I don't know exactly why that was, I never had it, but I remember in the early years, late '60s and early '70s, there was quite a strongly expressed opinion against including Americans on festival programming.
Well, it was two things at once. You still admired the American musicians, but you also were saying you didn't need them. Very normal father relationship.
I remember when we played in Donaueschinger in '66 or '67 with Globe Unity: Shepp was there, with Beaver Harris, a very good band, two trombones, Roswell Rudd and Grachan Monchur, Jimmy Garrison; they played after us. I think everybody admired Shepp in a way we wouldn't do now. I mean, we were still the young Europeans looking up to them, even if we didn't admit it, we did… I guess it's really normalized now. But those were phases of emancipation; you have to kill your father for awhile, or tell him to leave you alone. In the late '60s, early '70s, step by step we did that.
- Peter Brötzmann
In 1999, W. G. Sebald opens his book On The Natural History of Destruction like this:
“Today it is hard to form an even partly adequate idea of the extent of the destruction suffered by the cities of Germany in the last years of the Second World War, still harder to think about the horrors involved in that devastation.”
Later he adds, “There was a tacit agreement, equally binding on everyone, that the true state of material and moral ruin in which the country found itself was not to be described. The darkest aspects of the final act of destruction, as experienced by the great majority of the German population, remained under a kind of taboo like a shameful family secret, a secret that perhaps could not even be privately acknowledged.”
Perhaps most poignant of all is this, “I spent my childhood and youth on the northern outskirts of the Alps, in a region that was largely spared the immediate effects of the so-called hostilities. At the end of the war, I was just one year old, so I can hardly have any impressions of that period of destruction based on personal experience. Yet to this day, when I see photographs or documentary films from the war I feel as if I were its child, so to speak, as if those horrors I did not experience cast a shadow over me, and one from which I shall never entirely emerge.”
I think, when we consider the music coming from post-War Germany, we must also consider it in this context. I can’t imagine having grown up in that environment. However, that is precisely the environment that German free improvisational musicians like Peter Brotzmann, Gunter Hampel, and Alex von Schlippenbach grew up in.
As much as we like to think that European free “Jazz” was just an extension or copy of the American model, I think the music of these Germans was a call to freedom from national guilt and national victimhood. They no longer wanted to deny the past. They were searching for a way out.
Although Gunter Hampel’s Quintet recorded Heartplants in 1965 and Alexander von Schlippenbach recorded his Globe Unity orchestra in December 1966, I think European free improvisation starts with Peter Brötzmann’s For Adolphe Sax recorded in June 1967. This was the first of two albums he released on his private BRÖ label. The second was Machine Gun. Both were released in very limited numbers.
I did not know about Peter Brötzmann’s BRÖ record label until years after I had bought the FMP label’s reissue of his seminal Machine Gun, which became the album most representative of European free improvisation.
It then took me many years of hunting until I was lucky enough to find the BRÖ original. Art critic Markus Muller writes:
“I cannot look at the cover of Brötzmann’s Machine Gun, the image silkscreened in signal orange on each cover of his 1968 self-released BRÖ 2, without thinking of Warhol’s Electric Chair Series (1963):
and Wolf Vostell’s B52 Lipstick Bomber (1968):
Warhol and Vostell simply were two agents of the two most important visual art movements of Post-War-Culture, namely Pop Art and Fluxus. Brötzmann’s image production especially Machine Gun was so on time and of his time….”
Brötzmann would have known Vostell, who was Nam June Paik’s assistant during the production of his first solo exhibition in 1963 titled Exposition of Music – Electronic Television at the Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal. Brötzmann also worked on that exhibition. I wrote about this in an earlier journey:
,
Later, in 1965 and also at Wuppertal’s Galerie Parnass, Brötzmann worked on the exhibition 24-Stunden, a Fluxus happening that featured Vortell, Joseph Beuys, Nam June Paik, and Charlotte Moorman.
That event, one of the final moments of Germany’s Fluxus movement, was photographed by Ute Klophaus:
Ute Klophaus was one of the most renowned photographers of German contemporary art and a chronicler and contemporary witness of German post-war art. Born in 1940, she is best known for her extraordinary photographic documentation of Joseph Beuys’s performances in the late ‘60s and early ’70s. She also shot the pictures for Brötzmann’s first BRÖ release, For Adolphe Sax.
