Peter Brötzmann - Biography
Although “ferocity” is practically the first word in any description of the playing of German reed master, Peter Brötzmann, a closer listen to any of his many recordings will reveal the inner logic of a man fully in control of his instrument. He’s not just a wild free blower, but someone who has worked hard on his sound. In a 2007 interview with David Dacks, he says “I like the physical way of playing: a horn has to sound, to go somewhere...At that time, people see what they want to see, and hear what they want to hear, and for them I was just the loudest, very brutal saxophone player who couldn’t actually play the horn, it just was loud.” While the inspiration of Albert Ayler is apparent in his work, he actually reached his sound on his own, before he’d heard Ayler, and the influence and appreciation grew later.
Peter Brötzmann was born in Remscheid, Germany on March 6, 1941. Interested in painting as an adolescent, he studied at the the art academy in Wuppertal. Although he was involved with the FLUXUS art movement, and had exhibited in Holland and Germany, Brötzmann grew dissatisfied with the gallery scene. Music up until then had been purely an interest, since he’d been listening to jazz classics from a young age. Soon he began to teach himself to play clarinet, then the saxophone family. Attending a Sidney Bechet concert while at school made an “amazing impression” on Brötzmann, as he later told Dacks; “it turned me on to the music more and more.” Although music quickly became the focus of Brötzmann’s energies, he never stopped creating art and has been deeply involved in the graphic design of his many albums and CDs.
His first musical experiences in the early Sixties were in semi-professional jazz groups, playing a variety of styles from Dixieland to bop. During 1962 and 1963, he regularly performed in a trio with bassist Peter Kowald and a succession of drummers, playing in their own style that combined the structures of jazz with the improvisational freedom being emphasized in electronic music at the time. But it wasn’t easy for them. “Whenever Peter Kowald and I showed up somewhere on the same bill people would start to laugh anyway” is how he described the period to Dacks. “That changed a little bit when they found out that people like Steve Lacy and Don Cherry took Kowald and me quite seriously.” The trio of Brötzmann, Kowald and Swedish percussionist Sven-Åke Johansson began playing together in 1965. A combination of the trio and a sextet co-led by pianist Alex von Schlippenbach and trumpeter Manfred Schoof became the first Globe Unity Orchestra, which recorded for the Saba/MPS label in December 1965.
In June 1967, Brötzmann established the Brö label to release the trio’s first recording, For Adolph Sax (who probably never imagined his creation could scream and roar the way Brötzmann played it). Brötzmann, who has since recorded on soprano, alto, tenor, baritone and bass saxophones, various clarinets, and the Hungarian tarogato, made his debut on tenor and baritone. The next project for Brö, Machine Gun, is a legendary classic of European free improvisation. It features an octet of Brötzmann, once again on tenor and baritone saxes, fellow woodwind players Willem Breuker on tenor sax and bass clarinet and Evan Parker on tenor, plus pianist Fred Van Hove, bassists Kowald and Buschi Niebergall, percussionists Johansson and Han Bennink. Uniting players from Germany, Holland, Sweden, and England was radical enough, and the political ramifications were clear, in an era when the smallest public gesture had a political dimension. The wild abandon of the musicians as they realized Brötzmann’s simple open structure was met with shock and dismay at the first public performance. But as Brötzmann says, the musicians “realized there is an audience. A bunch of young guys have been waiting for this kind of music so we kept on going.” Machine Gun has been re-issued by Atavistic, with notes by the leader plus alternate takes and the initial performance at the Frankfurt Jazz Festival (2007 Atavistic).
In 1969, Brötzmann and Jost Gebers formed the FMP (Free Music Production) label. The first release was European Echoes with Brötzmann and a pan-European cast in a big band led by Schoof. FMP also re-issued the two Brö albums, giving the records somewhat wider exposure. (Both have since been re-issued on CD by Atavistic along with many others in the label’s FMP Archive Series.) Virtually all of Brötzmann’s recordings as a leader in the Seventies and Eighties appeared on FMP. Brötzmann began to work more regularly with Dutch musicians, including pianist Misha Mengelberg. He briefly formed a trio with Breuker and Bennink before settling in 1970 on what turned out a long-lasting group with Bennink and Van Hove. Sometimes joined by other musicians who could stand the intensity of their delivery, notably trombonist Albert Mangelsdorff in a series of 1971 concerts in Berlin, the trio was Brötzmann’s main vehicle in the Seventies. He also appeared with successive editions of von Schlippenbach’s Globe Unity Orchestras, the ICP Tentet, and in various workshops organized at free jazz festivals. When Van Hove left the trio, Brötzmann continued with Bennink as a duo. A subsequent trio with two South Africans, bassist Harry Miller and drummer Louis Moholo, ended sadly with Miller’s fatal automobile accident in December 1983.
