Inge Brandenburg
Sing! Inge, Sing!
“As soon as Inge Brandenburg sings, it becomes magical.” (phenomenelle)
“Fantastic — all you can do is cheer.” (Financial Times)
“A highlight of German jazz vocals! — Made in Germany, you can hardly believe it.” (Radio Bayern)
“What you hear on this CD is a voice of the century that makes every famous name pale by comparison (and that’s meant internationally).” (Jazzdimensions)
“Concert promoter Fritz Rau best describes the effect of her voice: it touched my soul.” (Der Tagesspiegel)
“A wonderfully intense, emotional voice that still amazes today.” (Radio Bremen)
“A long-overdue tribute to this lost artist. Alongside rousing swing power, she always had that bittersweet expression that makes great jazz voices stand out and immortal.” (Sono)
“It was a voice already marked by life very early on — and today, in retrospect, it speaks more of life than many other sleek, polished voices.” (BR-Klassik)
Tracklist – Sing! Inge, Sing!
I Love Jazz
“This rediscovery will delight fans of the singer as well as connoisseurs of the German jazz scene.” (Just For Swing Gazette)
“Anyone interested in the history of German jazz can’t miss this disc!” (Rondo)
“Timelessly good.” (AVIVA – magazine for women)
“We award this ambitious and successful album the Musenblätter accolade: the ‘Muse’s Kiss’. Our record of the month.” (Musenblätter – independent culture magazine)
“New CD with 18 wonderful finds from 1959–1971 that impressively prove she truly was the First Lady of German jazz vocals.” (NMZ)
“A fantastic album that delights all around — and proves that the record industry back then was sometimes even dumber than the audience!!!” (About Jazz)
“What a voice, what a feel for jazz, what beautiful songs. What a woman! I Love Jazz is a truly lovely compilation!” (hr2 Kultur)
Tracklist – I Love Jazz
original recording
Reviews
“This rediscovery will — as did Boettcher’s award-winning 2011 film soundtrack SING! INGE, SING! — delight fans of the singer as well as connoisseurs of the German jazz scene.”
“Anyone interested in the history of German jazz can’t miss this disc!”
“We award this ambitious and successful album the Musenblätter accolade: the ‘Muse’s Kiss’. Our record of the month.”
“This CD once again underlines that Inge Brandenburg was an excellent jazz singer — still well worth listening to today. How fitting that she closes the CD with ‘I Love Jazz’.”
“The success of the documentary film ‘Sing! Inge, sing!’, the CD of the same name, and Marc Boettcher’s biography of the same name brought Inge posthumous awards and chart positions in the jazz charts. Under the title ‘I Love Jazz’, on the occasion of her 20th anniversary of death and 90th birthday, he has now released a new CD with 18 wonderful, previously unpublished finds from 1959–1971 — impressively proving she truly was the First Lady of German jazz vocals: who else could place blue notes so wonderfully off-kilter and touching (‘Was weißt Du von Liebe’) or bring forth such a wealth of timbres in just a few bars (‘Summertime’)? Who had that unbelievably refined sense of time, that expressive power that sends shivers down our spines (‘Round Midnight’)…”
“The 18 songs on this album are a great remembrance of Inge Brandenburg — an entertaining and impressive compilation of an almost forgotten, incredible jazz singer from Germany. The bands and arrangers are the best you could find at the time, so this album is also a wonderful retrospective of German big-band music. Special thanks also to Marc Boettcher and Patrick Römer, who collected, analysed, selected, and polished the material so that the spirit of the era and today’s sound ideals blend well together. This album is a perfect combination of vocal jazz and big band music — and if you enjoy that, you won’t be disappointed. For all non-German-speaking readers, it’s a great opportunity to discover that it’s possible to swing and groove in German.”
“She was the best jazz vocalist Germany produced in the 20th century.”
“Among the remarkable new releases of the season is an album with historical, previously unreleased recordings of singer Inge Brandenburg from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. After the film, the book, and the CD ‘Sing, Inge, Sing’,
the album ‘I Love Jazz’ now provides further insights into Inge Brandenburg’s multifaceted work.” (Bert Noglik, MDR Kultur)
“Album of the week! — A wonderful opportunity to rediscover this artist and personality, who was completely undeservedly forgotten!”
“Whether she still believed in love is unknown — and whether she believed in broad success for her jazz singing as well. But she certainly believed in jazz as an art form capable of expressing life in all its facets. Because that is unmistakably documented here.”
“The rediscovered 18 songs are valuable. They show, purely, the full range of Inge Brandenburg. They also reveal the tension under which her work stood: on the one hand German schlager, on the other the further development of jazz. All the more valuable are these songs in which she coos, rasps, switches at dizzying speed through highs and lows — both vocally and emotionally. The last two songs are the two poles between which she lived. She wrote the lyrics to ‘Das Riesenrad’, in which she melancholically describes how she rolls up and down between the heights of success and human disappointments. She sings her life’s elixir with jubilation in ‘I Love Jazz’. Anyone who hears that song at the end believes her instantly.
With ‘I Love Jazz’, those who were already impressed by the documentary about her and her biography ‘Sing! Inge, Sing!’ experience once again the essence of her art. Here, only she speaks — or rather, sings. A great gift for her 90th birthday. The lovingly designed CD cover and the extensive booklet are styled in the aesthetics of her 1960s peak success. One can only hope it won’t deter younger jazz fans from buying it — because her songs are not only documents of their time, but timelessly good.”
“An album of standards — that makes some colleagues today look old.”
“If music touches the soul, then with these titles between A Taste Of Honey and I Love Jazz.”