Hellmuth Kolbe

Kolbe was the son of Walter Karl Kolbe, an Austrian lawyer and Editha Berta Ehrbar of Vienna who was related to the Austrian piano manufacturer Friedrich Ehrbar (1827–1905).

Kolbe's parents separated when he was five years old and Kolbe and his mother then moved to Zug, Switzerland, where she remarried.

Kolbe studied with Hans Erich Apostel (1901–1972), head of the Austrian section of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) from 1946 to 1948.

Hellmuth Kolbe (28 August 1926, in Switzerland – 15 July 2002, in Zurich, Switzerland) was a musician and an audio recording and acoustics pioneer.

Fatty George (Franz Georg Pressler) (1927–1982) was another member of this band.

The Hot Club Seven played for United States military forces and in Soviet Army officer casinos in Austria.

Between 1933 and 1945, Kolbe completed 12 years of schooling.

He learnt to play the piano, double-bass and vibraphone.

For a season in 1945, Kolbe was a pianist at a hotel in Engelberg and during the day, worked as a ski instructor.

He became fluent in English, French, and German and later, Spanish and Italian.

In 1946, Kolbe studied music, musicology and orchestral conducting in Vienna and received his diploma in 1953.

He then enrolled at the Vienna Academy of Music and Performing Arts (now called the Vienna University of Music and Performing Arts).

From 1947 to 1950, Kolbe was an editor of Universal Edition.

He revised scores such as Alban Berg's Wozzeck and Lulu.

Kolbe also played with Hot Club Seven, an Austrian band, where he was known to the audience as Hello Kolbe.

In 1947, Kolbe approached American Armed Forces Radio, and in 1948 was employed as a producer and engineer for the US forces radio station, Rot-Weiss-Rot (RWR), Vienna.

Soon afterwards, the station seconded Kolbe to the Wiener Musikverein to record the performances of orchestras such as the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and the Vienna Symphony.

In 1950, Kolbe gave lectures titled Introduction to Jazz Music at the Österreichische Radio-Verkehrs-Aktiengesellschaft (Austrian radio transmission company (RAVAG), and had his own jazz program each week on Thursday and Friday nights at the RAVAG radio station, Wien I. He led jazz combos and wrote jazz critiques.

From 1951 to 1963 in Vienna, Kolbe operated "Mastertone", his first recording studio.

The Mastertone studio was engaged by Vox and Vanguard.

Kolbe said, "At that time, the rate of exchange of the dollar to the Austrian Schilling was very favorable and American record companies soon found it well worthwhile to record in Vienna".

From 1955 to 1975, Kolbe worked as a freelance recording engineer and producer for Columbia International (CBS Masterworks).

He was employed to record all their classical collections in Europe, often uncredited.

This work involved extensive travelling to record on location.

In 1956, Kolbe worked with Karlheinz Stockhausen, a composer of electronic music.Together they developed the first electronic music scores in the form of frequency versus time graphs.

In 1957, Kolbe returned to Switzerland and in 1960 he founded the Phonag Record Company in Winterthur, with the label Helvetia.

The company mainly produced Swiss folklore records.

In the mid1960s, Kolbe researched quadraphonic recording systems with Benjamin B. Bauer for CBS' “Stereo Quadraphonic” (SQ) matrix system.

In 1965, they recorded Stockhausen’s Klavierstücke I-XI (1961) and Mikrophonie I/II (1965).

Kolbe engineered both.

For example, in April 1966, Kolbe recorded Mahler's 8th symphony with Leonard Bernstein and the London Symphony Orchestra in 3-track stereo in London and was nominated for a "best engineered recording – classical".

Also in 1966, Kolbe went to Paris to record Alban Berg's "Wozzeck" with the conductor Pierre Boulez and the "Orchestre et Chœrs de L'Opera", Paris.

For this, Kolbe received the Grand prix du disque, an "Académie Charles Cros Diplome".

In early June 1967, just after the Six-Day War, Kolbe was in Israel.

In 1970, Kolbe accompanied the organist, Edward Biggs across Checkpoint Charlie to Leipzig, East Germany to record Bach's works in the Thomaskirche for CBS.

In 1987, Kolbe said, “We were two Americans, two Swiss and seventeen Austrians and we were heard all over Europe.

My department was jazz and modern classical, together with being involved in the design of the studios.

We also did a lot of live concerts including one a week from the large concert hall in Vienna, where we used just one microphone, a Shure modified with an AKG capsule and it sounded wonderful!"

In 1987, Kolbe said, "In the autumn of 1953 [we got] the first stereo tape recorder in Europe, an Ampex 350... which meant we aimed for proper stereo image rather than the 'ping-pong' style that was popular in the early days – everything on the left or the right and no middle".

From the beginning, Kolbe was a strong advocator of 3-channel stereo.