Bass on Top

Bass on Top

a column by
Andrey Henkin

Buschi Niebergall: “the most underrated bassist in Europe at the moment”

When Hans-Helmut “Buschi” Niebergall died in Frankfurt (different sources have 1990 or 1992), the German bassist was not far from his birthplace of Marburg or Cologne, the city where he established himself as one of the first wave of European avant garde jazz musicians. In a 1975 review of a Niebergall performance in the Frankfurter Rundschau, jazz critic Wilhelm Liefland commented:

“Buschi Johannes Niebergall is one of the leading double bassists of the European jazz avant-garde. He had an idea, a conception of the instrument ‘jazz bass,’ namely that such an instrument, traditionally condemned as a supplier of harmony basis and swing motor skills and drive at the base of a group, already contains so much instrumental energy itself that it only needs to be decoded. Niebergall did this in true treatises, ‘essays,’ noise orgies, tone poems, sound frescoes that are very similar to the ‘sheets of sound’ diagnosed at the time in Coltrane, the sound surfaces with indistinguishable interval sequences. This craftsman of the avant-garde always remained understandable.”

Yet, at the end, only in his early fifties, Niebergall was living a life apart from the musical innovations he helped create. He still performed on occasion: solo concerts, duo performances with Frankfurt-based Turkish drummer Bülent Ateş or accompanying recitation (a 1978 example of such can be heard on the 1995 ECM compilation Atmospheric Conditions Permitting with Liefland and American expatriate pianist Bob Degen). And he used his skilled hands to engage in another creative endeavor: running a pottery shop.

It was a quiet end to a thunderous career, one which saw Niebergall as a key participant in a number of seminal ensembles and playing with most of the continent’s important improvisers. He had already distanced himself by the early ‘80s, not appearing on that period’s recordings by pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach’s Globe Unity Orchestra, of which he was a founding member (neither did his fellow founding bassist Peter Kowald, then based in New York). His last official recordings were in the bands of bass clarinetist Michel Pilz (another Globe Unity Orchestra alumnus) and trumpeter/composer Michael Sell, both in 1983. The latter, in response to an email inquiry, wrote the following:

“One of my last works with Buschi was Jugoslawische Quartette. You can listen to his fantastic bass playing in my compositions ... let the music speak for itself.”

Niebergall was born in 1938, began on guitar and later played trombone (and supposedly tenor saxophone and piano) and heard jazz as part of the Voice of America radio broadcasts and on albums he purchased as a teenager. It was as a trombonist that he first worked with the two-years-older trumpeter Manfred Schoof in various amateur jazz bands. His early movements are difficult to track; after taking up the bass at 18, it seems, after giving up his medical studies, he moved to Cologne around 1959 – where Kurt Edelhagen taught at that city’s Musikhochschule and where his recently established WDR Big Band was based – matriculating alongside Schoof, Schlippenbach and drummer Jaki Liebezeit and playing gigs around Germany with same under the moniker The Jazz Cookers. Some sources have Niebergall briefly relocating to Munich to work with pianist Joe Haider and then Barcelona to join the band of Spanish pianist Tete Montoliu but no documentation of either collaboration exists.

Niebergall on record begins on January 30th, 1965 with vibraphonist/flutist Gunter Hampel’s SABA album Heartplants. Its liner notes state that Niebergall joined Hampel’s band two years earlier. The album also includes Schoof, Schlippenbach and the Dutch drummer Pierre Courbois; Hampel had met the Germans at the Cologne Musikhochschule. The session includes one Niebergall composition, “No Arrows.” In the notes, he describes the piece:

“The basic idea underlying the piece is that of the arc, or bow; hence the title. At first the bass and the drums confront one another, thus providing the element of tension, the ‘tendon’ as it were ... the pianist is the main soloist in this number. His task is to trace the bow which has been strung by the tendon. He must keep the whole piece taut, both the curve of the bow and the tension of the tendon.”

