Wednesday, 4 November 2026
62 reviews from the 1980s new in the archive: the Jarrett plan and Metheny at the Jazzspelunke
Sixty-two newspaper and magazine articles from the 1980s have come into the archive from Hernstein, Lower Austria, Austria.
All of them are now in the press archive, each with a summary and short quotations; the originals can be viewed after signing in. They document concerts by the Jazzzwio, by Air Mail, by the quartets and by the Michel Portal Unit, the group of the French clarinettist Michel Portal, between 1980 and 1987, from Montreux, Switzerland, in 1981 and Frankfurt, Germany, in 1982, via the Posthof venue in Linz, Austria, and the Ohio Theatre in New York, USA, in 1985, to Montreuil, France, in 1986. Seventeen concerts are new in the chronology; the concert in Bolzano, Italy, took place on Wednesday, 13 March 1985. Two finds stand out. In May 1983 Werner Pirchner, the Austrian composer and vibraphonist, told the Viennese music magazine VOX about a plan: on the next album for ECM, the renowned European jazz label, Keith Jarrett was to take part as well as Jack DeJohnette, “if everything works out” (translated from the German); no recording in this line-up is known. The same issue reports that the Zwio (the duo of Pirchner and Pepl) was extremely well known and esteemed in musicians’ circles, for example by Chick Corea, and that Pat Metheny had the record by Pepl, Pirchner and DeJohnette played to him in the dressing room before his concert in Vienna. A newspaper picture caption fits this: at the Jazzspelunke, a jazz club in Vienna, Metheny hears the Jazzzwio, which is playing there with the bassist Marc Johnson and the drummer Joris Dudli, and decides to play there himself. The date, Wednesday, 23 March 1983, is inferred from a recording.