My room at the Unique Hotel Innere Enge in Bern is full of jazz paraphernalia. Choc-a-bloc in fact. From my bed to the bathtub, I am immersed in jazz history in the form of photographs of jazz celebrities, newspaper clippings and colorful posters of jazz festivals around the world, from Newport to Montreux.
The jazz memorabilia filled George Wien Room at the Hotel Innere Enge in Bern honors the greatest jazz impresario in the world
Hotel Innere Enge Bern
If you are not a jazzophile, you may not recognise the man looking at you from many of the framed pictures. It turns out I am staying in a room dedicated to American jazz impresario George Wein, a close friend of hotelier Hans Zurbrügg.
Far more than a septuagenarian jazz fanatic, Hans has produced the International Jazz Festival Bern since kicking it off in 1976. Together with his wife, Marianne Gauer Zurbrügg, a luxury hotel interior designer, they opened the Bern hotel around the same time. It occupies a charming 1716-built roadside house, wedged between fields of sunflowers and a magnificent private park with city and alpine views.
The Hotel Innere Enge in the Swiss capital Bern calls itself ‘The world’s unique jazzhotel’. The early 18th century building also houses the world-famous Marians Jazzroom
Hotel Innere Enge
The Innere Enge was not intended as a tribute to some of America’s greatest jazz players and composers, even if that’s what it ended up. “What I wanted to have was a jazz room, and out of this the jazz hotel took shape step by step. When you look at famous hoteliers like César Ritz or Conrad Hilton, they brought their passion into the hotel and that is what gives it character,” says Hans.
Hans Zurbrügg and Marianne Gauer Zurbrügg, the hoteliers behind Bern’s Hotel Innere Enge. The hotel is a work of love tribute to the world’s jazz greats.
Hotel Innere Enge
He describes Wein as “the most prominent and most important jazz promoter in the history of jazz.” The American has spent a lifetime organizing festivals from New Orleans to Nice, Monterey and many others. “He’s also a jazz pianist, but he’s a better promoter than a jazz pianist,” Hans says. “Wein spearheaded the first Newport Jazz Festival in 1954, and he is still going very strong in Newport, at 94.”
Wein inaugurated Room no.29 and donated all of the memorabilia in it according to Hans. Other Musikzimmer include the Miles Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Lionel Hampton and Eddie Condon (women jazz icons are sorely missing). Elsewhere in the hotel, sculptures of jazz players and musical instruments deck the foyers, halls and walls.
Musical notes, jazz sculptures, artworks and memorabilia are scattered throughout the Innere Enge Jazzhotel in Bern, from the Musikzimmer rooms named after musicians to the public areas.
Tamara Thiessen
Hans, a small seemingly self-effacing man, is not shy when it comes to his knowledge of the jazz world, nor the place of his hotel in it. “I know everything that is going on, on the planet, regarding jazz, and the concert activities that go on here are very special, with a room dedicated to the culture of jazz and blues musicians.”
The basement Marians Jazzroom hosts 10 concerts a week, 37 weeks of the year, for a total 370 concerts. “We are definitely the leading jazz promoter in Europe,” he says. For him there is no doubt about the place of these American jazz legends in musical history. “To the jazz world these musicians can be compared to Beethoven and Mozart, and Chopin and Verdi, in the classical field. Jazz for me, and I think it is recognized as such, is the most important art of music of the last 100 years. It influenced everything … Pop music and all.”