Wolfgang Dauner - 1969 - The Oimels

Wolfgang Dauner

1969

The Oimels

01. Oh Baby I Don't Love You Anymore 4:20
02. Take Off Your Clothes To Feel The Setting Sun 4:00
03. My Man's Gone Now 3:30
04. Come On In On In 3:32
05. Dig My Girl 7:32
06. Greensleeves 3:55
07. Uwiii 2:56
08. A Day In A Life 2:57

Bass, Cello, Vocals – Eberhard Weber
Drums, Vocals – Roland Wittich
Guitar – Pierre Cavalli
Guitar, Sitar – Siegfried Schwab
Piano, Organ, Vocals – Wolfgang Dauner

This 1969 record has more in common with the Beatles and sixties psychedelic pop-rock than that period’s jazz. The Oimels also highlights three internationally acclaimed eclectic European musicians: keyboardist Wolfgang Dauner is a German jazz institution; fellow Stuttgarter bassist Eberhard Weber is known for his band Colours with Charlie Mariano, and his work with Jan Garbarek, while guitarist Sigi Schwab’s career spans work with a host of headliners, film, theatre, and TV music, and his own projects. Oh Baby I Don’t Love You Anymore starts out with an old-fashioned honky-tonk blues before electric guitar distortions take the music to the edge. With Schwab’s sitar and the band vocals, Take Off Your Clothes To Feel The Setting Sun shows its Beatles influence. Gershwin’s My Man’s Gone Now is reinterpreted in a Latin-rock feel with lots of affects. Come On In On In starts off with Weber’s electrified cello melding into an Indi-country-rock rhythm guitar riff and a raga-like vocal line before ascending into chaos. Dig My Girl moves to the mysteries of India, with sitar and vocals ala George Harrison. Dauner takes an acidic electric organ solo and the guitar is ablaze with distortion. The Traditional English ballad Greensleeves is given the Latin treatment. Uwii has a funk groove with Dauner scatting along with his solo. Rolling Stone rated A Day In The Life as the Beatles’ greatest song. Dauner and Co. rework it into a minimalistic masterpiece. Dauner in the Sky with Diamonds.

Wolfgang Dauner, one of the few internationally renowned German jazz musicians, was born in Stuttgart on Dec. 30, 1935. Oddly enough, having learnt to play the piano as a child, he eventually graduated from the conservatory in Stuttgart with a major in “trumpet”. Yet, it is the piano that remains his great love. He fancied contemporary jazz and, in 1963, founded his first own band: The Wolfgang Dauner Trio, with Eberhard Weber playing the bass and Fred Braceful on the drums. He would continue playing with these musicians well into the 1970ies. Dauner is extremely important with regard to modern jazz and jazz rock in Germany, and his efforts can be compared to the spade work Miles Davis did for jazz and jazz rock in the USA.

Having participated in various jazz bands in the early 1960ies, Dauner was already a jazz veteran before he founded his own band. His first albums belong to the genre of experimental modern jazz, influenced by Bill Evans, Steve Lacy, Sun Ra etc. The albums he published until 1969 will primarily appeal to “pure” jazz fans.

The acme of psychedelic music in 1968/69 created new possibilities. Dauner and several other excellent young jazz musicians were sick of the jazz of the time turning increasingly cliché, and decided to disregard all existing rules. They did to jazz what Faust was going to do to rock music a couple of years later. A first result was the extraordinary album FÜR, released in the summer of 1969, which can hardly be called jazz, but is much rather an experiment aimed at overcoming limitations. Musical revolution for its own sake. This was also expressed in the cover notes, where the musicians explained what the album was about, e.g. the record had to be played inside out and was going to destroy itself when played.