The band had participated the day before in the Südwestrundfunk Jazz Session 1965 radio broadcast and would perform at least through August 7th, 1966 in Belgium.

In the June 1965 issue of Jazz Podium, the band took part in blindfold tests and we have the rare opportunity to hear Niebergall is his own words, commenting on “Victory and Sorrow” from the 1961 Bethlehem LP Booker Little And Friend:

“The absolute king of this recording is Booker Little. Certainly he will have written the piece too, because other pieces by him sound quite similar. Except for the trumpet chorus are all other solos uninteresting ... I didn't like that bassist [Reggie Workman], who is not right with the drummer or the soloists.”

While Heartplants is certainly highly significant in the nascent European avant garde jazz scene (along with fellow 1965 recordings Astigmatic by Poland’s Krzysztof Komeda and Free Jazz by France’s François Tusques), its greater importance was in the group that grew out of it: the Manfred Schoof Quintet with Schlippenbach, Niebergall, Liebezeit and the one-time Edelhagen big band saxophonist Gerd Dudek. Even moreso than the Hampel quintet, Schoof’s band really demonstrated one of the first truly European responses to period music coming from the US. The day after the group appeared as part of the “free” portion of the 1966 German Jazz Festival in Frankfurt, it waxed its debut Voices for German CBS and recordings from later in the year and 1967 were released on FMP in 1978 as The Early Quintet.

Prior to recording Voices, the group was featured once more in the March 1966 issue of Jazz Podium, this time about their own approach. As part of the wide-ranging discussion, Niebergall goes into specifics:

“In order to make music swing, it is important to get the pitches in the right proportions. Experience has shown that the beat played through, in which the quarter notes are all precisely accentuated in the 4th bar, is a good measure. But it has also been shown that you don't necessarily have to stick to the quarter notes, but that it depends on when which note is played when it comes to swinging rhythm. In this case, it doesn't matter whether the quarter note is played in the so-called beat or whether you stick to another metric, whether you go slower or faster. It all depends on the composition of the notes, on their distance from each other, which you have to know exactly. Of course, a melody instrument can swing without a rhythm group being involved. Solo pieces like ‘Picasso’ by Coleman Hawkins are clear proof of this. In this respect, it is not unusual for the rhythm section to break away from its previous function and become more integrated into the melodic progression, in which the bass or drums, for example, provide choruses. So it is not the case that the rhythm section creates the swing and transfers it to the melody instruments, but rather the entire ensemble brings the swing with it.”

The band was quite active, performing in Prague, Stuttgart, Baden Baden, Antibes, Lugano, Cologne, Warsaw and presumably other cities, with excerpts of the Prague and Warsaw shows released as part of festival compilations by Supraphon and Polskie Nagrania Muza, respectively.

[note: as part of the research into this article, English saxophonist Evan Parker confirmed that 1967 gigs in Poland had himself and Netherlands’ Han Bennink in place of Dudek and Liebezeit and recounted this:

“We were paid in zlotys. As with all the Eastern Bloc countries their currencies were non-convertible. We were each given an advance. Buschi went to the market in Warsaw (I think) and found a sheepskin coat, but to buy it he needed to borrow most of the advances from the rest of the band. It created financial chaos for the rest of the time there.”]

It was also during this period that the group collaborated with noted composer Bernd Alois Zimmermann, recording a part of his radio play “Die Befristeten” and opera “Die Soldaten” for Wergo. Zimmerman wrote about the process:

“I concerned myself with the question of how, on the one hand to retain the improvisatory character of the jazz musicians and the style of every performer ... without, on the other hand, losing the original concept of the composition. This question became even more important since the players were not provided with the usual kind of opportunity to improvise, as on motives, themes, and all-time favorites ... presenting the jazz musician with more or less concrete compositional facts, such as formal structure, time proportions, tone levels, sound colors (registers, densities, approach), as well as realizing the playing instructions around these facts in such a manner that clearly defined fixed compositional instructions, and yet allowing free improvisation, within a given framework, the interweaving and exchanging of the two.”

