On October 6, 1944, Efim Schachmeister died of heart failure in Buenos Aires, aged 50, a long way from the Berlin dance palaces where Deutsche Grammophon had billed him as the “King of all Dance-Violinists.” Born Chaim Chaissowsky in Kiev, he trained at Berlin’s Stern Conservatory, came up through a gypsy-style salon band, and by the mid-1920s was leading a hot dance orchestra at the Hotel Excelsior and the Palais de Danse, moving from ragtime toward jazz; his 1927 “St. Louis Blues” crossed blues phrasing with something closer to the shtetl. As a Jew and a jazzman he was doubly unwelcome after 1933. He went to Luxembourg, then Argentina, playing nightclubs and stints in La Paz and Lima, often without steady income. Meanwhile the Nazis’ Lexikon der Juden in der Musik, a blacklist, conceded he had been a “defining” jazz bandleader of the Weimar years. After the war his widow pursued West German compensation for years and was repeatedly refused on bureaucratic grounds.
The Stolperstein for Efim Schachmeister outside his former home at Hauptstraße 5, Berlin-Schöneberg, laid in March 2014. No freely licensed photograph of Schachmeister himself is known. (Photo: OTFW, Berlin; CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
Sources: Efim Schachmeister — Stolpersteine in Berlin (born Kiev, July 22, 1894; emigrated to Luxembourg 1933, then Buenos Aires; died there of heart failure on October 6, 1944; “König aller Tanzgeiger”; widow’s West German compensation claims repeatedly rejected on bureaucratic grounds) , Efim Schachmeister — Wikipedia (Deutsch) (born Chaim Chaissowsky; Excelsior, Barberina, Palais de Danse; Lexikon der Juden in der Musik p. 258 calls him a “tonangebender Jazz-Kapellmeister”; Luxembourg, Buenos Aires, La Paz and Lima, often without income; AMIA burial record giving death date 06/10/1944, La Tablada cemetery) , Efim Schachmeister — Wikipedia (Stern Conservatory 1910–13; Popescu gypsy band; billed by Deutsche Grammophon as “King of all Dance-Violinists”; 1927 “Saint Louis Blues” mixing blues and shtetl style; died in Argentina 1944) , Efim Schachmeister, König der Tanzgeiger — grammophon-platten.de (born Chaim Chaissowsky in Kiev, 1894; most productive recording years 1925–28; emigration via Luxembourg to Argentina; died in Buenos Aires October 6, 1944)
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