Joachim-Ernst Berendt; Promoted Jazz in Germany

Joachim-Ernst Berendt, 77, a musicologist known as the “pope of jazz” for his leading role in promoting the music in Germany. The author of numerous books on jazz, classical and blues music, Berendt’s “The Jazz Book,” written in 1952, has been revised repeatedly since and has sold 1.5 million copies worldwide. Berendt also produced scores of records for labels such as MPS, Atlantic and Electrola. Raised in Berlin, the son of a Lutheran minister, Berendt was bitten by the jazz bug in 1935 at the age of 13. “I got hooked listening to Benny Carter playing with the Ramblers,” he later recalled. During World War II, Berendt was drafted into a tank division and served on the Russian front until he was wounded and returned to Germany. Berendt’s father was imprisoned at Dachau for his anti-Nazi sentiments and died there during the war. Berendt helped found Sudwestfunk, the Southwestern German Radio and Television Network. In 1976, Berendt spoke at a Smithsonian Institution Bicentennial conference of international scholars examining U.S. contributions to the world. “Several of us said jazz was the most important American contribution,” he said. “Americans have a very special relationship to jazz. . . . But they take it for granted. In Europe, it’s so much of an art form that it’s special. It’s a music of freedom and tolerance.” In the early 1990s, Berendt turned his attention to the human ear and society’s need to refine the art of listening, writing two books on the subject. On Friday of injuries sustained when he was hit by a car the night before as he was walking to an event to promote his new book, titled “Only Walking.”