Karl Ratzer played with Chaka Khan, Chet Baker, Joe Chambers, Lee Konitz, Clark Terry, and a slew of other jazz legends – and became one himself in the process. He played the opening concert at the Vienna institution Porgy & Bess, and the club has been a second home for him ever since. He’s reached an age where most people slow down, and his life story is notoriously dramatic, but he’s still going strong, as two recent records (a compilation titled “Organic Stew” and a duo album with Ed Neumister called “Alone Together”) and a well-deserved Amadeus Award for his life’s work attest. Markus Deisenberger recently had a wide-ranging conversation with him about God, the world, and Austrian media…and above all, about music.
Where else would a Vienna legend receive guests but in a coffee house? That’s exactly what Karl Ratzer does. The legendary jazz guitarist, singer, and composer sits at a corner table in his neighborhood café, near Vienna’s stately Augarten park. There’s a guitar hanging on the wall above his head – which turns out to be practical, since he occasionally takes it down to underscore his story with an appropriate groove, or to demonstrate something – the difference between samba and mambo, for example.
Maybe that’s a mark of great masters: you have to let them tell their stories in their own way – and if you do, your patience is rewarded with a wealth of anecdotes and off-the-cuff wisdom, as Ratzer picks at the guitar and drinks one cup of milky tea after another. There’s nothing to do but listen, rapt, as he improvises over a Disney melody or explains how the bossa nova works. The guitar is a second voice, chiming in when the first one fails, and music is the wave that carries us along – from note to note, tune to tune, story to story.
“They open you up and Root around inside of you.”
Your history with the media has been full of misunderstandings. Why have you had it so tough with journalists? Did they ask so many dumb questions?
Karl Ratzer: There’s a path to your life, and people like to rummage around in it. I was addicted and and depressed, but I fought my way out of it – fought hard, with the help of my wife and my people.
And you were annoyed by journalists constantly asking about it?
Karl Ratzer: Yes. But we live in a society of envy. Informers and racists. It’s soaked into the culture. They’ve all got their own ideas about things…why didn’t you become George Benson? Why aren’t you Miles Davis? Everybody’s got an idea what you should do and how you should do it. They’re full of advice and good intentions, and it’s useless. I live here, my home is here, and so is my wife. She likes it here; that’s important to me. We live very internationally, you know; I’ve kind of shut Austria out. I didn’t even know what television show I should go on here.
There also aren’t really any television shows that present music – at least, none that can be taken seriously.
Karl Ratzer: There are all kinds of shows that open you up and root around inside you – like Stermann and Grisseman or [Barbara] Stöckl. Places like that don’t work for me. The ORF called, too, but I turned them down. Why should I bother? If I do that, I want to get paid for it.
“I was able to save my playing and my life.”
In the television report on the Amadeus Awards ceremony, they discussed your return to Vienna. You reacted sharply to the question “Why did you come back?” That appealed to me – the question always seems to suggest that the person didn’t make it elsewhere, and then came crawling back.
Karl Ratzer: That’s nonsense. You just come home.
Exactly – but people like to paint “coming home” as a failure. Why is that?
Karl Ratzer: Exactly – why? I was at home everywhere. In the U.S., for instance. But there, wherever I went, there was cocaine. And after Khomeini came to power [in Iran], a $10 bag of heroin suddenly cost $5. Why? Because the goal was to ruin the West. Everyone was heavily addicted back then. From musicians to the soldiers in Vietnam who took drugs to cope with it.
When you give in to drugs, though, you don’t have many options. There’s no space for a business plan or a lifestyle anymore. You’re just living from one shot to the next. You’re just marking time. In the U.S., I couldn’t even imagine that I could get treated for it, that I could escape from that crap. That I wouldn’t have to run around like a zombie anymore, but that I could escape, get help. There were programs there, but you had to be a veteran, or at least an American citizen.
What period are we talking about here – the early 1980s?
