Jutta Hipp (February 4, 1925 – April 7, 2003*) was a jazz pianist and composer who enjoyed a brief period as a promising jazz pianist for whom a great future was predicted, until nervousness and self-effacement caused her to abandon music.
She was one of the first wave of European musicians to understand the bebop idiom and to play it fluently and idiomatically. On the evidence of her few recordings, she possessed a crisp technique and a remarkable facility for creating lucid improvised lines over the most demanding harmonic foundations.
At the end of the war her family managed to get out of East Germany and settle in Munich. There she found work as a jobbing pianist, mainly in nightclubs, where the hours were long and the pay bad. Eventually, she began working in bands which played at American military bases, where she occasionally had the chance to hear and learn from American jazz musicians who had been drafted into the forces.
In 1951 Jutta Hipp joined the band led by the Austrian saxophonist Hans Koller, one of the leading figures in European jazz at the time, with whom she toured throughout Germany and further afield. In 1953 she formed her own quintet and recorded an album, New Faces - New Sounds From Germany. The next year, the touring jazz show Jazz Club USA, starring Billie Holiday, arrived in Germany. Its master of ceremonies, the critic Leonard Feather, heard the quintet and arranged for Jutta Hipp to visit the United States. Under his auspices, she received a work permit and began what she thought would be a two-week engagement, leading a trio, at the Hickory House in Manhattan.
Here's "Ain't Misbehavin" from above album.
She proved such a success that her contract was extended to six months. In 1956, Blue Note Records issued two live albums, and a studio session with tenor saxophonist Zoot Sims. It was widely assumed that Jutta Hipp was now launched on a successful career, but her self-confidence was slipping and she was finding it
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increasingly difficult to face the public. On tour, she ran into the mean and vindictive side of American showbusiness.
When Art Blakey asked her to sit in with his band at New York's Cafe Bohemia, she refused, saying she was drunk, and anyway did not think she was good enough. Blakey dragged her to the piano, and started playing at a furious tempo which she could not handle. Blakey then addressed the audience: "Now you see why we don't want these Europeans coming over here and taking our jobs!"
So completely had Jutta Hipp vanished from sight that Blue Note Records had no idea where to send the royalties from her three 1956 albums. The alto saxophonist Lee Konitz contacted Blue Note on her behalf in 2000, by which time the back-royalties amounted to $40,000. At that time, Hipp was seventy-six years old, unmarried, living on Social Security and a little union pension, with no family in America.
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Jutta Hipp died at the age of 78 in the Queens apartment where she lived alone.
(Compiled mainly from The Telegraph obit) * (some sources give 6th or 11th April 2003)