Jaki Liebezeit (born Hans Liebezeit; 26 May 1938 – 22 January 2017) was a German drummer, best known as a founding member of experimental rock band Can. He was called "one of the few drummers to convincingly meld the funky and the cerebral".
Biography
Early life
Hans Liebezeit was born in the village of Ostrau south of Dresden, Germany. His mother, Elisabeth, was from Lower Saxony. His father, Karl Moritz Johannes Liebezeit, was the music teacher at the village school, specialising in accordion and violin, and taught both instruments to Hans, who treasured his father's accordion for the rest of his life. His father was forced to stop teaching music during the Nazi period, and died in mysterious circumstances on 18 August 1943. Kübler left Cologne in 1960, and Gerd Dudek joined the Jazz Cookers to play saxophone. The quintet was inspired by the liberated style of jazz music played by Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, and John Coltrane with "an additional cool hard edge" from the mid-sixties Miles Davis Quintet. Schoof's quintet played prestigious festivals at Antibes and Lugano, and performed in Prague and Warsaw. A record deal with CBS Records International led to the album Voices (1966). Schoof later claimed his quintet were "the first free jazz group in Germany".
Other than Voices, Jaki can be heard on the studio recordings made by the Schoof Quintet in Munich (resurfaced in 2013), on scattered recordings of the Globe Unity Orchestra, and early Quintet tapes of Swedish drummer Sven-Åke Johansson.
Schoof had a connection with composer Irmin Schmidt, who asked Schoof's quintet in 1966 to perform on Schmidt's soundtrack project for West German film '. The quintet also took part in a recording of "Die Befristeten" composed by Bernd Alois Zimmermann, which came out on a Wergo label in 1967 and accompanied "Ode to Freedom in the Form of a Dance of Death", a radio production of a play by Elias Canetti.
Motorik
By the late sixties, Jaki felt burned out with free jazz, later saying "there were too many rules in free jazz"
Jaki contributed for Michael Rother's late-1970s solo albums, drumming with his distinctive motorik beat.
In 1980, Jaki became a member of Phantomband, albums and with Schiller on the Atemlos album.
Jaki also worked on the Cyclopean EP, released on 11 February 2013 on 12" and download for Mute Records. Cyclopean was a project that involved, other than Jaki, Irmin Schmidt from Can alongside long time collaborators Jono Podmore (Kumo / Metamono) and musician and producer Burnt Friedman. He recorded with Hans Joachim Irmler of Faust an album called Flut, released 18 July 2014.
In 2013, he recorded the album The Obscure Department with British singer-songwriter Robert Coyne. Two more albums with Coyne, Golden Arc (2014) and I Still Have This Dream (2016), followed.
Liebezeit died of pneumonia on 22 January 2017. A tribute concert to Liebezeit took place on 22 January 2018 at the Philharmonic Hall, Cologne.
Style
As early as 1961, Jaki got attracted to world music, listening to North African, Indian, Turkish, and Iranian music. Liebezeit described the intention behind his metronome rhythm as "always pushing the band, similar to the director of an orchestra. You have to keep the orchestra together, make the musicians come to that one point where the beat is. And play like the people come together and make a unit."
Michael Karoli, Can's guitarist, lauded the partnership between Jaki and the band's vocalist Malcolm Mooney. ‘He was probably the most important point of reference in the band. I’ve never heard anything like that elsewhere. How those two fed each other with sounds!'
Personal life
Liebezeit was married to Birgit Berger, a painter. The couple had two sons named Ben