Siggi Loch
Siggi Loch - A Life in the Spirit of Jazz

Siggi Loch holds an exceptional position in the European music landscape:  With a career spanning 60 years and still active, he is one of the most experienced music managers and producers in the industry.  In his mid-twenties, he became the youngest head of a record company, Liberty/United Artists in Munich, where he discovered artists like Katja Ebstein, Amon Düül II, and CAN. At the age of 30, he was appointed as the founding managing director of WEA Music, the German branch of the world's largest music conglomerate, Warner Communication. However, his lifelong love was jazz, and he aspired to promote this music with his own label. He eventually achieved this goal, albeit through some detours. While he discovered and produced saxophonist Klaus Doldinger at the age of 22, he also developed an appreciation for the emerging "Beat" movement and produced the first recordings at the legendary Hamburger "Star Club" with acts like "Searchers," "Rattles," and Jerry Lee Lewis. As the WEA Chief, he discovered and nurtured international stars like Al Jarreau and Helen Schneider, as well as some of the most successful talents in the young German pop scene, including Jürgen Drews, Marius Müller-Westernhagen, Peter Schilling, Joachim Witt, Heinz-Rudolf Kunze, and Ideal. As a corporate manager, he eventually rose to become the President of WEA Europe INC. At the height of his success in the pop music business, he ended that phase of his career to pursue his lifelong dream of running his independent jazz label, ACT. Since 1992, ACT has been recognized as one of the most important labels of its kind worldwide, with a focus on jazz and jazz-related music, especially from Germany and Europe. The careers of artists such as Nils Landgren, Esbjörn Svensson, Michael Wollny, Wolfgang Haffner, Viktoria Tolstoy, Vincent Peirani, Emile Parisien, Youn Sun Nah, Lars Danielsson, Nguyên Lê, and many others are closely tied to ACT and Siggi Loch. The London TIMES recently summed it up: "Since 1992, the German label ACT has been building its own European union of musicians, fostering a freedom of movement between nationalities and genres and has given us an authentic impression of what the continent is about." ACT productions have received numerous awards, including the Annual Prize of the German Record Critics, the ECHO Jazz, Victoires du Jazz, multiple Grammy nominations, and continue to significantly contribute to the public perception of jazz as one of the most important genre-spanning, culturally significant, and region-encompassing forms of "world music." On the cultural policy front, Siggi Loch served as a founding board member of the German Phono Academy and as a board member of IFPI / Federal Association of the Phonographic Industry. Since 2012, Siggi Loch has curated "Jazz at Berlin Philharmonic," one of the most successful and enduring jazz concert series in the capital. For his work as a music promoter, Siggi Loch has received various accolades, including the Federal Cross of Merit, the appointment as "Knight of the Swedish Order of the North Star 1st Class," the Royal Norwegian Order of Merit, the Prize of the German Record Critics for Lifetime Achievement, the WDR Jazz Prize, and the Skoda Jazz Award. ACT also won the ECHO Audience Award for Label of the Year four times in a row.