Inge Brandenburg was “the German jazz singer” of the 1960s. Despite of her incredible talent she was not able to succeed commercially as a Jazz musician. 2019 would be her 90th birthday but it is also the 20th anniversary of her death.
German film-maker and producer Marc Boettcher released a portrait of Inge Brandenburg in 2011 called “Sing! Inge, Sing!”. The Berlin based label uniSono-Records edited and remixed 18 unpublished songs and released them with this album “I Love Jazz” for this anniversary.
Born 1929 in Leipzig, and grown up in difficult circumstances in Nazi-Germany, Inge Brandenburg was used to stand on her own feet. During the German economic miracle, she was suddenly celebrated as the best European jazz singer, compared by Time magazine with Billie Holiday. But the German audience ignored the talent of the outstanding jazz singer and the record industry tried to reduce her (unsuccessfully) to „Schlager“-music. The story of her life became a sad story: after being ignored by record labels she became an alcoholic, she lived from social welfare and she died alone and almost forgotten in 1999 in Munich. The film and now this album are a great reminiscence of Inge Brandenburg and the Jazz orchestras of the radio stations in the 1960s in Germany.
