In 1968, Ella Fitzgerald (1917–1996) was on tour in Europe, possibly with material from her upcoming album Misty Blue. For the concert at Rheinhalle (today: Tonhalle) Düsseldorf on February 8, Günther Kieser designed a colorful poster in DIN A1 landscape format.

For “ELLA” and “’68”, he used a typeface that might have originated around 1899 at the Theinhardt foundry under the name Viktoria. In 1967, Kieser already worked with Viktoria for his Soul Time poster.

In January 2024, Michele Casanova released his open-source digitization under the name DisSenso.

A guitar with eyes, mouth, and horns (of a devil, or of a bull?), plus tightly spaced Pump Bold, for a tour poster designed by Günther Kieser.

Jack Bruce (1943–2014) was a Scottish bassist and until 1968 a member of Cream, who also collaborated with many other bands and artists, including Jimi Hendrix, Lou Reed, Frank Zappa, and Soft Machine. In 1972, he was touring Germany with his own band and material from his third studio album, Harmony Row. The support act mentioned in Franklin Gothic Condensed was Czesław Niemen (1939–2004), a Polish singer-songwriter who also performed at the Rock & Jazz Now! opening show for the Munich Summer Olympics earlier that year.

Manuscript Capitals in use with overlayered glyphs and repurposed swash bits, partly masked by photography, for the poster of a Can concert in Hamburg.

We’ve seen designer Günther Kieser employ the same typeface with similar techniques before, in a poster for Tina Turner’s concert at the same location in November 1973, just a few weeks after Can. “Concert 14.10.” is in another Letraset face, the then freshly released Cut-In Bold.

In August 1973, Can brought out their album Future Days. In October, they embarked on a Germany Tour, with Hamburg as the final stop. The poster depicts the five members, Irmin Schmidt, Michael Karoli, Damo Suzuki, Holger Czukay, and Jaki Liebezeit. Japanese vocalist Suzuki left the band around this time. According to all-blues.de, it’s still subject of discussion when exactly this happened. The fan site states that the Hamburg concert took place at Ernst-Merck-Halle (not at Musikhalle as announced on the poster). The comments to Bootleg Archive’s recording suggest it was the last Can show featuring Suzuki.

Damo Suzuki ダモ鈴木 died on 9 February 2024, at the age of 74. RIP.

The shown copy of the poster by Popdom is signed by Irmin Schmidt, now the last surviving member of the band’s classic lineup.

Some of the ultrageometric, spurless “Bauhaus” faces of the late 1960s and 1970s came with a buckload of alternates, see for example Blippo. Pump was not among those. Bob Newman’s 1970 design for Letraset offered no extra glyphs whatsoever.

That didn’t stop resourceful designers to expand on its repertoire. Günther Kieser built some alternate swash caps himself: he unceremoniously extended the R’s leg by attaching the lower part of an L, and engrafted half an S onto the right arm of the Y. The A and S were created in a similar fashion. The hands-on nature and materiality of rub-down lettering facilitated such repurposing and recombination.

For the pictorial part of the DIN A1 poster (60×84 cm), Kieser opted for a similarly playful approach, and doubled Ray Charles’s trademark sunglasses and his smile by means of photomontage.

“The Genius of Ray Charles Show ’71” by the Ray Charles Orchestra featuring the Raelettes (here spelled Raeletts) was presented by Norman Granz. The concert at the Philipshalle Düsseldorf (today known as Mitsubishi Electric Halle) on September 22, 1971, was the only tour stop in North Rhine-Westfalia. The same poster design was used for the show at Musikhalle Hamburg two days later, as well as for the gigs in Frankfurt (October 16), Geneva (Oct. 23), and probably other locations.

Letraset instant lettering sheets with the uppercase letters and numerals (2437) and the lowercase letters (2438) of 72pt Pump

In 1973, King Crimson was on tour to promote their album Larks’ Tongues In Aspic. On November 2, the English prog rock group played the Audimax Hamburg.

Günther Kieser’s poster is exclusively typographic. Maybe the band’s name was considered more attractive than photos of the musicians: after all, all founding members except for Robert Fripp had been replaced shortly before. “King Crimson” is rendered as a pile of tumbling and partly overlapping glyphs from Premier Shaded. The shaded caps feature a rainbow gradient fill and, if you look closely, they cast yet another shadow on the background, for more dimensionality. The second I got a dot, probably to improve legibility.

Two giants who left us this year: Tina Turner, the Queen of Rock ’n’ Roll, passed away on May 24, 2023. Günther Kieser, the German King of Concert Posters, died March 22, 2023.

This A1 poster announced a concert of Ike & Tina Turner at Musikhalle Hamburg, with support from Blue Magic. Kieser used two photographs that capture Tina Turner’s vigorous stage presence and combined it with two typefaces that were available from Letraset at the time: Manuscript Capitals and Herkules. The former doesn’t include any numerals. Kieser simply made them himself: the 7 appears to be composed from parts of a mirrored F and V, while the 3 is a mirrored ampersand.

The show took place fifty years ago, on November 6, 1973, promoting the album Nutbush City Limits. Three years later, Tina fled her abusive husband, filed for divorce, and launched her highly successful solo career.

