Ekkehard Jost (*22.1.1938 ; +23.3.2017) //
An obituary by Martin Laurentius:
With almost feuilletonistic eloquence, he made profound historical references to the various national scenes as well as to the USA. Jost, born in 1938 in Breslau, was one of the musicologists who always managed to leave the ivory tower and talk entertainingly about his field of research: jazz in its many stylistic forms. For Jost was also a musician himself: as a smoothly phrasing baritone saxophonist, he already caused a stir in the German jazz scene during his studies in Hamburg from 1959 to 1965. And because he was recognised as a musician and appreciated by his colleagues, he was able to combine his fields of work well. For his habilitation on the subject of free jazz, for example, Jost lived for a long time in New York in order to speak directly on the spot with the protagonists of this revolutionary musical genre and to analyse their projects from a musicological perspective. Another standard work is his Social History of Jazz in the USA, which enabled him to describe and analyse the sometimes difficult living and working conditions of US musicians. From 1973 until his retirement in 2003, Jost was professor at the Musicological Institute of the University of Giessen. He was also a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the International Society for Jazz Research in Graz and held teaching positions in Marburg, Hamburg and Frankfurt, among other places. But apart from his career as a scientist with an international reputation, Jost remained a jazz saxophonist all his life, continuously realising his projects with musician friends (the double bass player Dieter Manderscheid, for example, or the drummer Joe Bonica) and releasing them on his own label, Fish Records. Jost's WDR 3 radio series Jazzgeschichten aus Europa was then published as a book by Wolke Verlag in 2012. This compendium, so typical of Jost, will be his last publication during his lifetime: The musicologist and jazz musician Ekkehard Jost died in Marburg on the night of 23 March at the age of 79.