Hans Georg Brunner-Schwer and the MPS label

Hans Georg Brunner-Schwer (1927-2004) founded the MPS label in Villingen, West Germany, where he'd tun radio and TV manufacturer SABA (Schwarzwälder Apparate-Bau-Anstalt since 1918 in Villingen), Hans was himself an enthusiastic hobby pianist and had been involved with radio since 1944 when he was called upon to announce air raid information. This is when Hans was first exposed to jazz music, to which he became a life-long enthusiast, advocate, and promoter. His SABA company began producing jazz albums (of very high quality right from the start) in 1963. With his sale of SABA to General Telephone & Electronics in 1968, Hans had to create his own studio in order to continue serving his true passion and love: producting jazz albums. Thus was born MPS studios and its record label. (MPS stands for Musik Produktion Schwarzwald. Villingen is in the Black Forest, central to Freiburg-im-Breisgau to the West, Tübingen and Stuttgart to the North, Schaffhausen and Zürich to the South, and Tuttlingen to the East).
     Hans helped produce over 1000 albums at MPS over the 35 years he was owner. Some of the artists he worked with there included Oscar Peterson, Duke Ellington, Ben Webster, Eugen Cicero, Hank Jones, George Shearing, Don "Sugar Cane" Harris, Stéphane Grappelli, Baden Powell, Friedrich Gulda, Hank Jones, Cecil Taylor, Ernest Ranglin, The Singers Unlimited, Art Farmer, Joe Pass, Attila Zoller, Steve Kuhn, Art Van Damme, Egberto Gismonti, Volker Kriegel, Jasper Van't Hoff, Joachim Kuhn, Jean-Luc Ponty, Freddie Hubbard, Monty Alexander, Mel Lewis, Ali Akbar Khan, John Handy, Joe Venuti, as well as a large number of classical music artists.

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