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| Photo by Peter Gannushkin |
“I don't make music, I am music.“ A typical Gunter Hampel quote about Gunter Hampel. “I don’t compose songs that have been done a thousand times before. I really am like Mozart or Beethoven. My compositions are original, they come about like my children,“ he once said. “When I was in New York in the 1970s, I was the center of things because I was the one who came from Europe and who brought a breath of fresh air.“ Modesty has never been his thing, however, his musical work and the appreciation he has received for it prove him right.
Gunter Hampel was born in Göttingen/Germany on August 31, 1937. In 1953, he already had his first own combo. He studied architecture and became a professional jazz musician in 1958, trying to integrate European influences such as 12-tone music into American jazz. In the 1960s, therefore, he worked with European musicians like John McLaughlin, Alexander von Schlippenbach, Manfred Schoof and Willem Breuker, and then more and more with American soloists, especially Marion Brown, Jeanne Lee and Anthony Braxton. With the album The 8th of July(Birth Records, 1969), which included Braxton, Breuker and Lee as well as Arjen Gorter on bass and Steve McCall on drums, he succeeded in finding a convincing synthesis of European and American free jazz for the first time.
In the early 1970s, Hampel founded the Galaxie Dream Band in New York, which lasted for almost 30 years. In addition to himself, the central players in this formation were his wife, the jazz singer and composer Jeanne Lee, and the clarinetist Perry Robinson. Furthermore, he repeatedly gave solo and duo concerts (especially with Marion Brown and with Jeanne Lee).
But Hampel has also always transcended the limitations of improvised music and turned to completely different projects, such as the alternative music ensemble The Cocoon, which was founded in the environment of the avant-garde band Kastrierte Philosophen. Later came a collaboration with Jazzkantine, a very commercial jazz/hip-hop project that was actually very successful in the mainstream, for their first two albums. His forays into more commercial territory also include writing film music, as well as music for the 1996 play Sid and Nancy by German actor Ben Becker. At the other end of his musical spectrum, he repeatedly devoted himself to new classical music, participating in the performance of compositions by Hans Werner Henze and Krzysztof Penderecki. All in all, Hampel conducted several different large formations, trios, quartets, quintets, sextets and much more. In order to be able to publish all this appropriately, he ran his own label Birth Records.
From 1972 to 1981 he released 16 albums by the Galaxie Dream Band alone. All of them are really good, if I had to pick two I’d go for Celebrations (Birth, 1974) and All the Things You Could Be If Charles Mingus Was Your Daddy (Birth, 1981). A must have is the above-mentioned The 8th of July, as well as my personal favorite Cosmic Dancer (Birth, 1975), again with Robinson and Lee plus Steve McCall on drums. Enfant Terrible (Birth, 1975) - nomen est omen - is another great one, actually a Galaxie Dream Band recording, it was just not released under that moniker. Apart from the free jazz albums, I can wholeheartedly recommend the two Cocoon records, especially While the Recording Engineer Sleeps (first released in 1989, re-released on Staubgold, 2015).
Hampel was a multi-instrumentalist, he played the flute, saxophone and piano, but especially as a vibraphonist and bass clarinetist he had great merits. He created enormous sound fields, did not let anything dictate him musically throughout his life and always tried to penetrate new musical worlds. Now this great free spirit and stubborn man (in a positive sense) has passed away. May he rest in peace.
Watch a performance of the Galaxie Dream band from 1972 (in excellent quality) and you’ll get the magic of the ensemble:
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