REMEDY’s “Hipp Hipp Hooray” honors the 100th birthday of pianist and composer Jutta Hipp, born February 4th, 1925, in Leipzig, Weimar Republic. Consisting of nine compositions loosely related to Hipp’s life story and output, the goal wasn’t to emulate the sound of her day but to get to the essence of Jutta Hipp’s spirit and tell her story through our artistic lens.
A multi-level pioneer, Hipp was known as “Europe’s First Lady of Jazz,” the first woman ever to record as a leader for Blue Note Records, and at the age of 30, the first German jazz musician of note to emigrate to the United States permanently. However, until a renaissance in recent years, Hipp’s oeuvre had largely been forgotten following her retirement from playing in the early 1960s.
Like most people of her generation, Jutta Hipp’s coming of age during the Nazi terror regime, culminating in the horrors of World War II and the hardships and trauma of its immediate aftermath, defined who she was.
From Hipp’s point of view (and that of many youngsters in 1950s postwar West Germany), the music she loved and America were cut from the same cloth – both synonymous with freedom, democracy, and promise.
Her generation’s craving for a new start led to a glorification of all things USA, which clashed with the social and cultural realities that Jutta Hipp encountered after moving overseas. Still, she made New York City her new “Heimat,” never set foot on German soil again, lived for nearly
another half a century, and passed at her home in Queens, New York, on April 7, 2003.
REMEDY set out to salute a trailblazer. Jutta Hipp’s biography is an important cornerstone in the evolution of jazz as a global phenomenon; her music is well worth revisiting, reminding our generation of composers/instrumentalists of the unbroken lineage of masters, heralded and unheralded, who came before us.
