He was a lucky child from the charming top of his head to the dancing soles. But Rolf Kühn also knew the obstacles against which he had wrested his fortune. Born on September 29, 1929 in Cologne and raised as the son of a Jewish mother with his brother Joachim in Leipzig, he felt the racial politics of the Nazis early on.
The father, a circus performer, toured the most well-known variety shows – a job that was actually intended for Rolf as well. But he was drawn to music and the clarinet. In 1942 he was expelled from school as a “half-Jew” and was only able to continue his musical education in secret. An aunt and an uncle were deported to Theresienstadt and murdered in Auschwitz.
How he left the dark days behind and became one of the internationally best-known German jazz musicians of his generation can no longer be imitated, and yet the stylistic breadth that he developed commands admiration: from swing to easy listening to Kühn was not alien to free forms.
In “Brüder Kühn”, a double portrait of Rolf and Joachim Kühn, the great pianist, which Stephan Lamby shot three years ago for the clarinetist’s 90th birthday, we see him again standing in front of New York’s Birdland – and in front of the house in where he once lived with a drunken Billie Holiday. Things that he never forgot, and which still connected him with the anarchic spirit that spread in the early 1960s, even in his middle-class life, which he led as a theater musician and commissioned composer.
Rolf Kühn’s first god was Benny Goodman, in whose band he later also played for two years. For the cool elegance he cultivated in his game, this was no reason not to have other gods besides Goodman. In 1966, when he appeared with Joachim at the Berliner Jazztage, John Coltrane’s sheets of sound had already left their mark.
Things got ecstatic at the 1967 Newport Jazz Festival, which also featured Coltrane’s bassist Jimmy Garrison. Rolf Kühn’s clarinet sometimes achieves a volume and sharpness that, with his brother’s piano behind him, pushes him to the limit of uncompromising free jazz.
The concert in Newport became the prelude to the suite Impressions of New York, which the brothers recorded for the Impulse label that same year – a posthumous tribute to Coltrane, whom they had seen laid in state at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. But Coltrane’s alto saxophone antipode Ornette Coleman with his harmolodics also ranked high in his universe. Over the years, Rolf Kühn, like his famous colleague Jimmy Giuffre, has measured the entire ambitus between melodically purring seduction and complete abstraction.
He stood on the stage almost to his last breath: not as a monument to himself, but as someone who sought to connect with the younger generation to the same extent as they did with him. It could be argued that in his old age he was more himself than ever.
The quartet with drummer Christian Lillinger, guitarist Ronny Graupe and bassist Johannes Fink was the more prickly and rugged ensemble; the one with pianist Frank Chastenier, bassist Lisa Wulff and percussionist Tupac Mantilla is the more flammable formation for songs and melodies. They were on par in the density of improvising togetherness.
Several concerts were scheduled for the coming month – including one with his very different brother Joachim, with whom he shared deep affection and a deep musical understanding. Rolf Kühn’s death last Thursday has now thwarted these plans.
