Brötzmann and Free Jazz?

Man, you don’t play scales, you don’t play harmonies, you just don’t! What do you play? I mean, I like it....

“Free Jazz, I never liked that. That word. Because it always gave reasons for a lot of misunderstandings. There is not the type of freedom that many people from the very beginning thought - that you could do what you want. Of course you can’t. Because if you are on stage together, you want to build up something together.”

Peter Brötzmann

In Bremen in May 1968, against a backdrop of seething revolutionary fervor and political unrest throughout Europe, Peter Brötzmann recorded the monumental record, Machine Gun, on his label, BRÖ:

Machine Gun has long been characterized as a radical European take on the aggressive sounds of John Coltrane’s Ascensions, but I don’t totally agree with that assessment. I feel the roots of Brötzmann’s sound go much deeper.

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I think that jazz in Europe has seldom been the same thing as European Jazz.

Pretty much everything in post-war European culture was directed by American tastes and economics. Therefore, it seems entirely reasonable that jazz, as ostensibly an Afro-American art form, would follow suit. However, in the late 1960s, the seeds of a distinct European Jazz sound were sown by a small group of musicians led by Peter Brötzmann, Alex von Schlippenbach, and Willem Breuker, who created a platform that extended beyond and perhaps independent of American influences.

I really can’t recall the first time I heard “Free Jazz”. But then again what is Free Jazz? This was a question I started to ask myself within the last few years, long after I left Chicago. But in Chicago in the late 1990s, I was first confronted with this music that had to be reckoned with.

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The Empty Bottle

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, at the North Sea Jazz festivals, I heard some strange music played by Willem Breuker’s Kollektief, and John Zorn’s Speedfreak was stunning and new to me. However, it was when I saw Peter Brötzmann’s Tentet at the Empty Bottle in 1997 that I was faced with music altogether different than anything I had ever heard before.

Sometime in 1996, I befriended Ken Vandermark and had been listening to his various bands at that time. Then, there was a lot of buzz going around the north side that Ken had convinced a German saxophonist, Peter Brötzmann, to come to Chicago to form a tentet. Admittedly, I had no idea who Peter Brötzmann was at the time. Here they are, with tenor Mats Gustafsson in the middle, tenor Ken Vandermark just behind him on the right, and tenor Peter Brötzmann on the far right:

In January of 1997, The Peter Brötzmann Tentet played at the Empty Bottle. This was music even more different than Sun Ra’s music, with both Marshal Allen and John Gilmore playing their instruments with wild abandon.

In a 2012 interview, Brötzmann shares an important point: “I remember sitting after a concert somewhere with John Gilmore, the saxophonist of Sun Ra, and he heard my band and he said, ‘Brötzmann, man, you don’t play scales, you don’t play harmonies, you just don’t! What do you play?’ I mean, he liked it, he just couldn’t see some kind of construction in the music.” He goes on to add another important point, “If you look back, especially to American music, there was never such a break. American music never went away from a kind of theme, a kind of composition.”

Hearing the Peter Brötzmann Tentet was an important step in my Jazz journey. It was the first time I had heard European “Jazz”, not Jazz played by European musicians. I liked it. It brought me later to legendary European collectives that, like Sun R’s Saturn, developed their own labels to record and distribute their own music: landmark labels like Peter Brötzmann’s BRÖ and later FMP and Willem Breuker’s Dutch labels ICP and BVHaast.

I find Ralph Ellison’s words, which I shared a few weeks ago, critical: “But if you would tell me who I am, at least take the trouble to discover what I have been.” I think to understand the roots of European “Jazz”, we must first try to understand the men who played it. One such man is Peter Brötzmann.

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Peter Brötzmann

Then:

…and now:

Peter Brötzmann says that what influenced him most about the special setup of the Machine Gun band was “the experience of a concert of the Lionel Hampton big band with a beautiful hardcore tenor saxophone frontline playing “Flying Home”. I loved that so much and got so impressed that I gathered the tenor players together we had at that time, Gerd Dudek was the 4th member of the gang in the beginning, he couldn’t make the recording date.” Here are the three:

• Tenor Saxophone – Evan Parker

• Tenor Saxophone, Baritone Saxophone – Peter Brötzmann

• Tenor Saxophone, Bass Clarinet – Willem Breuker

Machine Gun was radical in many ways. Brötzmann’s octet was probably the first truly European group: Brötzmann and bassists Peter Kowald and Buschi Niebergall from Germany, Parker from England, Breuker and drummer Han Bennink from the Netherlands, Sven-Åke Johansson from Sweden, and pianist Fred van Hove from Belgium.

