermeier

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[1] Fatty George (clarinet), Al Fats Edwards (vocals), Rudi Wilfer (piano) and Karl Prosenik (drums) played the opening concert. Initially, in the years following, performers included Abdulla Ibrahim/Dollar Brand, Alexander von Schlippenbach, Sven-Åke Johansson, Clifford Thornton, Amina Claudine Myers, the World Saxophone Quartet, larger and smaller ensembles of Roscoe Mitchell, Joseph Jarmen, Muhal Richard Abrams, Anthony Braxton and Don Moye, Peter Brötzmann, Frank Wright, Michele Rosewoman, Maria Böhmberger, Akira Sakata, Sun Ra with an eleven-piece Arkestra, Andrew Cyrille’s Maono, Max Roach, Dieter Kaufmann, Dieter Glawischnig/Neighbours, Peter Kowald, and H. C. Artmann. As Hans Falb wrote in a letter to Roscoe Mitchell (found in the Jazzgalerie archive), a four-day portrait of the AACM composers Roscoe Mitchell, Anthony Braxton, Muhal Richard Abramas, and Leo Smith was planned for the Konfrontationen 1984. But in the end, only Mitchell and Braxton came.

[2] These friends also included many Austrian musicians, for whom the Jazzgalerie provided impetus and let them think bigger and determine their own musics and careers, for instance Christian Fennesz and Franz Hautzinger, who both come from the Nickelsdorf region, Susanna Gartmayer, Christof Kurzmann, Didi Kern, and many more.

[3] For an attempt at describing the Konfrontationen see the text On Ghosts and Colours : https://thefuckle.wordpress.com/2019/07/12/uber-geister-und-farben-vierzig-jahre-konfrontationen/ 

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Philipp Schmickl is a scholar working in the fields of improvisation and festival studies. He received his PhD from the Institute for Jazz and Popular Music Studies at the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz with a dissertation on the Konfrontationen festival organized by the Jazzgalerie Nickelsdorf, Austria. He is founder and editor of the oral music histories book series THEORAL (currently dormant).