Uschi Brüning

Uschi Brüning (born 1947) is a German jazz and soul singer and songwriter. She made her career in East Germany and was 42 when the Berlin wall was breached. She has transitioned and sustained her career more successfully than other former East German performance artists post-reunification, though her fan base remains concentrated principally in the east.

Biography Brüning was born in Leipzig, one of the two largest cities in the southern part of the Soviet occupation zone, a couple of years before the zone was rebranded and relaunched as the Soviet sponsored German Democratic Republic (East Germany). She was the younger of her mother's two daughters. A year after her birth her father "ran away". Her mother, who worked as a waitress at the zoo canteen, was left to bring up her daughters as a single mother. There were no longer any grandparents, aunts, or uncles, and the children were often left at home unsupervised; her mother was in the end overwhelmed by the situation.

When she was about five Uschi and her sister were removed by the authorities into a children's home in Engelsdorf, some ten kilometers away, where she turned to singing as a consolation. Here they were incarcerated for the next two years. The orphanage had been founded by Carmelite nuns in 1931, and somehow managed to remain an island of relative sanity, quietly ignoring government precepts on the centrality of Marxism–Leninism to children's education, while outside the country was transformed into a one-party Soviet-style socialist paradise-dictatorship. She was nevertheless shocked by the sudden separation and unhappy; isolated, for the most part, both from her mother and from the "big children", including her sister, who were accommodated in another part of the building. When she was about seven the girls were able to re-join their mother, who was by now better able to deal with the challenges of managing a one-parent family. Later, on the tram to school, she saw that large portraits of a good-looking man with a moustache had appeared on posters alongside the streets. She asked her teacher who he was. It turned out that this was Joseph Stalin, a "good man, and our big brother, who together with his Soviet brothers and sisters had liberated [us] from fascism. He had recently died". Brüning would later recall that on receiving this explanation she had wept bitterly. There was not at this stage any question of a musical education, but as a child she sang round the house, at school, and around town: word of her exceptional singing voice spread. By the time she started work in the justice system she had already launched herself on the musical progression which would become her career In 1960, aged just 13, she made her first "genuine" stage appearance, singing well-loved Schlager songs in front of the workers at the large Langbein-Pfanhauser electroplating factory in Leipzig-Sellerhausen, not too far from her mother's apartment, which was also on the east side of the city. Further performance invitations followed. By the time she was seventeen, still at school, she was also appearing as a singer-guitarist with "Studio Team", an amateur band with which at the weekends she undertook brief tours of Saxony. She nevertheless passed her Abitur (school final exams). According to more than one source she would have liked to study music and become a school music teacher after leaving school, but it was made clear that this was not an option because, it was explained, she did not play the piano: for a couple of years the music performances took a back seat as she prepared for her career as a clerk in the justice system. He had heard that she was "good" and invited her to join his band. (Lenz had received the recommendation concerning Brüning from his friend.) the composer-bandleader Horst Krüger. In 1972, she won second prize at the International Schlager Festival in Dresden. describing it as the "Affenkultur des Imperialismus".

From 1975, she was working with her own band, "Uschi Brüning & Co" with which, in 1982, she released her third LP record. One member of the band was the saxophonist Helmut Forsthoff. She still suffered remorse and embarrassment over her retraction more than forty years later, but explained to an interviewer how she had been persuaded by the nature of the official pressure applied and the implicit threat that family members, including her mother Clärchen, might also suffer state-backed retribution. She participated in the first "Jazztagen" (East German jazz festival), held at Weimar in December 1985. and again, in 1986, at the first International Women's Jazz Festival in Frankfurt, beyond the "internal border" to the west. In 1989, touring with Ali Haurand's European Jazz Ensemble, she performed "Ich mach ein Lied aus Stille" together with the children's author-poet Eva Strittmatter. She had already toured with the European Ensemble in 1987 and would do so again in 1991. An edited recording of the concert was (re-)issued in 2015.

Between 2014 and his unexpected death in October 2016, after four decades during which the two of them had gone their separate ways, Her album So wie ich ("Just like me"), produced by Andreas Bicking, was nominated in the "National-Singer" category in the 2017 Echo Jazz prize. On 14 September 2018 she teamed up with Stephan König for the thirty-second "Augustiner Concert" at the prestigious Gymnasium St. Augustine (school) to perform together the programme, "Herzenslieder" ("Songs of the heart") which the two of them have developed.

Discography (selection) Albums

Singles

Autobiography So wie ich. Berlin 2019,