Peter Brötzmann considers himself a normal jazz player. His favorite sax players are Coleman Hawkins and Sonny Rollins. He started playing Dixieland at school but was more interested in art than music. He was trained as a visual artist in his hometown of Wuppertal, Germany, in the late 1950s, and his early musical career as a saxophonist and clarinetist was paralleled by his first art exhibitions in Holland and Germany. Brötzmann assisted Nam June Paik on Exposition of Music-Electronic Television, Paik’s first installation at Galerie Parnass in 1963. Brötzmann is in the lower left corner.

This cut-off ox head was mounted above the entrance of the gallery. As was the tradition in Korea when there was a large festival or celebration, they put up above the entrance the head of the ox they would be eating at dinner. Interesting custom.

The early 1960s was a very progressive time in Köln for music: the Avant-garde American jazz bands were touring in Europe then; Stockhausen had just opened his electronic studio, and hosting many of the modern classical musicians like John Cage and Lukas Foss; and Mauricio Kagel had moved there from Argentina to experiment with combined music and theater. Slowly, over the years, music and the brotherhood of music became more important to Brötzmann. But where did his sound come from? I think this short video, German Blues, helps explain a little.

For a terrific and more in-depth picture of Brötzmann’s story go here. An outstanding hour-long interview at the Red Bull Music Academy.

At the time Machine Gun came out, in Germany, a whole generation born into the horror of Nazi rule and wartime destruction was raising its voice in a cry of ‘never again’. This is a picture of Kölner Dome after the war, not far from where Peter grew up.

In a 2012 interview, Peter Brötzmann tells a little about the German post-war experience:

“What happened to us in Germany is a kind of trauma of our generation. I know Peter Kowald thought the same way and I know Alex von Schlippenbach thinks the same way. As a German, I come back to my own history. Of course we are guilty for what happened in Germany in the war. But there is a very special German fate, there is a great shame there and a terrible kind of trauma. And that’s why maybe the German way of playing this kind of music sounds always a bit different than the music from other parts of Europe, at least. It’s always more a kind of scream. More brutal, more aggressive. When we started we thought, OK, enough Art Blakey, enough Horace Silver, enough of form and notation and measures and all kinds of ways. We don’t need that.”

At the end of the day, he was just looking for something new and outside the Jazz tradition.

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Powerful Beauty

In the course of a century, jazz has traced the same trajectory that Western music did over half a millennium: a drive toward freedom, self-consciousness, and autonomy. 12-tone music in the 1920s was a break with tradition in the same way Free and improvised Jazz was in the 1960s. In this way, Coleman, Braxton, and Brötzmann are true allies of Cage, Boulez, and Stockhausen. These were the people that crossed real boundaries and if they remain somewhat obscure, perhaps it’s because they crossed a boundary that mattered.

This low-fi 1974 live performance in Warsaw with Peter Brotzmann - reeds, Alexander von Schlippenbach - piano, Peter Kowald - bass, and Paul lovens - drums gives us a pretty good idea where they were going:

In a 2005 interview from Wire magazine, German pianist, improviser and composer Alex Von Schlippenbach gives a slightly different take on the sound and draws a line between Jazz and improvised music:

I am a jazz musician, albeit a white, European, German one. Besides that, I don’t see much of a difference between what I do and the American progressive jazz tradition, certainly nothing like a separate European jazz. If I like someone’s playing I don’t give a damn where he comes from. If we have to distinguish between approaches at all, then we should think in terms of improvised music and free jazz. Improvised music can be more or less anything, whereas free jazz is definitely coming from the jazz tradition. I prefer to call my music free jazz. That hasn’t changed over the year.

When asked if he thought his music was violent, von Sclippenbach answered, “Violence isn’t a nice word, maybe. Power, perhaps. I never had the idea of destroying something. Always building it up - that’s a creative necessity. Strength and power. That’s alright. And beauty. Powerful beauty.”

When I think about Free Jazz, I think that pretty well sums it up for me.

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Although this isn’t totally free jazz so to speak, I’d like to close with a 2013 song from Mats Gustafsson’s trio, The Thing. Mats is a powerhouse and original member of the Peter Brötzmann Tentet. And you will see from this song that he comes from punk roots. I like the punk rock influence he brings to jazz - Peace & Fire:

Mats newest band, The End is outstanding. I recommend listening to their newest release Allt Är Intet.

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One more thing, feel free to send me requests. Just send them in the comments section. I have one already - Hoagy Carmichael, who I’ll get to a little further down the road. But before we get there, and to lighten things up, here is a quick taste of something of his I like, sung by Bing Crosby:

I’m not sure where our journey will take us next week. I’ll wait and see if I get some requests….

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Until then, keep on walking….