Sidney, June 23, 2017

ZEN IMPRESSIONS
Horst Liepolt

From his teens to the BERLIN of 1944, HORST LIEPOLT has lived his life in jazz music and abstract art. Contemporary art forms, forbidden for more than a decade still lived underground in bombed out cellars. When the U.S. Occupation Forces came, musicians came with them. Some were famous jazz artists and some unknown who would become jazz legends. They were creating the new and exciting music, which would soon thrill jazz fans everywhere.

Horst was there, living with it and for it.

In MELBOURNE seven years later he opened his JAZZ CENTRE 44 in rooms beside the Luna Park Big Dipper at the bay beach of St. Kilda. It became the Australian Mecca for musicians, artists and audiences for all that was the newest and most creative in jazz, art, poetry, film, photography.

In SYDNEY from 1961 and for the next twenty years, he produced jazz in CONCERTS and FESTIVALS. Programs featured Local and International artists in major Australian city venues including the Sydney Town Hall and the Opera House. He produced music for several films and a quarterly magazine “JAZZ DOWN UNDER”. The multi-national company Phonogram Records assigned to him his own label, “44 RECORDS” with which he recorded the best of Australian jazz over a twenty year period. The BASEMENT Jazz Club , of which he was the co-founder, is as familiar a landmark to Australians and visitors as the nearby Harbour Bridge. It began as an underground cavern with sandstone walls, a relic of the first white settlement on harbour foreshores.

As co-founder and Musical Director Horst’s programs introduced jazz lovers to the latest and best local and international talent and a new generation to jazz music.

Thirty years after leaving Berlin, Horst moved to NEW YORK. Consolidating all of his past experience, he initiated and produced for several years, the Greenwich Village Jazz Festival. In partnership with Mel Litoff and Phyllis he established SWEET BASIL, regarded for some years as New York’s premier jazz club. The “Live at Sweet Basil” recordings which he produced testify to the quality and diversity of Sweet Basil music during the lifetime of the club.

For the past twenty years Horst has been creating abstract art inspired by jazz. With his wife, Clarita, a noted Sculptor, he spent several years in Berlin where he exhibited his work. The present exhibition is his first solo in his adopted city.

ZEN IMPRESSSIONS
See the art and hear the music

Moya Wood, Sydney – Australia