With the group’s status as one of Germany’s most important modern jazz ensembles, the members, along with Hampel and pianist Wolfgang Dauner, were interviewed for an article, “Conversation about the New Thing,” discussions of then-recent ESP-Disk LPs, in the July 1965 issue of Jazz Podium. Niebergall is, once again, highly opinionated.

Giuseppi Logan Quartet: “The music of this group sounds extremely chaotic and also monotonous. I was actually really interested only in the piano solo. What is also played is low in ideas. And I think no piece swings.”

Albert Ayler Trio: “With all the action that is involved it is somehow motionless to me.”

The Schoof band would continue through 1968, though personnel was fluid apart from the leader, Schlippenbach and Niebergall, sometimes with Pilz instead of or with Dudek and drummers Mani Neumeier or Sweden’s Sven-Åke Johansson instead of or with Liebezeit. It was Schoof, Dudek, Schlippenbach, Niebergall, Johansson and Liebezeit who recorded an album in December 1967 for Wergo released as Manfred Schoof Sextett.

As with the birth of the Schoof Quintet from the Hampel band, the former would itself help seed an even greater and much-longer lasting aggregation: Schlippenbach’s aforementioned Globe Unity Orchestra. The band was a fusing of Schoof’s group, the Wuppertal-based trio of saxophonist Peter Brötzmann, Kowald and Neumeier and the “Blasergruppe” (brass ensemble) of Hampel, Belgian trumpeter Claude Deron, Dutch saxophonist Willem Breuker, trombonist Horst Gmeinwieser and tuba player Willi Lietzmann. The band debuted on November 1st, 1966 at third Berlin Jazz Days, a recording of the piece “Globe Unity” released in 2014 by the festival to commemorate its 50th anniversary.

Globe Unity Orchestra was intermittently active through the next two decades and Niebergall was one of its bedrock members, appearing on the December 1966 SABA debut Globe Unity, recordings from 1967 and 1970 released by Atavistic in 2001 (the latter adding Netherlands’ Arjen Gorter to the bass corps of Niebergall and Kowald), FMP, Po Torch and JAPO albums through the end of the ‘70s and concerts throughout the years in Europe and elsewhere (including possibly in Tokyo in 1980).

Parker and Niebergall both worked in Globe Unity Orchestra and it may be from one of those encounters that Parker recalled this wonderful story:

“Buschi was a wise man and although he liked me and my playing there were aspects that he felt needed more attention. He called me over to where he stood with his bass and said, "Listen." He then plucked one long sustained note on the open E string. "Do you hear the speed of that?" I think he then used the German expression Geshwindigkeit ist kein Hexerei (speed is not magic). One of the pieces on my [1991] solo record Process and Reality for FMP is dedicated to Buschi and is called G.I.K.H.”

If there is only one thing that a free jazz aficionado will definitely know Niebergall for, it is his work with Brötzmann at the end of the ‘60s into 1970: the period albums Machine Gun (FMP) and Nipples (Calig) and performances from the Frankfurt Jazz Festival on March 24th, 1968 and March 22nd, 1970, the former adding Dudek to the Machine Gun octet and the latter (excerpted on the Scout bootleg Born Free: The 12. German Jazz Festival) having Niebergall on trombone in a group with Parker, Breuker, Bennink, trombonists Malcolm Griffiths, Paul Rutherford (both English) and Willem Van Manen (Dutch), Belgian pianist Fred Van Hove and English guitarist Derek Bailey, both released officially on the Fuck De Boere (Dedicated To Johnny Dyani) CD in 2001 by Atavistic.

