The “Tatort” melody is German cultural heritage – created by the composer and saxophonist Klaus Doldinger. Now the jazz legend has died at the age of 89, as his wife confirmed. He fell asleep peacefully at home on Thursday evening surrounded by his family.
Doldinger wrote international jazz history with his band Passport, and he remained on stage well into his old age. He completed more than 5,000 appearances in just over 50 years.
Also made music with Udo Lindenberg
The Passport album “The First Fifty Years of Passport” was released for the band’s 50th anniversary in 2021 and traced the group’s musical development. One of Doldinger’s numerous bandmates was Udo Lindenberg, who was the first drummer for “Passport” in 1971 and honored his boss at the time as a “jazz master”.
The Berlin-born Doldinger began his career much earlier: in the early 1950s, while he was still studying piano and clarinet in Düsseldorf, he belonged to the Dixie band The Feetwarmers and gained his first experiences. A few years later he founded his first band, The Oskar’s Trio.
Freeman of New Orleans
In 1960, Doldinger toured the USA for the first time and was awarded honorary citizenship in the jazz metropolis of New Orleans. The career of the Berlin-born musician had gained international momentum. In 1969 he started his new band Motherhood, before Passport followed in 1971. The sources of Doldinger’s music included jazz, rock, blues and soul as well as experimental electronic sounds and Latin American rhythms.
“The Boat” and “The Neverending Story”
At the same time, he composed for film and television productions. He contributed the music to popular hits such as “Das Boot”, “The Neverending Story”, “Salt on My Skin” and “Liebling Kreuzberg”. The “Tatort” melody became an evergreen.
On the occasion of Doldinger’s 85th birthday in 2021, Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier also congratulated and honored the musician as a creative spirit “who always gives improvised music new, independent forms of expression, a composer and arranger who has worked with countless leading international jazz musicians, and a teacher and artist whose work has influenced improvised music for decades influenced”.
Klaus Doldinger was born in Berlin in 1936, but grew up in Vienna and Düsseldorf and ultimately lived near Munich. His autobiography “Made in Germany. My life for music” was published in 2022, which he wrote together with the music journalist Torsten Groß and his son Nicolas Doldinger.
In it he tells how the jazz music that the American GIs brought to Germany in 1945 impressed him as a small boy. “You couldn’t have marched in line or clicked your heels to this music,” writes Doldinger. The fascination for these free rhythms has never left Doldinger, who also enjoyed success in South America with the casual fusion music of his band Passport.