Wednesday, 4 November 2026
Guitar, vibraphone and wordplay: the Jazzzwio with Werner Pirchner
For ten years, from 1975 to 1985, Harry Pepl and the vibraphonist Werner Pirchner from Tyrol, Austria, formed the Jazzzwio: two self-taught musicians who played “Stella by Starlight” at their first rehearsal and, in Pirchner’s words, “understood each other so well from the very first second”.
Der Standard, a Vienna daily, wrote that the duo had caused a furore “internationally between Berlin and Montreux”; in 1981 it played on the stage of the Montreux Jazz Festival (renowned jazz festival in Switzerland). The Swedish trombonist Runo Ericksson wrote of the two: “they play like two people in love with each other”. The wit is already in the titles: the duo liked to adapt them to the place, and in Berlin, Germany, it opened in 1981 with “Berlin '81, die Erste” (Berlin '81, the first), while Pepl’s “Mahavischnigg” winks at John McLaughlin’s Mahavishnu Orchestra. Later came “Schikaneder Delight” (Emanuel Schikaneder, the librettist of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute”, meets “delight”), “Die alte Mär und das Mann” (a twist on Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea”, in German “Der alte Mann und das Meer”) and “Herbstzeitlose Arbeitslose” (the autumn crocus rhyming with the unemployed). Pepl himself said: “I am often very cheerful and then very sad again. You can probably hear that in my playing too.” Apart from Runo Ericksson’s remark, quoted in the original English, the quotations are translated from the German.