Karl Ratzer: Yes, in the early 80s I came back and started therapy. You can view that however you like. But I’m just as famous now as I was then, and I was able to save my playing and my life. And I have a wonderful wife, who always stuck by me.
I recently interviewed Wolfgang Puschnig, who also lived in the U.S. for a long time. I asked if I could ask a dumb question, and he said yes. Then I asked him why he had come back, and he said it was difficult to say – but maybe because he never really got used to American society. “It just feels wrong,” he said. And perhaps because he was always a country boy at heart; I found that charming. Though he did well in the U.S., was successful – you had a good time there too, right?
Karl Ratzer: I had a very good time, sure. Great. People liked me everywhere; I made a lot of friends – Jeremy Steig, Eddie Gomez, Joe Chambers. Lifelong friends.
Let’s talk about your most recent record, “Organic Stew”. A great record.
Karl Ratzer: You like it?
“Like” doesn’t even begin to cover it. It’s a Sunday-morning album. It goes down so smooth – Organic Stew is the right name – and regardless of what mood you were in at the beginning, you’re in a good mood by the end. But what I didn’t know when I bought it is that it’s a compilation. How did it come about?
Karl Ratzer: The trumpeter and drummer have a scene in Munich and Murnau/Garmisch-Partenkirchen (Germany). We’ve known one another since the 80s, played together now and then, and it happened in 2010. I’ve known the label head since the 1980s too.
So the connection is an old one?
Karl Ratzer: Yes. At some point, Peter Herbert substituted; I had played with him before. The band has existed since 2012, and every couple of years, we record a CD. “Organic Stew” is a kind of “best-of” from these CDs.
The amazing thing is, the record seems completely unified, though the pieces are from different records and groups.
Karl Ratzer: If you say so. I’ve never listened to the whole thing. [looks at the record carefully] I know the tunes, of course, but the record looks great. Wow, Christoph [Huber] wrote the liner notes. I mean, it’s music people don’t really listen to so much anymore. Old songs, [jazz] standards.
“You have to get deep into the melody.”
I find that amazing, too – it’s a mixture of standards and originals, but you can’t tell the difference. Is your approach to an original tune different from when you’re working on a standard?
Karl Ratzer: The goal is to know another person’s composition so well that your interpretation is every bit as good as the original. If you play one of those wonderful Gershwin tunes, your version can’t be any less meaningful or dense. In the U.S., they always said: play ballads! That’s where you learn the most. Sure, guitarists always want to play fast, to show what they can do. But with ballads, you have to get deep into the melody, into the lyrics.
My local record shop recommended it – he said, “you need this one!” And he was right: I did need it.
Karl Ratzer: [looks thoughtfully at the photos] Duscher was a great trumpeter. We met in the early 80s; he was a nice guy, and he wanted to play with me. I was playing with Chet Baker at the time. And then one time they took a taxi after a gig in Munich because they were drunk, and the driver got in a horrible accident. Some of the band members died, and he broke his face.
Like Chet Baker.
Karl Ratzer: Exactly. They knocked his teeth in. But he could still play without them. They took his teeth out in France, and then he had to play taps for the border guards, because they didn’t believe he was really Chet Baker. I always stuck close to the best, you know? An evening with this one, an evening with that one – and you’re healed for a year. It’s like psychotherapy. These great artists will take you apart and then stitch you back together again. Objectively, but with love.
You seem never to have cared about genres. Jazz, blues, rock, soul – whatever, as long as the groove was right.
Karl Ratzer: It’s best when everyone’s got a classical framework, at least a minimum. It’s definitely helpful if you want to play jazz – it all comes from Bach; he prepared everything. In jazz, you have to be able to improvise on the spot, compose on the spot. [plays a lengthy improvisation]
Bach sat at the harpsichord all day – with his wig and a bib, the flies buzzing around – and composed etudes all day long, wrote them down, and made a lot of work for a lot of people. Now and then, someone would come by – the prelate of Cologne, say – and give him a larger commission, an Easter mass or something. They’d pay him in advance in gold coins, and he put them in a sack on the table. If you want to compose for so many people, you have to know how the instruments sound, how they function mechanically – the bassoon, the glockenspiel, the double bass, how high the piccolo can play, and so forth. An assload of work. I found out about it too late, unfortunately.
