Reinhard Kungel’s documentary “Jazzfieber” comes to the cinema – Munich

The thesis with which the film is advertised is steep: “Jazz is hip! Whether in a club or in a dance palace – swinging rhythms are en vogue, also and especially among young people!”, the press text for “Jazzfieber – The Story of German jazz”. Anyone who travels a lot in jazz might doubt that. Starting with the fact that swing (along with its audience) is one of the varieties that are unfortunately dying out. And that one can get the impression that young people who are interested in jazz play it straight away. Jazz is usually much younger on stage than it is down in the hall.

But well, the documentary film by the Munich filmmaker Reinhard Kungel and the producer Andreas Heinrich tells its “story of German jazz” almost exclusively from the musician’s perspective. And from several generations. Right from the start he intertwines what is part of the job for every jazz musician at all times: the journey to the gig. You can see the Max Greger Big Band in the 1950s or 1960s in their own tour bus with the band’s name inscribed in large letters; then the current jazz talent around the Munich singer Alma Naidu and the trumpeter Jakob Bänsch with a van that is probably available through a funding program and says “Vans for Bands”; and finally the jazz professor Tizian Jost, as he sets off in his own vehicle with the young singer Hannah Weiss for his “Enemy Station” project about jazz in the “Third Reich”.

Here, as later, the film gains its strongest moments from the fact that it superimposes these very different generations of musicians, so to speak. Because it wasn’t just in the cutting room that the themes were brought together, Kungel also lets the youngsters in the tour van look at and comment on the older people’s material on the tray. It is touching how the young jazz academics react to Coco Schumann’s tales of Theresienstadt and Auschwitz.

This film’s greatest virtue was born out of necessity. Because Reinhard Kungel started his project back in 2011. He announced it as “Entering Germany: How jazz came to Germany” at the end of 2015, and the cinema release was planned for 2017. But the unfortunately usual problems with financing, production, committees and distributors prevented this. And then Corona came. By the time things could go on, almost all of Kungel’s interviewees and sources of information for the original topic, i.e. the early days of German jazz, had died, from the “swing legends” Max Greger, Hugo Strasser and Paul Kuhn to the “ghetto swinger” Coco Schuhmann, the clarinettist Rolf Kühn or the composer Peter Thomas to the “Mr. Jazz of the GDR” Karlheinz Drechsel. So that it doesn’t get too morbid, Kungel continued shooting with young jazz musicians and extended the theme to the present day. And so his film finally has on September 7th Premiere in selected movie theaters.

The film has seven chapters, from “Where Does Jazz Come From?” and “Jazz in the Third Reich” about “What is jazz?” or “Jazz through the ages” to “Does jazz have a future?”. Each of them cannot be examined exhaustively in 90 minutes, and so it often goes very cursorily over the topics, which are also not clearly defined. Goebbels propaganda volume Charlie and his Orchestra For example, a central phenomenon of jazz in the “Third Reich” there are only a few partly misleading musicians’ voices, not even the name is mentioned. The crucial question “What is jazz?” remains just as vague. Even or precisely when a Klaus Doldinger states that the core is the “freedom of expression that would not be possible with words.” Or when Hugo Strasser thinks jazz is “also a way of life”.

Logically, the film with its many protagonists likes to spill over into the anecdotal. On the other hand, of course, it has a special charm to have German jazz and its history presented only through musicians and their music, without the usual experts and without the filmmaker taking sides with anyone. Because Kungel remains absolutely neutral and abstains from any comment. It’s all the funnier when – archive material is used sparingly but precisely – a top-class television group discusses free jazz in the 1970s and a still very young Siggi Loch states that he can’t do anything with it at all.

The big plus is that you can once again meet the pioneers of German jazz history and their legacy – it’s often the last recordings of them that Kungel made there. And at the very end it is once again the confrontation of the generations that reconciles the final question of whether jazz has a future. While one Max Greger – and not the only one – resignedly answered no (“It’s a shame, but it’s over”), drummer Mareike Wiening countered with the assessment that sums up the current situation: “Jazz is everything these days, includes every kind of music. And music always has a future.”

“Jazzfieber. The Story of German Jazz”, Thursday, Sept. 7th, Studio Isabella, Neureutherstr. 29, www.jazz2germany.de