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Berlin Jazz 1930: Mitja Nikisch Orch. - Steig ein, mein Liebchen, ins blaue Auto

Mitja NIKISCH und sein Orchester, Refrain: Paul Dorn - Steig ein, mein Liebchen, ins blaue Auto [Get Into This Blue Automobile, Baby] Foxtrot a.d. Tonfilm Der Hampelmann [The Jumping Jack] (R.Stolz – G.Beer) Electrola 1930 (Germany)

NOTE: Mitja NIKISCH (b. in Leipzig 1899- d. in Venice 1936) – German composer and dance bandleader of Austro-Hungarian / Beligian origin. He was the only son of the world famous Hungarian symphony conductor Arthur Nikisch and the Belgian soprano Amélie Heussner Nikisch. He remains one of the most mysterious jazz persona on the stunningly rich light music scene of Berlin in the Weimar years. Carefully educated by his parents at the Leipzig Conservatory from 1912 to 1919 to become the classical music performer, he made his debut as piano soloist with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in April 1918; performed with luminaries such as Wilhelm Furtwängler and Sir Henry J. Wood. From 1919 he undertook concert tours as a pianist, and in 1923 he recorded works by Chopin on piano roles. Unexpectedly, in 1925, he ceased his well-developed career and went on his own way, joining the nightlife scene of Berlin of the Roaring Twenties. As leader of his own dance band, Mitja Nikisch – whose famous family name opened for him many doors – contracted a group of the most admired performers in Germany and started performing in the fashionable clubs of Berlin.

At the end of the Roaring Twenties, Mitja Nikisch Tanz-Orchester was an extraordinarily well staffed ensemble with top-class international soloists: George Hirst, Danny Polo, David Bee, Ady Rosner, the brothers Waldemar and Adalbert Luczkowski were among the soloists of the band, which the guitarist Otto Sachsenhauser, who was very busy in Berlin, judged as “the best dance band ever heard in Berlin”. In 1927 Mitja Nikisch started recording for Parlophon as Jazz-Symphony Orchestra” to switch later to His Master’s Voice and Electrola . In 1929 they had a “competition concert” with the most admired Berlin’s jazz band The Weintraub’s Syncopators. In 1931 he was contracted as resident dance band at the Casanova International Casino, yet in 1933 due to the NSDAP law he had to give up the band, which, in large part consisted of the Jews.

In 1934, in an attempt to pick up where he had left off with his career as a concert performer, Mitja Nikisch recorded Mozart's piano concerto (KV 466) with the Berliner Philharmoniker under Rudolf Schulz-Dornburg and devoted himself increasingly to composition. His Piano Concerto is considered his main compositional work; he completed it shortly before his suicide and dedicated it “to his wife”. In 1941 it was premiered under Charles Münch in Paris, the soloist was Nikisch's friend Kostia Konstantinoff; the German premiere did not take place until 1988 in Munich.. He divorced his first wife, the Austro-Hungarian actress Nora Gregor and was about to marry Russian soubrette actress Alexandra Mironova, whom he called “Barbara”. Unfortunately, in the meantime he was diagnosed lymphatic cancer and when Barbara was on a tour in UK, Mitja Nikisch committed suicide in August 1936 during his stay in Venice. See some more recordings of that remarkable dance band of the German Roaring Twenties: