VA - Focus Jazz: More Modern Jazz from the Wewerka Archive 1966-1969 (2006)

"I can’t remember." This is the statement you’re most likely to hear from producer and publisher HANS WEWERKA when you ask him about specific moments in his long career. And this is certainly not due to old age - although he is well into his eighties - you should hear and see the man in action! He is still managing his publishing house and keeping up to date with the diverse trends in modern music. (Asked about plans to leave the business, he stated that he thought of leaving it on January 12, 2033.) As for forgetting details - well, who could blame him? WEWERKA claims to have supervised more than 20,000 recording sessions, many of them arranged ad hoc late at night after a gig. "Once a session was done, I couldn’t bother with it any longer, since a thousand new projects awaited their realisation. We offered them to record companies, but most of them turned the music down, claiming it had too little sales potential. So the renewed interest in these recordings proves that I have been right from the start. I always believed in this music and knew that its time would come." And when you consider that producing music was not his only field of action (he’s been a successful TV producer for many years), you’ll realise that storing the details of all of these sessions is way beyond the capacity of any human brain. And even in record production, he wasn’t restricted to Jazz - he produced children’s records, albums of folklore, he recorded opera, modern music - you’d be better off by asking him what he hasn’t done. (For the biography of HANS WEWERKA, please see the extensive liner notes by STEPHAN STEIGLEDER for the first part of this series).