It’s a beautiful day in May as I drive up the mountains of Salinas to the very top and arrive at a house overlooking the salt flats and the bay of Es Codolar, with the majestic Es Vedra visible in the background – it doesn’t get a lot more beautiful than this.
Joachim Kühn lives here, born in Leipzig in 1944, in the midst of war and destruction. He says that there were a few days’ break from the hail of bombs, otherwise he would have never been born. His first memory is of a piece of music by Artie Shaw, ‘Indian Summer’, his brother Rolf played records and practiced the clarinet to him in the baby carriage. Joachim says ‘I was cradled with jazz’.
He was born into a family of artists. His father was an acrobat, his brother Rolf a musician. At the tender age of 5, his mother took a private teacher, Arthur Schmidt Elsey, pianist and conductor. He organized school concerts and at the age of 6 Joachim gave his first concert with Robert Schumann in Leipzig. Through his brother, jazz became his passion, a music that was not at all conformist in the GDR, but he didn’t care, he had found his destiny.
At the age of 14, Joachim already knew that he wanted to do nothing else in life but play the music he liked, contrary to his mother’s advice, who thought that life was partly made up of compromises, which he couldn’t understand at all. Until then, he played classical concerts every year, but also had a jazz band that performed at the youth club. He could already play the piano really well, but he knew that he had to practise fanatically for 10 hours a day for 10 years in order to achieve his goals. At the age of 20, he was ready to play with his brother at the Jazz Jamborie festival in Warsaw in 1964 – a huge success. They then called themselves the ‘Rolf & Joachim Kühn Quartet’, toured the GDR and recorded their first LP ‘Re-Union in Berlin’ for CBS. At that time, Rolf was already the world’s best jazz clarinettist.
When he gives a concert today, he sits at the piano for hours beforehand and practices to meet his own standards. Freshly washed hair and a fresh mouth feel are essential for a successful performance, and he has always used Odol mouthwash – in addition to an original drawing from 1924, he also owns an original ceramic bottle with a metal cap. To see how far he has come as a pianist, one anecdote is enough: Frank Zappa gave a concert in Hamburg in 1982. The day before, there was a dinner with Frank, who remembered him from the 1969 Jazz & Rock Festival in Amougies (Belgium). He invited Joachim to join him at the concert – a great honor.
When asked what music means to him, especially Free Jazz, Joachim says ‘Free Jazz means throwing all the rules overboard, becoming radical within the vast freedom and creating something new from the rubble’. His great role models J. S. Bach, John Coltrane and Miles Davis also became increasingly free with age in order to meet their own demands.
He first came to Ibiza in 1972, Salinas was wild and unexplored, the Marysal was opened but it would be a good 20 years before he would settle here, first he needed the wild, vibrant life in Paris, San Francisco and Los Angeles. When I ask him how he was able to leave the GDR, he says that back then you needed an invitation. In 1966, when Joachim was 22 years young, the famous pianist Friedrich Gulda organized a jazz competition in Vienna. His brother Rolf played with Friedrich and persuaded him to send Joachim an invitation. He got the visa and was finally able to leave the ‘damn GDR’ behind him in the sleeping wagon to Vienna.
After that, things really took off: Berlin Jazz Days 1966, Newport Jazz Festival 1967, the same year John Coltrane’s producer, Bob Thiele, recorded ‘Impressions of New York’ with the brothers for the label Impulse. In 1968 Joachim went to Paris and got his first record deal with BYG Records. This was followed by free jazz festivals with his own trio in France and others with Gato Barbieri in Italy, during which the film music for ‘The Last Tango in Paris’ was created. He toured with Eje Thelin in Scandinavia and Joachim and his brother Rolf, as well as with Don Cherry, repeatedly gave concerts in Germany.
This continued for many years – five of which Joachim lived in California and New York – touring South America, Asia, Africa, Israel, Australia, Japan and Europe. From 1996 to 2000, Joachim played with Ornette Coleman, the Thomaner Choir Leipzig, Archie Schlepp, Pharoah Sanders and many more, always together with his brother and great role model Rolf. He has released around 120 records, 35 of them piano solo records alone. His latest record ‘Duo’ with pianist Michael Wollny for ‘Act Music and Vision’ is a huge success. His new production ‘The Way’ with a new French Trio will be released in August, also on ‘Act Music and Vision’.
At the age of 80, he was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit First Class by the German Federal President and jazz lover Frank-Walter Steinmeier. In his music room on the second floor is a Steinway that was given to him by the company for his life’s work. The room has a natural acoustic that enables him to make recordings himself. He is one of the few artists who cultivates his inner child and at the same time has become a master of his craft, living his dream in his house in the mountains of Salinas, doing only what really fulfills him.