THE OIMELS, the album the Wolfgang Dauner Quintet presented to their fans in early 1970, was even more radical than the previous productions. Here, Wolfgang Dauner and his band surprised as a psychedelic-jazz-pop-band. To top it all, the album con-tained a version of the Beatles’ title “A Day in The Life” of the Sgt. Pepper’s album, along with several other more or less “weird” songs that remind one of pop or beat with a pinch of jazz and ethnic sounds. Apart from the distorted guitar, sitar sounds and other freak-outs so beloved by fans of psychedelic music, the five musicians really pulled out all the stops in order to demonstrate their idea of what psychedelic pop had to sound like. An extraordinary album in every respect. 1969 and 1970 were a musical Fountain of Youth for Wolfgang Dauner and his alternating band members. They published eight albums on different labels and under various band names (Wolfgang Dauner Quintet, Wolfgang Dauner or Et Cetera). For progressive rock enthusiasts we particularly recommend the albums RISCHKAS’S SOUL (recorded in 1969, published on Brain in 1972), and ET CETERA (1971 on Global). Fans of progressive rock will also love the LP KNIRSCH (with participation of Jon Hise-mann and Larry Coryell) published on BASF/MPS in 1972, and the 1973 live double album also published on BASF/MPS under the band name ET CETERA. Readers of the Sounds magazine voted Dauner musician of the year 1972. In 1971 he had won the “star of the year” award by the Münchner Abendzeitung, and before that, in 1969, he had been appointed head of the radio-jazz-group Stuttgart. It is not an exaggeration to call Dauner one of the most productive and versatile musicians, particularly with regard to the subsequent years. During the 1970ies and 1980ies he was involved in innumerable projects, both his own and as guest musician (between 1970 and 1990 he participated in no less than 49 record productions). Apart from the above mentioned productions he was keyboarder with the “New Violin Summit”, played with the United Jazz and Rock Ensemble, worked with Dieter Süverkrüp and Konstantin Wecker, whose producer and musical director he became in 1986, the Kolbe-Illenberger duo, Charlie Mariano, Albert Mangelsdorff and many others. His discography is so vast it would go beyond the scope of this booklet. In 1977 he co-founded Mood records, and recently, in 2001, was responsible for three record productions. In addition to this he did commissioned compositions for various symphony orchestras, composed the chamber opera “Die verwachsene Froschhaut” for the State Theatre Stuttgart, created the laser show music for Germany’s cultural contribution to the Olympics in Barcelona in 1992, as well as the world championship fanfare and a composition for the awards ceremony of the athletics world championship in Stuttgart in 1993. In 1999 he toured Chicago, New Orleans and the Bahamas with the German Allstars-Old-Friends (K. Doldinger, A. Mangelsdorff, M. Schoof, W. Haffner and E. Weber). In 2004 the tour was continued with concerts in Southern America. A typical feature of Wolfgang Dauner’s musical production is that he doesn’t make a distinction between serious and light music. Although always open for any kind of musical influence, he nonetheless kept his distinctive Wolfgang-Dauner style, which can be easily spotted in the many soundtracks he composed in the course of his creative work. His compositions for TV- and film adorned Courths-Mahler productions, the TV series about defence lawyer Abel and even a production by the animal film maker Horst Stern (Remarks on butterflies), etc.

Wolfgang Dauner, who has received countless awards and distinctions, is still musically productive. In 1997 he received the Medal of Merit of the State of Baden Württemberg, and in 2003 the German Jazz Trophy – A Life For Jazz. In 2005 he was awarded the 1st class Order of Merit of the Federal Republic, and in 2006 the Citizen Medal of Stuttgart. Since 2004 he has been member of the jury of the new jazz centre at the Columbus Circle in New York, the “Jazz at the Lincoln Centre.”

In a personal comment Wolfgang Dauner told us how impressed he had been with the Beatles’ unconventional approach to pop music, which he thought had been rather refreshing. He mentioned, too, that he has always taken an interest in the entire diversity of music development, both contemporary and popular. In his opinion, all genres contained innovative and interesting elements, ranging from the Beatles, Pink Floyd, Zappa or Ligeti to instrumental theatre. Personally, he had never accepted musical boundaries. For an extensive discography, a survey of his compositions for film and TV and a history of his career in tabular form please visit his website www.Jazzpages.com/Dauner. Our special thanks go to Wolfgang Dauner for letting us republish the album THE OIMELS on CD.

