Description

Dot Time Records is excited to announce the October 6th, 2023 release of Bruno Spoerri, A Portrait, a five CD Box set that celebrates this Swiss Jazz icon and legend. A pioneer of post-war Jazz in Switzerland, his influence as an intrepid experimenter, composer, inventor and virtuoso instrumentalist is documented through this release. The box set includes a 38-page booklet filled with photos, essays and biography of this Jazz Legend in German and English.

Before the Second World War, jazz hardly existed in Switzerland. After the war, the first fragile plants emerged from the desert sand, proving to be tough yet resilient: young musicians in the German-speaking part of Switzerland and in the French-speaking part of the country are already able to play the new music from the USA quite competently.

Swiss jazz in the 1950s is Amateur jazz. The focal point of this amateur jazz is the annual “Amateur Jazz Festival” in Zurich. And there, the name Bruno Spoerri first appears for a broader public. It’s 1954, and the young Basel saxophonist, scarcely on the scene, is one of the best in Switzerland.

Music sits in Bruno Spoerri’s genes- his mother was a professional musician. But he didn’t really start playing music until a school band was in need of a saxophonist. So, he started practicing and got to a high level. So high, in fact, that at the Zurich Amateur Festival in 1954, at nineteen, he collected the prize for the best saxophonist. He acquires the reputation of being the Swiss Gerry Mulligan.

The list of his creativity in his seventy years of music is boundless: dozens of compositions mostly written for ensembles at the interface of acoustic and electronic music, some forty film soundtracks were added over the years, as well as soundtracks for countless short films and over 500 commercials, for which he was not only involved as a musician, but also as a producer. Bruno Spoerri wrote theater and radio play music, created interactive electronic installations, and above all this: He played thousands of concerts with artists and musicians all around the world, not only jazz musicians, but also rappers, folk musicians, classical and pop musicians.

Bruno was also a meticulous archivist and historian and he documented his career – and jazz in Switzerland in general – virtually without gaps, a good prerequisite for his book “Jazz in der Schweiz – Geschichte und Geschichten” (Jazz in Switzerland – History and Stories) and also for a second music-historical work “Musik aus dem Nichts – Die Geschichte der elektroakustischen Musik in der Schweiz” (Music from Nothing – The History of Electroacoustic Music in Switzerland).

This release is the first of the ‘Portraits’ edition, a new line of releases from Dot Time Records that celebrates the work of artists, musicians and composers.