Augustin Lehfuss - Happenstance (2020)

His birthplace already prophesised his eventual career as a musician, with the Austrian capital of Vienna long considered the benchmark city of musical excellence. In 1963, Augustin’s year of birth, both pop and jazz were still fringe genres and things belonging to musical outsiders. While John Coltrane performed at the Newport Jazz Festival, Miles Davis recorded his legendary album “Seven Steps to Heaven” and Nat King Cole reached an audience of millions, the Austrian music scene was still dominated by Viennese songs, operettas, and, of course, great classical music. Most often heard on one’s home transistor radio were German schlager hits from the likes of Peter Alexander, Fred Bertelsmann and Catarina Valente.

Augustin comes from a culturally diverse family of doctors: his parents were hard-working concert and theatre-goers, who also subscribed to the Vienna State Opera. After buying a Bechstein grand piano, their little five-year-old began playing on it. After the first months of lessons under the watchful eye of the highly regarded Professor Leopold Großmann, Augustin didn’t have the energy or will to practice scales like a machine. Instead, he preferred to learn the hits from the radio by ear. His first attempts at composition stem from this age, preserved in the scribbles of child’s handwriting, never to be made available to the public.

When he ran out of patience with his music school lessons and looked for a new teacher, Augustin found Helmut Henesch, a studied classical pianist who had accompanied many greats of the international jazz scene in West Berlin for a few years. He also had a large record collection. This clever man knew just how to deal with the adolescent, showing him the first jazz standards while managing to keep his interest in classical music alive.