Biography
Erich Kleinschuster surfaces when musicians are grouped by surnames that echo their chosen instruments, here the trombone’s exaggerated length. The surname itself translates as “tiny shoemaker,” or even something elfin, creating an ironic knot between the idea of unwieldy extension and miniature scale. Another Graz native who physically expanded to outsized proportions, Arnold Schwarzenegger, shares the same Austrian city, which once hosted a notable concentration of shoe factories.
Kleinschuster began playing piano in the immediate postwar years and took up trombone studies at the Graz conservatory during the early 1950s. His first professional role placed him in a radio dance band. Although he initially trained and worked as a lawyer, he abandoned that path for music, joining the internationally active Newport International Band, whose personnel included guitarist Gabor Szabo. Appearances at the Brussels World Fair and a Columbia recording session cemented his commitment; thereafter he showed no inclination to return to accumulating billable hours.
The same attributes that might have distinguished his legal arguments—smoothness, intellectual rigor, and harmonic integrity—came to define his trombone playing under the sway of J.J. Johnson and Bob Brookmeyer. Across more than fifty sessions he recorded with trombonist Slide Hampton, trumpeters Dusko Goykovich and Art Farmer, multi-instrumentalist Jimmy Giuffre, and tenor saxophonists Joe Henderson and Clifford Jordan. During the 1970s he led his own quintet on regular European engagements.
Kleinschuster began playing piano in the immediate postwar years and took up trombone studies at the Graz conservatory during the early 1950s. His first professional role placed him in a radio dance band. Although he initially trained and worked as a lawyer, he abandoned that path for music, joining the internationally active Newport International Band, whose personnel included guitarist Gabor Szabo. Appearances at the Brussels World Fair and a Columbia recording session cemented his commitment; thereafter he showed no inclination to return to accumulating billable hours.
The same attributes that might have distinguished his legal arguments—smoothness, intellectual rigor, and harmonic integrity—came to define his trombone playing under the sway of J.J. Johnson and Bob Brookmeyer. Across more than fifty sessions he recorded with trombonist Slide Hampton, trumpeters Dusko Goykovich and Art Farmer, multi-instrumentalist Jimmy Giuffre, and tenor saxophonists Joe Henderson and Clifford Jordan. During the 1970s he led his own quintet on regular European engagements.