Oscar Peterson recorded there in the 1960s. So did George Duke, Jean-Luc Ponty, Monty Alexander and a remarkable cast of European musicians most American jazz fans have still barely encountered.
The place was a studio above the living room of a villa in Germany’s Black Forest, built by engineer and jazz obsessive Hans Georg Brunner-Schwer.
In 1968, it became the home of MPS Records — short for Musik Produktion Schwarzwald — a label whose records paired startlingly clear sound with some of the most adventurous jazz of the era.
From immaculate solo piano and vocal harmony to jazz-rock, large ensembles and solo trombone experiments, MPS Records made records that did not sound quite like anybody else’s. These are ten of its greatest albums, listed chronologically.
Kenny Clarke–Francy Boland Big Band – Faces (1969)
Recorded at Sonopress Studios in Cologne in June 1968, Faces gathered seventeen musicians under drummer Kenny Clarke and pianist-arranger Francy Boland, including trumpeter Benny Bailey, saxophonists Johnny Griffin and Ronnie Scott, and baritone player Sahib Shihab.
Subtitled “17 Men and Their Music,” the album consists of four extended pieces, all written by Boland, that show off a big band built from touring American and European players based in Europe rather than New York.
It’s a useful reminder that MPS wasn’t only a boutique label for solo virtuosos: it could also record a large, disciplined ensemble at full strength.
Oscar Peterson – My Favorite Instrument (1968)
Peterson recorded prolifically for MPS through the late 1960s, and this solo piano session, later folded into the label’s Exclusively for My Friends series, is among the most focused results.
With no bass or drums to lean on, Peterson’s technique and harmonic instinct carry the entire record, and the album became one of the clearest arguments for treating him as a major stylist in his own right rather than simply an accompanist’s ideal partner.
The Exclusively for My Friends sessions as a whole, later collected in a multi-volume box set, remain the core of Peterson’s MPS legacy.
The Dave Pike Set – Noisy Silence – Gentle Noise (1969)
Vibraphonist Dave Pike, an American who relocated to Europe, led this genre-crossing quartet through a record that moves between hard-grooving jazz-funk and more spacious, exploratory playing, often within the same track.
It’s a good illustration of the loose, unpressured atmosphere MPS sessions were known for, recorded without the commercial constraints an American label of the period might have imposed on a vibraphonist trying to work outside a single lane.
Karin Krog, John Surman, Albert Mangelsdorff, Francy Boland, Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen & Daniel Humair – Open Space (1969)
Recorded at Sonopress Studios in Berlin in November 1969, this session gathered six musicians from six different European countries, each a reigning Down Beat poll winner in their category, for a one-off studio date organised by MPS producer Joachim-Ernst Berendt.
Norwegian vocalist Karin Krog is the nominal leader, and the record is unusual for the period in treating her voice as an improvising instrument on equal footing with John Surman’s saxophones and Albert Mangelsdorff’s trombone rather than as a singer fronted by a backing band.
It’s a good illustration of a role MPS played beyond its own artists’ catalogues: assembling ad hoc European supergroups that wouldn’t otherwise have had a reason to record together.
The Singers Unlimited – A Cappella (1971)
Formed around former Hi-Lo’s member Gene Puerling, this vocal quartet used multitrack overdubbing to build dense, close-harmony arrangements that no four singers could produce live, and A Cappella is the purest demonstration of the technique: voices only, no instruments at all.
It’s a long way from the label’s jazz-rock and big-band records, and that’s the point — MPS gave a genuinely unusual vocal group the space and studio time to make a record built entirely around harmonic detail rather than songs designed for radio.
Volker Kriegel – Spectrum (1971)
German guitarist Volker Kriegel led a quintet featuring pianist John Taylor on this record, moving between jazz-rock groove, lyrical folk-tinged writing and freer improvisation, sometimes inside a single piece.
Kriegel would go on to found the fusion group Spectrum (named after this album) and later the United Jazz + Rock Ensemble, and this record marks the point where his songwriting and the interplay of his working band came together clearly for the first time on record.
Wolfgang Dauner Group – Rischka’s Soul (1970)
Dauner was one of the central figures of German jazz-rock, and this record, released under his group’s name, is a good entry point into a substantial MPS discography that also includes his work as Et Cetera.
It sits alongside contemporaneous European fusion rather than following the American Miles Davis-derived template directly, built on Dauner’s own sense of electric keyboard texture and rhythm.
Along with Kriegel’s records, it’s part of the evidence that MPS was documenting a genuinely distinct German fusion scene, not simply importing an American sound.
George Duke – Faces in Reflection (1974)
Duke’s third studio album, and his second for MPS after The Inner Source, paired his keyboards and vocals with bassist John Heard and drummer Leon “Ndugu” Chancler, and reached number 31 on the Billboard Jazz Albums chart, a real commercial result for the label.
A collaboration with Brazilian singer Milton Nascimento on “Maria Tres Filhos” points toward the wider, more genre-blurring career Duke would go on to have as a producer and solo artist through the disco and funk years that followed.
Monty Alexander – Montreux Alexander (1977)
Recorded live at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1976, this trio set captures Jamaican-born pianist Monty Alexander at a festival known for pushing performers toward their most energetic playing.
Alexander’s style, rooted in bebop but inflected with the calypso and mento music of his childhood in Kingston, translates naturally to a live audience, and the record remains one of the most frequently cited entries in his large discography of the period.
Albert Mangelsdorff – Tromboneliness (1977)
German trombonist Albert Mangelsdorff had spent years developing a technique for playing chords on the trombone by singing into the instrument while playing, and this solo record puts that innovation front and center with no other musicians at all.
It’s a demanding listen by design, closer to the classical or new-music tradition of unaccompanied solo recital than to a conventional jazz album, and it stands as MPS backing one of Europe’s most technically radical improvisers at the peak of a genuinely original approach to his instrument.
