Uli Beckerhoff - Everyone has heroes

By Rob Adams | 1st published by the Herald Scotland. Jul 8, 2015

When Beckerhoff started planning his latest album, Heroes, he wanted to pay tribute to those musicians who have influenced him most. Some of his inspirations, including Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Jimi Hendrix, the Munster-born Beckerhoff had admired from afar.

One in particular, however, was a hero who became a good friend, the Canadian-born trumpeter Kenny Wheeler who arrived in Britain in 1952 and established himself as one of the leading figures on the European, then the world jazz scene, going on to record with another of Beckerhoff’s distant heroes, pianist Keith Jarrett, as his accompanist, no less.

The idea of the legendarily self-effacing Wheeler, who died last September, leading a band featuring Jarrett, a musician not known for lacking self-belief, bemuses Beckerhoff who, as does everyone who came into Wheeler’s orbit, has a story to tell. In the mid-1970s, Beckerhoff got a call to join an orchestra that was being put together in Berlin to work under the London-based Rhodesian composer Mike Gibbs.

“I remember being thrilled to discover that, of course, Kenny was going to be in the trumpet section,” says the Munster-born Beckerhoff. “I knew Mike Gibbs’ records and Kenny was on them, as were a lot of great players. So I was in with some big talents and the first piece we played in rehearsal was something Mike Gibbs had written as a feature for Kenny. It was a lovely piece and Kenny played this wonderful solo and when he finished everyone was astonished – all these heavyweight jazz musicians were nearly crying. It was beautiful, perfect, and I was thinking, I wish I could play something as fantastic as that when Kenny spoke up and said, Mike, could someone else play this solo, please, because I don’t feel confident enough to play it?”

It was a typical Wheeler moment, as Beckerhoff would find out as he got to know him over the years.

Trumpet wasn’t Beckerhoff’s first choice of instrument. His initial interest in playing music came through an art teacher at school who used to let his students bring in their favourite records to listen to in class. A big hit in Germany at the time, the early 1960s, was the Chris Barber Band’s version of Petite Fleur featuring Monty Sunshine on clarinet. This tune was especially popular with the girls in the class and Beckerhoff decided that, if he could play it on clarinet, maybe he’d impress the girls. Clarinets were too expensive, so he bought a second-hand trumpet from a friend for the princely sum of fifty marks (less than £10) and taught himself to play Petite Fleur.

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