The liberation of typographic letterforms: some seventy years after its creation, Viktoria (a.k.a. Phoenix, Medea) leaves the page and starts to fly. Thanks to the possibilities of photographic lenses, poster designer Günther Kieser could present the show’s lineup as if the multicolored words were projected onto the bodies of soul duo Sam & Dave, accompanied by a shower of stars.

Soul Time was jointly organized by Lippmann & Rau and the Youth Welfare Office of the City of Frankfurt. It took place on November 11, 1967, at Kongresshalle Frankfurt. In addition to Sam & Dave, the evening offered performances by Percy Sledge, Arthur Conley, Little Charles, Linda Carr, and Sam Baker.

Concert poster for the Grateful Dead’s only stop in Germany on their European tour in fall 1974, at the Olympiahalle in Munich. The poster was designed by Günther Kieser, who died earlier this year, just short of his 93rd birthday.

From the description by Heritage Auctions:

It features a very colorful bust dressed up in Dead fashion through the eyes of Kieser. Worked into his creation are skeleton & rose elements and even a Jerry Garcia “U.S. Blues” top hat. Speaking of which, the Dead were on tour behind From the Mars Hotel, released three months earlier.

The band name is shown in contoured and tightly spaced Pretorian, with some letters overlapping. The late-Victorian heavyweight is contrasted with caps from Condensed Sans Serif No. 7 (Stephenson Blake, 1893). Additional text is added in two weights of Helvetica.

Joni Mitchell and Jackson Browne, both signed to Asylum Records, played the Jahrhunderthalle in Frankfurt, Germany on May 9, 1972. The poster for the concert organized by Lippmann & Rau was designed by Günther Kieser.

For Mitchell’s name, Kieser chose Apollo. This design distinguished by diagonal double braces and curling terminals was possibly inspired by the earlier Flirt (Farmer, c. 1886). Apollo originated in 1902 at the Aktiengesellschaft für Schriftgießerei und Maschinenbau in Offenbach – less than 20 miles east of the concert venue in Frankfurt-Höchst. Kieser used it in all caps, joining the serifs in MI and LL, and filling the space between the double braces with blue. In order to enable tight linespacing, J had to let go off its descender. And H got a completely new form – in the typeface, this character follows the minuscule construction that was common in blackletter, and by extension also in many more-or-less hybrid faces from around 1900.

The rest of the display typography is set in two widths from Windsor, tightly spaced.

Dimensions: 46.4×33 in. (118×84 cm)

Dimensions: 47.2×33.4 in. (120×85 cm). Headline in Orbit Shaded.

Poster for the concert at Berlin’s Deutschlandhalle on November 24, 1971

Reproduced from: Welt aus Schrift: Das 20. Jahrhundert in Europa und den USA, edited by Anita Kühnel, Kunstbibliothek Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, 2010. The poster (offset, 118.7×82.6 cm) is part of the Kunstbibliothek collection, Inv. Nr. 14059394.

An almost dirty poster for the Berliner Jazztage in 1972, designed by Günther Kieser (1930–), who designed most of the festival posters since the festival started in 1964 until 2000.

The font in use is Frankfurter which was released by Letraset two years earlier. The typography consists of a photography of a block of text, with artists names inked in different colours, ready to make print, or just after having made a print (which would show mirrored type). The space between the letters is dirty, as if this block has been used many times before — which of course is not the case.

But... how did Mr. Kieser set the type? On a closer look, it seems like the type has been cut from a polymer- or rubber-like material. In many names, letters overlap one another (e.g. DY in Curdy, MM in Jimmy Smith).

If anyone can shine a light on how to proceed from a layout with dry transfer lettering to a machine-cut (?) block of text, I would love to hear/read it.

Detail

Generic concert poster by Günther Kieser for the Germany tour of the Miles Davis Group in 1971. In order to properly stack the lines of text – set in Letraset's Zipper – the tittle on the i in the bottom line was discarded. For balance, a dot of a question mark or exclamation mark was added as a tittle on the I in ‘MILES’.

From the Illustraction blog:

(...) Günther Kieser, the Premier German concert poster artist of the second part of the 20th Century. Born in Germany in 1930, he designed over three hundred concert posters (and in a lesser measure movie posters) between 1955 and now and established his style as one of the most visually arresting and iconoclastic of this genre, bringing it into the museums around the world.

The generic poster above was created for Miles Davis 1971 German Tour when the trumpeter was at his most adventurous musically – having freed himself from the traditional Jazz, to incorporate more modern rock sounds, creating what is now called “fusion”. The colors and design of the poster perfectly capture this.

Poster for the show at Jahrhunderthalle Frankfurt

Posters for the German leg of Fats Domino’s European tour 1973, presented by Lippmann+Rau with Robert Paterson.

The typeface is Bottleneck, released by Letraset the year before. Tony Wenman’s bottom-heavy design was likely inspired by the success of Chwast Art Tone, and is most similar to its Boot Black style (AKA Tulo).

Tour poster with all dates

Günther Kieser designed this poster for B.B. King’s short 1971 tour of Germany put on by famed German concert agency Lippmann + Rau.