One of the most significant forces in European jazz, Joachim Berendt has helped the music as an astute and very open-minded jazz critic (he has written more than 20 books), as an educator and as a producer of both concerts and records. In 1945 he founded the Sudwest Funk Baden-Baden, leading the jazz department until 1987. Among the events that Berendt produced were Jazztime Baden-Baden (1947), the Berliner Jazztage (1964-72), and the annual jazz concert at the Donaueschingen Festival for Contemporary Music (starting in 1954). He has long been a regular attraction on German radio and television, and his presentation of the John Coltrane Quintet (with Eric Dolphy) is available as part of the video The Coltrane Legacy. Berendt produced more than 250 recordings in jazz (including Violin Summit) and World Music, has been a skilled photographer and has long been a proponent both of the avantgarde and of various types of fusion. Perhaps Joachim Berendt's main legacy is The Jazz Book, an accessible yet very complete history of jazz survey that has been updated on a fairly regular basis since 1963. ~ Scott Yanow, Rovi