Eberhard Weber

Eberhard Weber was born in Stuttgart in 1940. He made his first ECM appearance in 1970, as bassist with Wolfgang Dauner’s trio on Output. His first leader date, The Colours of Chloë, was an immediate critical and popular success, winning the Großer Deutscher Schallplattenpreis in 1975. Through the 1970s Weber played with many other ECM musicians. He was a member of Ralph Towner’s Solstice group with Jan Garbarek and Jon Christensen. He recorded with Pat Metheny on Watercolours, and with Gary Burton on Ring and Passengers, also touring internationally with Burton. After leading his own band ‘Colours’, with Charlie Mariano, Rainer Brüninghaus and John Marshall, he joined the Jan Garbarek Group in 1982 and over the next quarter-century helped to define its sound. In 2009 the German Jazz Musicians Union awarded him the Albert Mangelsdorff Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Jazz, and ECM issued a triple album box set of the Colours records in its Old & New Masters series. The albums Resumé (released in 2012) and Encore (2015) were based on live recordings of the unique bass solos Eberhard Weber played in performances with the Jan Garbarek Group between 1990 and 2007, which Weber had edited, rearranged and modified with additional keyboard parts played by himself and contributions by Jan Garbarek, Michael DiPasqua (both on Resumé) and Ack van Rooyen (on Encore). In January 2015, Eberhard Weber received the Jazzpreis Baden-Württemberg, a lifetime achievement award presented to him at the Stuttgart event by Jürgen Walter, Baden-Württemberg’s State Secretary for Science, Research and Art. Weber’s autobiography Résumé: Eine deutsche Jazz-Geschichte was recently published by Sagas Edition. August 2015