Tuesday, 3 November 2026
New photos from the estate: Harry Pepl in the 1980s and 1990s
32 photos from the personal collection of the Austrian jazz guitarist, composer and improviser Harry Pepl are new to the archive, most of them from the 1980s and 1990s.
His son Daniel Pepl has secured the prints from the estate and dated them.
Portraits in sunglasses and a checked jacket
Portraits are the focus: Harry Pepl laughing in sunglasses in Hernstein, Lower Austria, Austria, in 1987; a series in a checked jacket from 1988; colour portraits from 1994 and 1996. Fellow musicians appear too: the American drummer Jack DeJohnette and the Tyrolean vibraphonist and composer Werner Pirchner arm in arm with Pepl in the early 1980s, and a quartet photo from 1983 with Pirchner, the American bassist Marc Johnson and the Swiss drummer Joris Dudli.
From Hernstein to Prešov
Four series tell of bands and stages: the photo shoot of the Harry Pepl Quartet for the album “N.Y.C. Impressure” on a terrace in Hernstein in 1992, with the trumpeter Claus Stötter, the bassist Paul Nowinski and the Swiss drummer Jojo Mayer, who has lived in New York since 1991; concert photos of the same band under the banner “Jazz Prešov 92” in Prešov, Slovakia; the duo with Jack DeJohnette that came about spontaneously at the Innviertel jazz festival in Raab, Upper Austria, Austria, on Whit Sunday, 22 May 1994; and pictures from a recording in Graz, Austria, in 1986 or 1987, with the saxophonist Karlheinz Miklin, the American bassist Ron McClure and the American drummer Billy Hart.
Wanted: dates and photographers
Some things are still open: on which day, and in which hall, did the quartet play in Prešov? And who took the photographs? The archive would be glad to receive any information via the page “Contribute material”.