Siegfried (Sigi) Schwab, born 5.8.1940 in Ludwigshafen on the Rhine, developed a desire for making music at an early age and started playing bass and guitar. At the age of 16 he took up studies for both instruments at the conservatory in Mannheim. He was interested both in classical music and jazz, and very soon, Laurindo Almeida, the Brazilian guitarist, became his musical role model. To begin with, Schwab played in local bands, worked as a studio musician early on (e.g. with Wolfgang Laudt and Erwin Lehn) and, after moving to Berlin, became a permanent member of the Rias-Berlin Big Band. In 1967 his first solo album was published in the USA and Europe. For the studio specialist Schwab gaining experience in an entirely different music scene had been an interesting experience. Before taking part in THE OIMELS, he had played with the band on the GULDA festival in Ossiach, Kärnten, Austria. At that time the band consisted of Jean Luc Ponty, Sigi Schwab, Wolfgang Dauner, Eberhard Weber and Fred Braceful. They had recorded THE OIMELS on request of their producer, head of MPS-Records Hans Georg Brunner-Schwer, who had asked them to break new grounds in music. Sigi Schwab was also member of ET CETERA, the successor band, so to speak, of the Wolfgang Dauner Quintet. Today Schwab feels that the Oimels was a very important step on the way to ET CETERA, the first jazz-free rock-band in the tradition of 1968 and the most modern and provocative ensemble at that time.

Apart from doing his own projects and participating in various formations (among others Embryo “Father, Son and Holy Ghost“,1972 and „Rocksession“, 1973) as a constant band member Sigi Schwab was involved as a studio musician in countless productions (every-thing from pop song to experimental jazz). Besides he composed music for television, film and the stage. His film music for Vampyros Lesbos- Erbin des Dracula (1971) was successfully re-released on CD in the late 1990ies, subtitled Sexadelic Danceparty, while his piece The Lion & the Cucumber was used by Quentin Tarantino in his film Jacky Brown. The recordings for The Vampire of Dartmoor are still exceedingly popular in fan circles. In 1987 Schwab composed the very successful song “My love is a tango” for the ZDF Christmas TV-series about ballet dancer Anna. 

Currently Sigi Schwab is very busy doing various musical projects. The balancing act between classic scene and modern improvised music has remained his theme of life. Like Dauner, he refuses to make a distinction between serious and light music: “There is only a universal music language, although it has multiple branches and all sorts of axes.” For further information on his various musical projects, CD publications, books etc. please visit his homepage on www.melosmusik.de. We would like to thank Sigi Schwab for his valuable support.

Eberhard Weber, another outstanding and internationally renowned, personality of the jazz-scene was born in Stuttgart on January 22, 1940. He has played, for example, with Gary Burton, the Pat Metheney group and Jan Garbarek. He, too, started making music as a child. At the age of 6 his father taught him to play cello. At school, where he was member of the school orchestra, his music teacher encouraged him to change over to the bass. Although he initially learnt to play the bass the classical way, i.e. with a bow, he eventually practised plucking the instrument since he had developed an increasing interest in jazz. Weber played in several school bands and finally decided to give up the cello altogether in favour of the bass.

In 1960 Weber met Wolfgang Dauner, with whom he recorded numerous albums. Hence it was only logical he would participate in the ground breaking projects The Oimels and, later on, ET CETERA. From 1973 on, however, when Weber’s successful album “The Colours of Chloe” was released, the two of them cut their own paths and only got together for joint projects on rare occasions. In spite of this, their cooperation has never stopped altogether. Weber worked with the guitarist Volker Kriegel and temporarily with the New Dave Pike Set. Following the release of his solo album “The Colours of Chloe” he founded the band Colours with Rainer Brüninghaus and Charlie Mariano. After nearly eight successful years with Colours Weber no longer saw a possibility for continuing the band’s creative musical discourse. He commented that he hated repetitions just for the sake of keeping the band alive. Colours split up in 1981. In 1982 Weber joined Jan Garbarek’s band as a permanent member and worked with the Norwegian saxophone player until the end of the 1990ies. Since 1985 Weber has also been giving solo concerts, where he uses electric sound multipliers to record his play and recreate it in a different speed and modulation.

Weber’s discography is impressive, and he has taken part in all sorts of productions as a guest musician ( e.g. with Kate Bush). For further information including a detailed discography please visit his website on mysite.verizon.net, ( put in Eberhard Weber in the search function.) In 2007 he published the CD Stages Of A Long Journey.

Piere Cavalli, also guitarist with The Oimels, stayed true to music as well and has published further LPs and CDs. Most recently he has played on Django, published by Universal Music France 2002. Roland Wittich, drummer with The Oimles, is working as an architect.In retrospect the most striking feature about the extraordinary production The Oimels is, that the three musicians who participated in it, i.e. Wolfgang Dauner, Siegfried Schwab and Eberhard Weber, have all pursued a musical career that has gained them international renown. 

Manfred Steinheuer, May 2007
Translation: Dr. Martina Häusle