KARL BERGER
Genres: Avant-Garde Jazz, Post Bop, Third Stream, Progressive Big Band, Hard Bop, 21st Century Modern • Germany

Karl Hans Berger (March 30, 1935 – April 9, 2023) was a German-American jazz pianist, vibraphonist, composer, and educator. He was a leading figure in jazz improvisation from the 1960s when he settled in the United States for life. He founded the educational Creative Music Studio in Woodstock, New York, in 1972 with his wife and Ornette Coleman, to encourage international students to pursue their own ideas about music. Berger was born on March 30, 1935, in Heidelberg. He started playing classical piano when he was ten and worked in his early twenties at a club in his hometown. He learned modern jazz from visiting American musicians, such as Don Ellis and Leo Wright. During the 1960s, he started playing vibraphone. He studied musicology and sociology at the Free University of Berlin, achieving a doctoral degree in 1963 with a dissertation on music in Sowjet ideology. He worked as a member read more...