Peter Brötzmann, photographer in Buffalo, N.Y., in 2010.
Marek Lazarski/Wikipedia
disguise caption
toggle caption
Marek Lazarski/Wikipedia
Peter Brötzmann, photographer in Buffalo, N.Y., in 2010.
Marek Lazarski/Wikipedia
Peter Brötzmann, a German saxophonist whose brash, tempestuous outpourings set an imposing customary free of charge improvisation, and helped outline the phrases for a postwar European avant-garde, died at his residence in Wuppertal, Germany, on Thursday. He was 82.
His loss of life was confirmed in statements from TROST Data and FMP-Publishing, which each launched his music.
Brötzmann’s sound may very well be gruff and garrulous, or knifelike and squalling, all the time with a ferocious dedication to the second at hand. Few figures in free jazz ever sustained a voice so unsparingly intense, over so lengthy a tenure. “His medium is screaming power music with a intentionally manic edge,” wrote the American critic John Litweiler in his e-book The Freedom Precept: Jazz After 1958. That pronouncement was made practically 40 years in the past; remarkably, Brötzmann solely stored increasing that legacy, preserving a working tempo as prodigious as his type.
He started his recording profession in 1967 with a steely provocation: For Adolphe Sax, named after the inventor of the saxophone, and that includes a trio with German bassist Peter Kowald and Swedish drummer Sven-Åke Johansson. Brötzmann self-released that album on his personal label, Brö, signaling rugged independence from the beginning.
His second album on the label had a seismic affect; he referred to as it Machine Gun, and its launch in 1968, coupled with the hair-raising bluster of the taking part in, resonated with worldwide protest in opposition to the Vietnam Conflict. “Typically, the ’60s had been fairly violent occasions,” Brötzmann defined in a 2018 dialog with the Crimson Bull Music Academy, alluding not solely to Vietnam but additionally political violence and assassinations in the US and past.
“Then again, our technology of the after-war guys, we wished one factor: we wished to eliminate outdated stays of Nazi stuff,” he added. “We did not get any solutions from our mother and father. They did not wish to speak about it. So we needed to discover solutions for our questions elsewhere.”
YouTube
Brötzmann was actually born into wartime, on March 6, 1941, within the western German city of Remscheid. He began out not as a musician however somewhat a visible artist: he studied portray, and fell in with the novel, anti-establishment Fluxus motion.
He was musically impressed by American jazz artists who handed via — not solely the New Orleans saxophone pioneer Sidney Bechet, but additionally vanguardists like multi-reedist Eric Dolphy. Brötzmann later recalled that he discovered his personal freedom of musical expression after touring to Amsterdam, the place he met free-thinking Dutch musicians like drummer Han Bennink and pianist Misha Mengelberg. For a time, he was a member of their Immediate Composers Pool, which usually labored as a 10-piece orchestra.
For a style of Brötzmann in full fury, you might do worse than this live performance clip from 1974 in Warsaw, Poland, that includes Alexander von Schlippenbach on piano, Peter Kowald on bass and Paul Lovens on drums.
YouTube
Whereas his major devices had been tenor and alto saxophones, Brötzmann additionally performed soprano and baritone, together with numerous clarinets and the tárogató, a reed instrument heard in Hungarian people music. And he collaborated not solely with a number of generations of European improvisers but additionally with many People — notably within the experimental scene in Chicago, the place he had a loyal disciple and champion within the multi-reedist Ken Vandermark.
Brötzmann additionally recorded with titans like pianist Cecil Taylor, drummer Andrew Cyrille and guitarist Sonny Sharrock; a 1987 duo summit with Sharrock noticed launch roughly a decade in the past, beneath a sometimes unprintable title. (The 2 additionally labored collectively in Final Exit, alongside bassist Invoice Laswell and drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson.) For greater than a decade, Brötzmann led a world free-jazz supergroup referred to as the Die Like a Canine Quartet, that includes Toshinori Kondo on trumpet, William Parker on bass, and Hamid Drake on drums.
In recent times, Brötzmann had struggled brazenly with well being points, sometimes preventing via them onstage. Critic Peter Margasak, who shaped a relationship along with his music in Chicago and now lives in Berlin, remembers a number of of those current performances in an homage on his Substack publication, Nowhere Road. One such efficiency was at Jazzfest Berlin final fall, with Drake on percussion and Majid Bekkas on Moroccan guembri; it has been launched on the ACT Music label as Catching Ghosts. “It was profoundly transferring,” Margasak writes, “and Brötzmann had summoned some divine energy, pushing the music excessive into one thing outstanding.”
