The two German emigrants Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff with their label Blue Note, Bob Thiele from Brooklyn and Impulse! or in Munich Manfred Eicher and ECM: Again and again there were and are individuals who advance music development with taste, business acumen, good intuition and the right allies, especially in jazz. The Swiss music producer Werner Xaver Uehlinger (born 1935) belongs to this series and has been documenting and promoting musical avant-garde with his exquisite label HatHut Records since 1975.
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Steffen Schleiermacher also sits on the thick avant-garde branch of hat hut.
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It all began on his first trip to America in 1974 when he heard from saxophonist Joe McPhee that he had released his last record on his own. Uehlinger was employed in marketing for a pharmaceutical company and had been infected with the jazz virus via the American radio station AFN since the 1950s.
New Yorker Jazz-Avantgarde
He visited McPhee near New York and had an idea that became more and more manifest: You can and must be active there. He brought out the next four records by the gruff, indulgent saxophonist on his own label. That was the beginning, and it helped him to come into contact with many musicians in the United States and in Europe whom he admired and promoted: Charles Mingus, Steve Lacy, Cecil Taylor there, Misha Mengelberg, Peter Brötzmann, Mike Westbrook here.
