Peter Brötzmann, photographer in Buffalo, N.Y., in 2010.
Marek Lazarski/Wikipedia
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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 commonplace totally free improvisation, and helped outline the phrases for a postwar European avant-garde, died at his house in Wuppertal, Germany, on Thursday. He was 82.
His loss of life was confirmed in statements from TROST Information and FMP-Publishing, which each launched his music.
Brötzmann’s sound might be gruff and garrulous, or knifelike and squalling, at all times 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 vitality 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, conserving 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 known as it Machine Gun, and its launch in 1968, coupled with the hair-raising bluster of the taking part in, resonated with worldwide protest towards the Vietnam Struggle. “Basically, the ’60s have been fairly violent occasions,” Brötzmann defined in a 2018 dialog with the Pink Bull Music Academy, alluding not solely to Vietnam but in addition political violence and assassinations in america and past.
“Alternatively, our era of the after-war guys, we needed one factor: we needed to do away with previous stays of Nazi stuff,” he added. “We did not get any solutions from our mother and father. They did not need to discuss it. So we needed to discover solutions for our questions elsewhere.”
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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 relatively a visible artist: he studied portray, and fell in with the unconventional, anti-establishment Fluxus motion.
He was musically impressed by American jazz artists who handed by — not solely the New Orleans saxophone pioneer Sidney Bechet, but in addition 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 Prompt Composers Pool, which generally labored as a 10-piece orchestra.
For a style of Brötzmann in full fury, you possibly can 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.
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Whereas his predominant devices have been tenor and alto saxophones, Brötzmann additionally performed soprano and baritone, together with varied 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 in addition with many Individuals — 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 global free-jazz supergroup known as the Die Like a Canine Quartet, that includes Toshinori Kondo on trumpet, William Parker on bass, and Hamid Drake on drums.
Lately, Brötzmann had struggled overtly with well being points, often preventing by them onstage. Critic Peter Margasak, who fashioned a relationship together with his music in Chicago and now lives in Berlin, remembers a number of of those current performances in an homage on his Substack e-newsletter, Nowhere Avenue. 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.”