Upon the occasion of an exhibition of his work in 2001, the noted photographer Gérard Rouy interviewed Brötzmann, who said:

“Buschi Niebergall was a very extraordinary guy. He was a bit older than I was and he had more experience traveling around, working with a lot of guys, a lot of famous guys even. He had a very philosophical background in a way so he could tell me a lot of things I didn’t know. We were hanging nights and nights in my place, at the kitchen table or in some bars, really all night long. Besides working with him, this was an important point for me, talking sometimes very intensively, because when Buschi started talking about life and the world and philosophy and whatever, it was hard to stop him. We had to buy so much beer that he finally fell asleep, but that happened very seldom in the early years.”

[note: there has been some mention in various sources that Niebergall suffered from alcoholism and that this contributed to his eventual disassociation from the scene and early demise. This possible fact is included for context not condemnation and this author has chosen not to pursue the truth out of respect to an artist not able to defend himself.]

The end of the ‘60s into the first couple of years of the ‘70s saw Niebergall also working with Swiss pianist Irène Schweizer, the brothers Kühn (pianist Joachim and clarinetist Rolf), various one-off small-group improvisational settings including musicians like American vocalist Jeanne Lee and trumpeter Don Cherry and trombonist Albert Mangelsdorff, and continuing to work with Schoof and Schlippenbach, significantly the former’s European Echoes (FMP, 1969) and the latter’s The Living Music (Quasar, later reissued by FMP, 1969).

This time also included two collaborations with expatriate Americans, one intimate and the other far larger. In 1968 Niebergall performed live in Munich in a band co-led by alto saxophonist Marion Brown and Hampel with two other Americans in trumpeter Ambrose Jackson and drummer Steve McCall, released as Gesprächsfetzen (Calig). Three years later at the Donaueschingen Music Festival on October 17th, 1971, Niebergall was part of Cherry’s New Eternal Rhythm Orchestra, performing the traditional piece “Sita Rama Encores” adapted by Cherry and “Actions For Free Jazz Orchestra” by composer Krzysztof Penderecki and conducted by him, released as Actions by Philips.

Dieter Hahne, who worked for FMP in the ‘70s-‘80s recalled:

“In 1971 I was a member and club employee at the jazz club in my hometown of Villingen in the Black Forest. Before the Donaueschinger Musiktage, the most important festival for contemporary music in Germany, which took place in October 1971, the German "Jazz Pope" Joachim Ernst Berendt asked the jazz club whether anyone would like to and have time in Donaueschingen to work as a stagehand at the festival. I had the time and desire to do this job! And so I was there at the rehearsals and concert of the “New Eternal Rhythm Orchestra.” That's where I heard and met Buschi Niebergall for the first time. At that time Buschi was a blank slate for me. I was a bass player in a rock band at the time and was completely amazed and stunned by Buschi's playing style.

In 1975 I moved to Berlin to work for FMP/Free Music Production. Between 1975 and 1980, Buschi repeatedly attended FMP concerts and festivals in Berlin. Unfortunately, from around 1980 he withdrew more and more from the concert sector. Buschi was very close friends with the translator Wulf Teichmann. At that time, the office and warehouse of FMP was at Behaimstrasse 4 in the Charlottenburg district of Berlin. Wulf Teichmann lived on the third floor of this house and was also friends with Alexander von Schlippenbach, Rüdiger Carl and many other musicians from the FMP circle. I also became friends with Wulf. Whenever Buschi Niebergall was in Berlin, I often went to Berlin bars with him and Wulf. Buschi always proved to be a thoughtful, reserved person and very, very lovable and friendly. I always felt very comfortable at these meetings.”

The ‘70s were Niebergall’s most fecund decade. Besides the aforementioned collaborations was a reunion with Hampel in Frankfurt in 1972 where the vibraphonist’s band played with English ensemble AMM; occasional work with the Radio Jazz Group Stuttgart, Schweizer and guitarist Hans Reichel; and, especially intriguing, a 1974 concert from the Moers Festival: Bassworkshop – In Memoriam Peter Trunk (the bassist had been killed by a taxi on New Year’s Eve 1973 while visiting New York) with Kowald, Ali Haurand and South African expatriate Harry Miller; the latter comes from the festival’s historical archive and a photo by Heinz Bunse (is there a recording? Let’s hope so).