Steady work and appearances at festivals increased Brötzmann’s circle of associates through the late Seventies and early Eighties. He hooked up with bassist/producer Bill Laswell, guitarist Sonny Sharrock, and drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson to form the free-improvising ensemble Last Exit. Their combination of in-your-face, free-funk wildness attracted some major label attention, leading to the band’s only studio record, Iron Path (1988 Virgin). The rest of the quartet’s releases, on Enemy, MuWorks, and Atavistic, come from live recordings, only fitting for a group that took the risks of complete improvisation every time they walked out on stage. Laswell, on electric basses, and Brötzmann, sticking to his 1923 Conn bass saxophone, made the powerful duo album Low Life (1987 Celluloid). There was also a duo with Sharrock, Fragments, recorded live in Chicago (1989 Okka Disk).
Performances and recordings with artists as diverse as his son, electric guitarist Casper Brötzmann, Laswell associate guitarist Nicky Skopelitis, the British electronic improvisers B Shops For the Poor, Americans including bassists Fred Hopkins and William Parker, pianists Cecil Taylor and Marilyn Crispell, and Europeans including trombonist Paul Rutherford, saxophonist Werner Ludi, percussionist Tony Oxley, and bassist Barry Guy, kept Brötzmann busy in the Eighties and early Nineties. A 1995 concert with saxophonist Thomas Borgmann and pianist Borah Bergman led to further recordings with Borgmann’s Ruf Der Heimat ensemble as well as the trio gem Eight By Three (1996 Mixtery) with Bergman and multi-instrumentalist Anthony Braxton. A developing collaboration with Chicago-based percussionist Hamid Drake, which began in 1992, led to a new set of like-minded musicians in the burgeoning Windy City scene. The Die Like a Dog quartet, with Drake, Parker and trumpeter Toshinori Kondo, is his continuing tribute to Albert Ayler. Starting in 1996, Brötzmann made annual visits to Japan and semi-annual visits Chicago. In 1997, at the suggestion of journalist/instigator John Corbett, Brötzmann organized an octet with multi-instrumentalists Ken Vandermark and Mars Williams, Jeb Bishop on trombone, Kent Kessler on bass, Fred Lonberg-Holm on cello and Drake and Michael Zerang on drums. An extremely successful first performance encouraged Brötzmann to continue working with the band. In the years since, with a variety of composers contributing to the band’s strategies, and the infusion of new players, like multi-instrumentalist Joe McPhee and reedist Mats Gustafsson, the Peter Brötzmann Chicago Tentet has thrived and grown in surprising directions. Brötzmann told interviewer Gérard Rouy that as “long as we all have the feeling we like to do it, we try yes [to keep it going], but it never should get a kind of institution.”
Out of economic necessity, most creative musicians need to juggle working bands with guest spots and short-term collaborations in order to make a living. In the first decade of the 21st century, in addition to periodic work with the Tentet, with saxophonist Frode Gjerstad in both duet and quartet formats, the occasional reunion with Bennink, solo recordings, and in various combinations with the Chicago crowd, Brötzmann also maintains an ongoing trio with electric bassist Peter Friis Nielsen and drummer Peeter Uuskyla. The Brö label was revived in 2003 for special editions of some of his most personal projects, beginning with an album of duos with drummer Walter Perkins, released only on vinyl. In late 2005 he had a major art retrospective exhibition, jointly with Han Bennink in two separate buildings separated by a glass corridor in Brötzmann's home town of Remscheid.
The ever-curious Brötzmann, concludes his interview with Dacks by stating that “just listening and sometimes meeting people and then finding out what’s possible, I think that’s what I would like to do.” True to his vision of music as a life-long commitment to learn and develop your own sound, Brötzmann continues to seek out new opportunities and situations for creative growth.
