“Keine Angst vor Jazz” (No Need to Mistrust Jazz) was the name given by Stuttgart’s radio station – still under the aegis of the American military government at the time – to an initial series of jazz programmes broadcast just after the war. These gave airtime to a genre that only a few years earlier had been banned from the German airwaves. The year was 1947. Eight years later, the series creator Dieter Zimmerle, head of jazz at the now independent broadcaster SDR, came up with an idea for a series of concerts called “Treffpunkt Jazz”. In those intervening eight years, people’s initial mistrust of jazz had subsided and given way to genuine interest and enthusiasm, due in part to the high-profi le German and overseas guests that were now appearing with increasing regularity in Stuttgart. Lee Konitz came in 1956, and Tony Scott made a stopover in the Swabian capital on his European tour in April 1957. That same year also saw performances by the Modern Jazz Quartet and Miles Davis. The guest artists were accompanied by the rhythm section from SDR’s own in house dance orchestra; the solo celebrities, Tony Scott included, were generally also invited to the studios for a recording session. For this very occasion the clarinettist prepared a selection of standards. He was joined by Horst Jankowski, one of Germany’s most talented young pianists, who was already making a name for himself as a technically brilliant improviser with a gift for spontaneous invention.

The two must have hit it off, for two weeks later Scott took his Stuttgart rhythm section with him for a concert in Yugoslavia, at which he gave the fi rst performance of one his most popular compositions: Blues For Charlie Parker. When Joachim-Ernst Berendt recorded this title with Scott in 1962, the clarinettist was in Hong Kong, just one of many staging posts during a South- East Asian odyssey that lasted several years – Scott’s attempt to escape the US commercialisation of jazz and seek out new inspiration. Berendt, then himself in search of new jazz horizons, met Scott in Asia on several occasions, armed with a portable tape recorder and microphone. Despite certain acoustic defi ciencies as a result of the far from ideal recording conditions, most notably audible on the track from Singapore, these tapes are deserving of our attention as rare testimony to a hitherto little documented phase in Scott’s career.