Oscar Klein....

Yet he was a strong Dixieland trumpeter, with a style based loosely on that of Louis Armstrong, and he was an accomplished guitarist, who played down-home blues after the manner of the Rev Gary Davis or Bukka White.

In his 50-year career he worked with European jazz musicians, including Charly Antolini, Henri Chaix, and the Dutch Swing College Band, as well as recording with such visiting Americans as Lionel Hampton, Roy Eldridge and Bobby Hackett.
Born in Graz, to a Jewish family, the eight-year-old Klein and his parents fled after the Anschluss in March 1938 to Switzerland, where he grew up, learning French and Italian alongside German and SwitzerDeutsch. Eventually he was fluent in seven languages.
He took up the guitar and banjo in the early 1940s, showing immediate talent, and playing throughout the final war years with other Swiss jazz enthusiasts.

Having trained as a graphic artist Klein became an art teacher, moving to Florence in 1947. He taught himself to play the trumpet and thereafter doubled on trumpet and guitar, although he also played several other instruments.
His first recordings as a trumpeter were made in Cologne, with the band led by his fellow Austrian, the reed player “Fatty George” (Franz Georg Pressler). When Lionel Hampton visited Vienna in 1956, Klein recorded with him. In the late 1950s, Klein fronted a Swiss band called the Tremble Kids, but in 1959 he moved to the Netherlands, where he became a member of the Dutch Swing College Band for four years, mainly playing trumpet, but also recording string duets with Arie Ligthart, the group’s guitarist.

Wanting to spend more time at home, after the ceaseless touring of the DSC, Klein returned to Austria, and formed a group to accompany his wife, the singer Miriam Klein, in which he played guitar. In the 1960s and 1970s he made numerous records on trumpet, with such luminaries of European jazz as Fritz Trippel, Emil Mangelsdorff and Henri Chaix, but he also made the celebrated album Pickin’ Blues, in which he plays a selection of country blues on guitar and harmonica. This side of his work was to culminate during the 1980s in a duo with the bluesman Philadelphia Jerry Ricks, and the two men appeared at many European festivals.
More normally, however, in the 1980s and 1990s, Klein fronted his “Jazz Show”, a loose-knit collection of European musicians and American expatriates who shared his love of traditional jazz. He is reputed to have had a different regular rhythm section in each of Switzerland, Germany and Austria, but they all knew that their job was to back up his punchy trumpet-playing, and to drop back occasionally for him to tear off a few virtuoso choruses of unaccompanied guitar.

Although Klein never learnt to read music, his instincts and fine musical ear made him a combative partner for musicians in all walks of jazz, from the contemporary organist Barbara Dennerlein, with whom he made two albums, to the cream of American classic jazz trumpeters, Eldridge and Hackett, with whom he recorded a moving tribute to Louis Armstrong at the San Remo Festival.
At the time of his death he had been planning his 77th birthday celebrations for January 2007, with a concert in Innsbruck. He was one of Austria’s best-known musicians in any genre, having been awarded the country’s Medal of Honour by President Thomas Klestil in 1996.

Oscar Klein, jazz trumpeter, guitarist and bandleader, was born on January 5, 1930. He died on December 12, 2006, aged 76
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article1265710.ece