At the end of his life, Jacques Brel, one of the greatest interpreters of French chanson, was asked what he regretted most about his career. The answer came promptly: "To be Belgian." A comparable word would never have crossed the lips of Emil Mangelsdorff, one of the greats among German jazz musicians. Like his brother, the trombonist Albert Mangelsdorff, he was at peace with his country and his native city of Frankfurt am Main. The two were never drawn to the motherland of jazz, to America, even to the high-pressure chamber of New York. The Mangelsdorffs were Frankfurters through and through; since childhood, which they spent in the Ernst May estate in Praunheim, through their amazing careers, which they steered from their humble inner-city residences, until their death,which overtook her at her hometown.
The city was lucky that the Mangelsdorffs settled down.
Without them, jazz and Frankfurt would certainly not have become synonymous.
Of course, the reverse is also true.
Without the cultural and social infrastructure of the region in the immediate post-war period as the center of the American armed forces and their musical networks, Emil and Albert Mangelsdorff would not have been able to realize their artistic ambitions in and from Frankfurt.
But the love of jazz didn't start with the presence of the American way of life after 1945.
It got its start in a time that was not conducive to jazz, which Emil Mangelsdorff clearly felt with harassment and imprisonment in the brown years.
Intellectual educational work and necessary culture of remembrance
That's why you have to modify the word "being clean" a bit.
Emil Mangelsdorff, who revealed his passion for jazz at the age of sixteen, for example as a founding member of the "Hotclub Frankfurt" in 1941 or in the groundbreaking band with Carlo Bohländer, Hans-Otto Jung, Hans Podehl and Karl Petri, had none Identity problems with his German origins, but with the murderous politics and the barbaric worldview of National Socialism in Germany.
This is also how he understood the discussion concerts under the slogan "Swing dancing forbidden", which he tirelessly carried out all over the country from 1986 to the end: as patriotic purification measures, intellectual educational work and a necessary culture of remembrance for future generations in Germany.
As a stylish alto saxophonist, clarinetist and flutist in the genres of swing, bebop and cool jazz, Emil Mangelsdorff was a formative figure on the German and international jazz scene, a responsible contemporary witness and, with his creative perseverance, a personality that has long since achieved cult status. This is evidenced by the many honors he received from politics and culture like no other jazz musician. The astonishing series of concerts that he and his quartet were able to stage from 1996 to November 1 of last year – 213 in total – at the Holzhausenschlösschen also bear witness to this. Incidentally, one can already hear from the management that they honor the memory of Mangelsdorff will dedicate a permanent jazz series each spring.It should not be the last posthumous honor for the great Frankfurter Emil Mangelsdorff, who died on Friday three years after his wife Monique and a few weeks before his 97th birthday.