“Music mirrors the world.”
Would you have liked to compose classical music?
Karl Ratzer: Now, at my age, yes. I would have liked to learn how. Listening to Mahler, you hear the old coffee houses and Venice. With Bach and Handel, too, you hear their era. Music mirrors the world in its tones, in the compositions. Just like in jazz. But that you can take compositions from a movie, for example, and then improvise over them and make them into jazz – that’s one of the great achievements in music history.
What era does “Organic Stew” mirror?
Karl Ratzer: Mine. But I’m sure there’s music out there that’s more modern, maybe more challenging.
What was it like playing with Chet Baker?
Karl Ratzer: Beyond compare. At the time in New York, they said, “what, you’re going to Europe with Chet? Good Lord…keep an eye on your guitars!” He was a serious addict, yeah. And people like that are always looking for victims, people they can steal from. He was probably like that with certain people, too – that he would take their instruments and pawn them. But never with me. To me, he was always a delightful, lovable person. We were sitting together in Paris; he was on substitution pills for heroin. You take one, and you’re constipated for three weeks. He had taken five. You can’t imagine.
[Showing him an old poster advertising a concert with the band Gypsy Love at the University of Vienna] Do you remember this?Karl Ratzer: Yes, that was in the late 1960s.
What did you play at that concert?
Karl Ratzer: Glam rock. But talking about improvisation: the organ is the queen. The greatest challenge for heart, soul, and spirit. A Bach cantata in the church. Played with both hands and both feet. Samba is a guitar-friendly music: four-bar phrases, and all the chords come from jazz. [starts playing again] Lots of chord changes. There are sambas buried in famous hits like “Girl From Ipanema”. Songs you can’t find in any book, on any record. This, for instance… [plays a samba] …do you know it?
No, unfortunately I don’t.
Karl Ratzer: We play that song in trio and in quartet. Cuba is so small compared to this huge kingdom, Brazil. But they’ve got the mambo. [switches from samba to a mambo] Cuban mambo only has two chords, Rubén Gonzáles plays whole rhapsodies over these two chords. One of the biggest mysteries of all: to be able to improvise over one or two chords, and not bore people. An unbelievable challenge. If you do too much, too fast, you run the risk of losing the audience.
“For The people who sing with me and worry with me.”
You mentioned Bach’s sack of money – how do you feel about recognition? The Amadeus was a nice acknowledgement, right?
Karl Ratzer: I accepted the prize out of gratitude to my wife, my musicians, and my comrades.
You didn’t care about it?
Karl Ratzer: I’m thankful, and it’s nice that I made the short list. I accepted it for everyone who had to deal with me. [laughs] The people who sing with me and worry with me. But the Austrian media…I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with them. I decided: your enemies are your greatest teachers. Remember that! I never needed the ORF, or the newspapers.
But it’s tough without the media, isn’t it?
Karl Ratzer: Sure, you need the right partners. If my wife left me, I’d have to think differently. We share our life…
In his encomium at the Amadeus Awards, Christoph Huber talked about how often you’ve played in Porgy. He said you’re the musician who has played most often under their own name – over a hundred times. Is that true?
Karl Ratzer: Yes, it’s true. I opened Porgy, too, played the first concert there. Christoph had heard that I had played with [John] Scofield and [John] Abercrombie and various other people. I’ve got a good agreement with Huber and Porgy & Bess: I work exclusively there, the best spot, twice a year – one gig in the winter, at New Year’s, and one gig in the summer. That’s good. Doing right by your audience, keeping your dignity, while maintaining continuity and making enough to live on…it’s an issue. Warner Brothers offered Joe Chambers four million dollars for his band back in the day, and he turned them down. With Mahavishnu [John McLaughlin] it was the same: Columbia paid a million the first year; the next year they were even. The third year, they all would have been millionaires – but Mahavishnu said, “my guru said no.” And that was it for the band. Billy Cobham swore that if he saw [McLaughlin] on the street, he’d kill him.
