Harry Pepl

Like Pat Metheny, he was one of the first jazz musicians anywhere to play the MIDI guitar, and he turned it into a tool for composing: for the “Schönberg Improvations” he used it to control a Bösendorfer computer grand piano, and with Real-time Composing he developed a method of his own for inventing music in the moment and capturing it at the same time.

Among the great guitarists of his time, his name carried weight. John Scofield called him “one of my favourites”, and John Abercrombie said: “He's great, he's like a machine gun.” He knew Pat Metheny and Bill Frisell personally, from festivals such as Jazz in Neuwied and from concerts for the NDR.

He also shared stage and studio with Dave Liebman, Art Farmer, Lee Konitz, Charlie Mariano, Joachim Kühn, George Lewis, Don Moye, Barry Altschul, Marc Johnson, Toninho Horta, Daniel Humair, Jean-François Jenny-Clark, Mino Cinelu, Didier Lockwood, Jon Christensen, Tony Oxley, Herbert Joos, Wolfgang Dauner and Svend Asmussen. In “Air Mail” he played with Wolfgang Puschnig, Mike Richmond and Wolfgang Reisinger, and he appeared as a guest with the Vienna Art Orchestra, once alongside John Surman. He recorded for ECM several times, the Kronos Quartet gave the world premiere of three of his pieces in Graz in 1991, and as professor of jazz guitar in Graz he shaped a generation of musicians, among them Wolfgang Muthspiel.

In the early 2000s Universal released reissues and previously unreleased recordings in its Austrian Jazzart series, among them “Light Blues”, “Live At Miles Smiles” and the “Schönberg Improvations”. This was followed in 2009 by “Live In Concerts”, produced under the direction of his son Daniel Pepl, with the Jazzzwio concerts in Montreux and Innsbruck on CD and DVD. Since 2015 recordings from his estate have been released by Fullmax Recordings. For his 80th birthday the live album “Harry Pepl (tape) & The (Lonely) Single Swinger Band” was released and took second place in the category best jazz album of the year at the Austrian Jazz Award 2025: today's musicians improvise live with his original tracks and enter into a dialogue with him. In this way a younger generation, too, can experience Harry Pepl on stage.

This archive documents his life and work on the basis of the estate and of research: biography, chronology, discography, catalogue of works, people, press archive and open data. It is published by his son Daniel Pepl, who administers the estate.