More notably, in 1972 Niebergall was tapped by Mangelsdorff to be part of his new quintet with old friend Dudek, saxophonist Heinz Sauer and Swiss drummer Peter Giger. Mangelsdorff and Niebergall had worked together as early as 1967 with Globe Unity Orchestra and would encounter each other over the years. While the band made only one official recording, Birds of Underground (MPS), Niebergall would continue to perform live with Mangelsdorff through 1975. That year also included two major Niebergall milestones: being part of both the group of Danish saxophonist John Tchicai and Schweizer with South African expatriate drummer Makaya Ntshoko at the Willisau Jazz Festival (released at the time by the festival as Willi the Pig) and the collective quintet NICRA with Ntshoko, English and Austrian trombonists Nick Evans and Radu Malfatti and English pianist Keith Tippett, which made an eponymous album for Ogun and appeared at the 1976 edition of Willisau. In the album’s hilarious liner notes by Rutherford, he writes:

“Buschi is the most underrated bassist in Europe at the moment, although maybe his fiery, aggressive temperament doesn’t help when it comes to dealing with the sensitive, reflective souls who dispense the gigs to us bloated, ungrateful ‘musos.’”

[note: sadly, during the writing of this piece it was announced that Ntshoko had passed away at age 84 on August 27th.]

By 1976, Niebergall had finally stepped to the front of the stage. He led a trio with saxophonist Alfred Harth and drummer Uwe Schmitt documented by period photographs. And he co-led his only two albums. In 1977 there was the FMP album Open with Dudek and Finnish drummer Edward Vesala, Niebergall writing three of the six pieces. On the occasion of Open being reissued by Atavistic in 2004, critic Stuart Kremsky wrote in the International Association of Jazz Record Collectors Journal that, “the phenomenally inventive Niebergall nearly steals the show.”

The following year saw the Trion LP Celeste with Schmitt and Pilz replacing Harth, Niebergall again contributing three compositions (Pilz would revisit Niebergall’s title track on his 2007 Konnex CD Day On Earth). The latter band would also appear at the 1978 Moers festival. In a 1979 review of a one of the group’s performance in the Frankfurter Rundschau, Liefland wrote:

“All three of them seem to come from different parts of the world in their never identical musical cosmos - and then to the point. Their free jazz, which can be called free music in general with the note that amazing compositional patterns are built up this evening, has no equal in terms of intensity, clarity, abundance of ideas, dynamics and awareness of balance.”

Unfortunately, this high-water mark would soon recede. There was the aforementioned work with Globe Unity Orchestra, Pilz and Sell, including a quartet co-led by the former with French reed player Michel Portal and completed by English drummer Tony Oxley appearing at the Total Music Meeting 1980. The last known dated performances by Niebergall came in 1983: in trio with Schweizer and Swiss drummer Pierre Favre at Zürich’s Rote Fabrik (coincidentally, the two Swiss had made trio and quartet recordings with Kowald over a decade earlier); and, finally, participation in the 122nd edition of Jazz in der Kammer in Berlin, playing in a quartet with Pilz, Japanese trumpeter Itaru Oki and drummer Mario Würzebesser and as part of a bass trio with Klaus Koch and American Jay Oliver. Whatever specifics came after have been lost to history.

To close with the words of The Guardian’s eminent jazz critic John Fordham, who beautifully encapsulated Niebergall in a 2002 essay in Double Bassist:

“A big, humorous, engaging and waywardly philosophical man with an immense Tolstoyan beard, Niebergall is much missed by players who worked with him. His thoughts – accurately recalled, and sometimes fabricated in the likeness of the originals – are frequently rekindled when his generation of European radicals gets together. The quotes always begin: ‘As the Holy Buschi would have said ... .’”

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