I’ve been around. I played in New Orleans, Chicago, Atlanta, Maine, Newark, Atlantic City, Georgia, Alabama, and Florida…and then the time came when the drugs swallowed me up.
“That’s for you, and that’s for the band.”
How did you get involved in drugs?
Karl Ratzer: [laughs] Drugs were everywhere back then. It was just suddenly there. I was playing in a club in Atlanta, seven nights a week, no day off, till three in the morning. Packed every night. Every night, we’d get a packet of drugs from the club owner. Every night a packet of cocaine: “That’s for you, and that’s for the band.” And then when you turn to the Lord, when you want to get clean, you have a mountain of guilt to swallow. Since I kicked the habit, I pray every day. It’s my responsibility to bring the light to people through music. You don’t have to talk to God all the time or quote Him, but you’re in the light. When it’s like that, everything is possible. If I were to start up again, I’d destroy all that.
You’re more relaxed now than you used to be, aren’t you?
Karl Ratzer: Definitely. The thing with drugs – it has a lot to do with ecstasy. When you abandon yourself to the music the way we did, and then come off the stage, you’re still in another world. It’s hard to come down to Earth; you want to keep flying.
There’s an old video of your band New Ice Age on YouTube – to be honest, it looks like you’re all pretty high.
Karl Ratzer: No, that was before I started taking anything, just after I got the U.S. I toured around with one band for eight months, with a soul band called High Voltage. The guitarist and bassist who were with Rufus later on, Tony Maiden, and Bobby Watson. Dear friends. They went to L.A. after that and started their international career with Chaka Khan.
I got invited to Atlanta by a drummer; it wasn’t until later than I found out about the racist shit that was going on in the South at the time. I only felt it once, when I was with a friend in a greasy spoon and they wouldn’t serve him because he was Black. You have to understand: my parents met in a concentration camp. Our society was still pretty racist in the 1950s and 60s, too.
“I want to bring people joy with my music.”
Not much has changed, if you consider that two court decisions confirmed that it’s legal for the far-right magazine Aula to refer to Holocaust survivors as “a plague on the country”. The Supreme Court had to overturn the decision – in other words, it took three court decisions to confirm what should be self-evident. In the 2000s.
Karl Ratzer: [sighs] I know. If Austrians would finally become conscious of their role in modern Europe, instead of wrangling and defaming each other, it would be a good thing. I want to bring people joy with my music.
Which brings me to my next point: the last chapter in the book of Karl Ratzer hasn’t been written yet. What’s coming up next?
Karl Ratzer: The last three Porgy concerts were recorded, and they’re supposed to come out on record. Then we’ll see. Music has such power…I’m thankful for what I’ve been given. I want to give the light that captured me to others. But don’t misunderstand me: I’m no Bible-thumper; I want to draw power from my personal relationship with God and pass it on to others. The whole clan that I come from was shattered after Auschwitz. One uncle went to the gas chambers; my parents were severely traumatized. Without God, they never would have survived. Does that sound strange to you?
Not at all. In soul music, it’s always been completely normal, logical, to appeal to a divine power. The spiritual.
Karl Ratzer: To come back to Bach one more time: he got the gold pieces, and then he composed. When they performed the work, for 125 people, they noticed that the second-to-last page of the score was written so that a white cross was left free. Everything full of black notes except for a white cross on the page. A declaration of his faith in God. “Maestro, how do you do that?” they asked him. And he answered: “I just try to put the right note in the right place, at the right time.”
Thank you for the conversation.
Markus Deisenberger, translated from the German original by Philip Yaeger.