The combination of violin and guitar as well as classical playing styles and jazz has been on everyone's lips since the inimitable duo Stephane Grappelli and Django Reinhard. An equally deep musical friendship exists between the Viennese violinist Rudi Berger and the Brazilian guitarist Toninho Horta, whose new album Belo Horizonte received the Latin Grammy Award for "Best Brazilian Album of the Year" in 2020. Their first collaborations started in 1988 in the United States, since then the two extraordinary musicians have played over 500 joint appearances to date. This album by the title "Rudi Berger featuring Toninho Horta" presents a cross-section of these years of musical life together, with recordings from Austria, New York City and Rio de Janeiro, from duo to 9-member formation. The compositions by Berger and Horta always transcend genre boundaries and incorporate influences from bossa nova, jazz, but also classical and folk music.

This CD is devoted to some of the most significant pieces for trumpet and piano, a formation that was born, literally, at the beginning of the last century. No prominent nineteenth–century composer has left us chamber pieces, let alone duo pieces, that involve the solo use of the trumpet; and it might be worth briefly questioning the reasons for the instrument’s nearly total absence from the repertoire. With this Album With this publication we will try to identify the reasons and to dis-cover some of the most evocative passages dedicated to it.

One of Oscar Pettiford’s big fans was Joachim-Ernst Berendt, the jazz editor of the Südwestfunk Baden-Baden, who went straight to work organizing various studio appointments and band members for the American guest, who had decided after an All Star tour of Europe in 1958, to settle in the Old World.

In changing sessions, local talents such as the trumpeter Dusko Goykovich, the clarinetist Rolf Kühn, and the drummer Hartwig Bartz, but also established colleagues such as the saxophonist Hans Koller and the guitarist Attila Zoller, each took his place in the queue. Sometimes American colleagues such as drummer Kenny Clarke or saxophonist Lucky Thompson joined the team and formed exquisite combos that discreetly courted Pettiford. He for his part thanked them on his instrument with eloquent and inspired noblesse.

Thus, over a period of almost two years after 1958, a good dozen recordings were made, consisting mainly of standards, but also of Pettiford hits such as “Blues in the Closet”, all of which document a master of the voluminous, bebop swinging groove bass, who was silenced only by his premature death in Copenhagen on 8 September 8, 1960, as the result of a traffic accident. Oscar Pettiford thus remains a charismatic figure in the background of jazz history, whose art is always worth rediscovering.

Complete Personnel and Recording Details:

Studio Recordings, SWF Baden-Baden: 15.07.1959 (tr.1-2); 14.06.1959 (tr.3-7); 24.02.1959 (tr.8-11); 02.12.1958 (tr.12-14)

Live recordings, SWF-Jazz-Session Stadthalle Karlsruhe: 3.12.1958 (tr.15-16)

Oscar Pettiford (b, cello); Dusko Goykovich (tp) tr. 1; Lucky Thompson (ss) tr. 2; Hans Hammerschmid (p); tr. 2, 13-16; Hartwig Bartz (dr) tr. 2; Rolf Kühn (cl) tr. 3-6; Jimmy Pratt (dr) tr. 3-11; Hans Koller (ts) tr. 4, 7-15; Attila Zoller (g) tr. 8-12, 15, 16; Kenny Clarke (dr) tr. 12-16; Helmut Brandt, Helmut Reinhardt, Johnny Feigl (bs) tr. 13, 14 ; Rudi Flierl (as) tr. 13, 14.