I like Mats Gustaffson’s comments on this album from his Discaholic Corner site:
Brötzmann’s first recording in his own name… with mighty German bass player Peter Kowald (as well as Brötzmann also based in Wuppertal his whole life), in company of Swedish jazz drummer Sven–Åke Johansson, that left his native country with his drumkit only some years earlier and met with Brötzmann & Kowald in Belgium by accident… managed to find his way to Wuppertal, on a mysterious and full-of-myth-path, to continue his musical research with the two Peters.
This is simply just beautiful music —- full of high energy free jazz blowing of the highest possible quality, with a very very unique interaction between the three players —- this beast will BLOW you away.
“Morning glory”…. Just listen to it… and be swiped away!!!
It has a very definite sound and the music is the earliest example (recorded June 1967) of what later media and educationists wanted to call the Germanschool… we don’t care about those definitions really… we can just confirm what we hear…. And that is a treat!
The music is… ACTIVE, in a way… that just makes this record a CLASSIC and something that everyone neeeeeeds to hear in order to fight the stupidity back.
The 1st edition on Brötzmann’s own BRÖ label, comes with a beauuuutiful silkscreened black & white cover and hand stamped labels. KILLING!
However, it was the SAJ series, a FMP subsidiary label under the direction of Sven-Åke Johansson, that got me digging into the early FMP catalog. For example, I listened first to Willem Breuker Kollektief’s Live in Berlin recorded on SAJ in 1975 at the Workshop Freie Musik (more on this workshop). Then I found ICP Tentet, recorded by SAJ at the 1977 Workshop Freie Musik, which along with Misha Mengelberg and Han Bennink included Peter Brötzmann. These two SAJ recordings of ICP musicians playing at the Workshop Freie Musik actually brought me to the FMP label.
FMP – Free Music Production
More than any other organization, FMP has promoted the internationalism of avant-garde improvisation. Following the lead of American music collectives like the Jazz Composers Guild in 1964, the AACM in 1965, and the Dutch collective ICP in 1967, FMP was founded in 1969 by Jost Gebers and Brötzmann. Gebers explains it this way:
“In the Summer of 1968, Peter asked me whether I could help him get something together because his appearance at the Berliner Jazztage had been canceled over the band’s attire (they refused to wear three-piece suits). Half a year later, I had the possibility to make some things in the Akademie der Kunste (in Berlin). They asked if I could organize something in their exhibition “Minimal Art”. Then, in the summer of 1969, Brörtzmann and I talked about a company for management and things like that. In September I started the company Free Music Production. At the end of the year, we released Manfred Schoof’s European Echoes.”
Much of the FMP catalog grew out of live productions recorded during their Workshop Freie Musik and Total Music Meeting annual events. The Workshops took place in the spring at the Akademie der Kunste and the Meetings took place in the fall at the time of the Berliner Jazztage. These documents help represent a Zeitgeist in European music taking place at the end of the 1960s and early 1970s. These sessions brought together a cross-section of defining Jazz and improvisational music figures, artists looking to break away from norms to establish their own terms and aesthetics - they were a meditation on freedom.
Here’s one more for the road, recorded for FMP in 1977 while Brötzmann and Bennink spent a week in Germany’s Black Forest. From the liner notes: “We took off for about a week at the end of the winter, still some snow on the peaks; it was grim, rainy, cloudy weather, and very cold. We drove in Bennink's windowless Citroën lorry he had painted black. You could see the original blue-gray shining though. Wherever we thought it was nice, we stopped, set up and played a bit. Bennink hadn't taken any drums with him, so he was playing on trees, stones, whatever was at hand. I had clarinets and saxophones, but it was much too cold to get them really working. Han had clarinets, sopranino, and some string instruments and toys..."
Next week, on that Big River called Jazz, we’ll stay in Germany’s Black Forest to discover the SABA record label and then to Munich’s Calig record label, two more historic European independent record labels that documented free improvisation’s development in Germany.
If you like what you’ve been reading and hearing so far on our journey and would like to share this with someone you think might be interested in learning more about our great American art form: Jazz, just hit the “Share” button at the bottom of the page. Also, if you feel so inclined, become a subscriber to my journey by hitting the “Subscribe” button here:
Also, find my playlist on Spotify: From Fred Astaire to Sun Ra.
Feel free to contact me at any time to talk shop. I welcome and encourage that….
Until then, keep on walking….