Inge Brandenburg It's alright with me

Exclusive vinyl LP - back in stock! Reissue of an excellent and very rare vocal jazz album, recorded November 1965 at Studio Grunewald in West-Berlin, with the Quartet of Gunter Hampel (vib/ fl), featuring Bobo Stenson (p), Pierre Courbois (dr) and Victor Kaihatu (b). One and only regular LP of “Europe`s finest female jazz singer”, carefully remastered with original cover design and liner notes, including unique versions of “Summertime”, “Out Of Nowhere”, “It`s Alright With Me” or “Round Midnight”. In memory of Inge. This LP is a fantastic experience and the only original longplay format, that presented the unique vocal stylings of Inge Brandenburg in a pure jazz setting - her legendary and sought after session with the deep jazz grooves of the Gunter Hampel Quartet at Studio Grunewald in Berlin, released as “It`s Alright With Me” in 1965. The original CBS-LP is long deleted and usually changes hands for hundreds of Euros in the circles of the “die hard”-jazz collectors. A musical masterpiece, sadly forgotten and the real legacy from one of the best European jazz vocalists ever. There was no master tape available, so that this 1:1 reissue had to be carefully mastered from the original LP. Born in Leipzig in 1929 and orphaned by the war, the lifetime of Inge Brandenburg is a story of missed opportunities and sad circumstances. She began her career as a professional singer in 1950 with the first engagement at an American GI-club called “Crossroads” in the city of Augsburg. The highly talented girl soon began touring Germany in the early 50s with a vast repertoire of entertainment but also jazz songs, heading for Sweden and performing there for nearly the whole year of 1957 before being finally discovered in front of a bigger audience with her outstanding concert at the Frankfurt Jazz Festival in 1958. Admired by famous German jazz critics Joachim Ernst Berendt or Siegfried Schmidt-Joos and nearly all well known opinion leaders of the international press, she was even voted for “Europe`s best female jazz singer” at the festival of Juan-Le-Pins. Jurg Ramspeck of the “Zuricher Woche” stated: “She has become a wonderful singer, a living dementi against the proverbial stiffness of the Germans”. But sadly, Inge was not in a position to bring this legendary reputation to the international market, having to sing and record for a major record company, that decided to release one flat pop 7inch after the other. Inge Brandenburg seemed to be an international jazz star for moments before she was crushed out by the mills of the German entertainment industry during the 1960s. Her jazz repertoire was refused by the industry and her pop titles sung in German simply drowned within the vast success of rock`n`roll and beat music, reducing and confining her to the poor entertainment image. The only exception is this LP “It`s Alright With Me”, that features the rare jazz talents of Inge surrounded by the hard grooving and out of the ordinary Gunter Hampel Quartet, luckily recorded in their one and only Berlin session. After all an awful fate for the best vocal jazz talent from Germany with an unbelievable voice ranging from the hard to the tender, who started to retire in the late 60s, performing on rare occasion only and living lonely on a low pension before dying in 1999 with a total of seven people attending her funeral. So this release is brought to you in memory of Inge! She was a fantastic artist, traded on the German jazz exchange for more than a decade as the only serious representative of her genre, but condemned to fail with a true “blues biography”.