Rainer Hass
 

Some old school German (though English speaking on the whole, it seems) ragtime/something-I-can't-quite-put-my-finger-on jazz for y'all here. There doesn't seem to be much of his music out there but here's a few snippets.





Seems like an interesting artists that might be worth a little bit of research.

Nobody?

I just read his biography... He's actually called Reiner Hardt. (1905 – 1943)
He recorded 200 songs, but due to the war which took place between 1914 and 1918, most got lost. Moreover he was never popular nor successful.
Just like most artists who experienced the WWI he got mentally ill and shot himself.

However, his music may sound facile - the topics are very deep though.
Reiner Hardt wanted to unite expressionism and jazz.
He was inspired by the expressionistic movies of that time.
In my opinion his lyrics are similar to Bertolt Brecht's works.

Thanks Goofle11 for bringing this thread up.

Thanks for posting those clips & the info on Rainer Hass. Previously the only track I had heard of his was "Packin' Heat At The Speakeasy" on the Yells From the Crypt cd.

That's the same album I discovered him on :)

This guy is certainly a strange discovery on your part, Goofle. Congratulations on digging up such an obscure artist.

I thought Now You´re Gone was clever; the simple, cheerful music and unusual lyrics made it sound surprisingly fresh even though the credits say "Berlin, 1932"

Pre-war Berlin has been glamourised by Christopher Isherwood and others as being a time of experimentation, artistic renaissance and sexual tolerance, but in your second clip, Rainer Hass seems to reveal a much more sinister side to the decadence of the period. Rather like Brecht´s famous Mac The Knife , which cheerfully depicts an assassin, Rainer Hass plays some happy-sounding music while reciting the following lyrics:-

I see folks walking to and fro, like cattle to the slaughter...
Those people ain´t no friend of mine
And killing cattle ain´t no crime.

It´s one thing to question staid old attitudes, as was apparently being done in pre-war Berlin, but to me, writing happy little songs equating people with cattle and suggesting that it´s ok to kill them shows a disturbing lack of moral compass. So while I was interested in your clips, I don´t think I´ll be investigating any more of Rainer´s material. Maybe I take lyrics too seriously, but songs that treat murder as a joke give me the creeps.

^ Thanks for the info, Silenzio, but I think you got your wars mixed up; the only work of Rainer Hass that would´ve been lost in the 1914-18 war would´ve been his exercise books from primary school.

The guy popped in my mind for some reason so I found this track on youtube:



I also uploaded the song Crazed mentioned to soundcloud a while ago:

https://soundcloud.com/goofle11/rain...-the-speakeasy

Changed my avvy too :)

I definitely dig what I'm hearing here! The recordings are surprisingly high quality for music from the 20s (?) as well. Good stuff.

100% sure this is a modern artist and that biography is fiction.