Paul Kuhn & Eugen Cicero - Bernhard Theater Zürich: 05.10.1992 (Live) (2020)

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Paul Kuhn & Eugen Cicero - Bernhard Theater Zürich: 05.10.1992 (Live) (2020)

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Just in time for the 80th anniversary of Eugen Cicero, IN+OUT Records raises a treasure from its archive and releases a concert gem, that was counted for lost. On October 5, 1992, the pioneer of crossover played along with Paul Kuhn, his big band fellow from Berlin, at the Bernhard Theatre located in the basement of the Zurich opera in front of around 300 people. This is also the first posthumous release of Paul Kuhn on IN+OUT Records, the label, which signed responsible for last 25 years of Kuhn’s creative work.

Swinging duets of great musicians on two pianos have not been heard for quite some time. At the end of the 1930s, there was a time when even three pianists, Albert Ammons, Meade Lux Lewis and Pete Johnson, played Boogie-Woogie together on stage at Carnegie Hall in New York. If now the recording of a duo concert of two renowned European pianists 1992 was found, then perhaps this is really a small sensation.

The circumstances of this edition are modestly reminiscent of the recording of Benny Goodman‘s famous Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert in January 1938, hidden on acetate records in the band leader‘s closet until after Goodman‘s departure from his apartment when they were discovered twelve years later and released on Columbia Records. Pianist Eugen Cicero (1940 – 1997) lived in Zurich starting from 1992 and gave concerts at the Bernhard Theater in Zurich for several years in succession, to which he always invited a guest. In 1992 that was Paul Kuhn (1928 – 2013). Eugen Cicero‘s friend Thomas Blaser handed over a recording of the concert with Kuhn on a tape cassette to the record producer Frank Kleinschmidt (IN+OUT Records), who put the tape in a box with other cassettes and forgot it there. Nearly three decades passed before rediscovery. Paul‘s widow Ute Kuhn, who owned a copy of it, reminded him of it. Kleinschmidt: “I rummaged through my archive, found the original cassette and was absolutely thrilled.” Sound expert Frank Schmidt made sure that the miraculous resurrection was successful from a sound engineering point of view.

From 1965 to 1971, Cicero was first a member of the RIAS dance orchestra in Berlin. Then Paul Kuhn, who conducted the SFB Big Band there, brought him to the broadcaster Sender Freies Berlin. Both of them knew each other very well, listened and reacted to each other, but each remained in his own sphere in this concert: Paul Kuhn with a supple, completely “American” phrasing, in which every single tone swings; Eugen Cicero with a harsh attack and the wide-ranging dynamics of a classical concert pianist, more “European” and with a somewhat more robust swing.

In stereo sampling, the different ways Paul plays in the left channel and Eugen in the right channel are immediately discernible to listeners and are also unmistakable in the mono version.

Eugen Cicero revealed his brand essence with many songs on no fewer than 50 long-playing records: “Rokoko Jazz”, “Tchaikovsky”, “Schubert”, “Cicero ́s Chopin” and so on. When Paul Kuhn let him play a solo at the Bernhard Theater, he chose his biggest hit: Chopin‘s “Prelude in E Minor”. “No one can play Chopin good enough,” he explained in one of his early interviews, “but I feel him.” As a bonus track, Frank Kleinschmidt added a flawless solo by Paul Kuhn from „Bess, You Is My Woman Now” from Gershwin‘s “Porgy and Bess”, which had only survived in part.

It must be thanks to a creative spirit that Paul was able to complete it before the tape ended. Eugen‘s subsequent chorus was not preserved. As Irving Berlin once said: “The song has ended, but the melody lingers on.”