Peter Brötzmann

Alarm
Atavistic ALP257CD

Brötzmann/Mangelsdorff/Sommer
Pica Pica
Atavistic ALP258CD

Two more valuable CD reissues of Wuppertal, Germany-based saxophonist Peter Brötzmann’s work for FMP in the 1980s once again show his versatility. One disk offers proof positive that the hard-driving reedist can easily hold up his side in an all-star trio configuration, while the other shows how he helps spark aural fireworks in a nonet situation.

Ironically the aptly-named Alarm almost ended up being more than a fanciful “blast from the past”. This Hamburg radio gig with a multi-national cast of nine Free Jazzers had to be interrupted after the 40 odd minutes captured on the disc were recorded because a phoned-in bomb threat meant that the audience, technicians and musicians had to quickly evacuate the hall.

Lacking the extra-musical drama of the other date, Pica Pica is just as incendiary, with Brötzmann playing tenor, baritone and alto saxophones and tarogato as one part of a little-recorded trio. His front-line partner is veteran trombonist Albert Mangelsdorff, then in the most experimental phase of his long career, but the real surprise is the presence of Günter “Baby” Sommer on traps set and horn. Like Han Bennink of the Netherlands –

Brotz’s usual percussion partner – Sommer is an all-around drum master. Unlike Bennink, he resides in East Berlin, on the other side of the then-existing wall, so he was just starting to interact with non-East Block players.

You couldn’t tell that from this session. Sommer’s tambourine shuddering cymbal raps, intense cross sticking and triplet flams and rattles add heaving tension to the tunes, which take on new dimensions when he releases the beat. As the trombonist and reedist bluster away on two long improvisations and the short title track, Sommer contributes blunt polyrhythms, using sticks, brushes, palms and fists to provide vivid brush strokes of aural color. The jokey and jittery “Pica, Pica” makes the greatest use of the drummer’s faux parade-drill timing. But his harsh ruffs and bulldozer-like press rolls are in evidence throughout.

Rotating among his horns like a mini-reed section Brötzmann spins from steady air raid siren glossolalia on alto to inchoate, near bagpipe-like timbres on tarogato and slurry and smeary reed undulations on baritone. His characteristic stratospheric glottal punctuation is often evident, as are his mouse-squeaking altissimo tones. Once, when he seems to be soloing on two different horns, it becomes apparent that the secondary timbres are from Sommer’s horn.

Articulating chromatic grace notes and whinnying plunger tones, Mangelsdorff’s triple-tongued slurs make common cause with the saxophonist’s staccato phrasing. Often accompanying as well as soloing, his pedal-point lilt sneaks in a common Bop riff at the end of “Wie Du Mir, So Ich Dir Noch Lange Nicht” to keep the proceedings on track as the piece downshifts to muted harmony.

Triple the brass, reed and rhythm on Pica Pica, and you approximate the cacophonous polyphony that arises during Alarm’s extended title track. Surprise at this explosion is a moot – but definitely not a mute – point when you consider the other players. The rhythm section is made up of German Free Jazz big band leader Alexander von Schlippenbach on piano plus two European-domiciled South African expatriates, bassist Harry Miller and drummer Louis Moholo. Brass was Japanese trumpeter Toshinori Kondo – who would reunite with Brötz for the Die Like A Dog band in the 1990s – and two trombonists: modern gutbucket stylist, East German Johannes Bauer, and British trombonist Alan Tomlinson, who was also a member of the London Jazz Composers Orchestra.

Joining Brötzmann on reeds is Willem Breuker from the Netherlands, then (1981) closer to his Free Jazz roots than his later composerly stance; plus American tenor saxophonist Frank Wright, a first generation New Thinger then part of the burgeoning Yank jazzmen-in-Europe-Diaspora.

Driven by the dense and unyielding rhythm section – that in Miller’s case also encompasses shuffle-bowing tremolo and stretched sul ponticello jetes – the massed band exposes the robust theme, variations of which are utilized by the horn section as linking motifs that connect the solos. And what solos they are.

Von Schlippenbach is at his most manic, turning high-intensity pummeling into a metronomic fantasia of exaggerated note clusters and patterns. Kondo contributes half-valve squeezes and brassy slurs, while the stop-time dual trombone theatrics include guttural, spittle-encrusted blasts and metal-scraping concussive expansion.

Not that the reedists are outdone. Except for an off-kilter, a capella raggedy march – is it a mess call or a mail call? – the majority of the saxophone timbres undulate almost physically. Parlando and flutter tonguing, each of three saxmen at times gets involved in double counterpoint with an individual brass player until hyper-fast piano motifs push the tune forward. Slip-sliding, roller-coaster-like coils and twists are expressed by both horn families, as are snorting, basement-level expositions and shrill altissimo timbres. Eventually the high-level pan-tonality gives way to conclusive slurs.

While it’s difficult to isolate individual soloist, there’s no doubt that it’s Wright who sings the jivey lyrics to his own brief “Jerry Sacem”. A rhythmic blues, the undemanding melody and Moholo’s backbeat easily speed the audience outside the studio without anyone being panicked about the purported bomb threat.

Luckily this part of the concert was preserved. It, along with the other CD fills in some gaps in European Free Jazz history. But both are exhilarating listening as well.

-- Ken Waxman

Track Listing: Alarm: 1. Alarm Part 1 2. Alarm Part 2 3. Jerry Sacem

Personnel: Alarm: Toshinori Kondo (trumpet); Johannes Bauer and Alan Tomlinson (trombones); Willem Breuker (alto and tenor saxophones); Peter Brötzmann (tenor and alto saxophone); Frank Wright (tenor saxophone); Alexander von Schlippenbach (piano); Harry Miller (bass) and Louis Moholo (drums)

Track Listing: Pica: 1. Instant Tears 2. Wie Du Mir, So Ich Dir Noch Lange Nicht 3. Pica, Pica

Personnel: Pica: Albert Mangelsdorff (trombones); Peter Brötzmann (tenor, baritone and alto saxophones and tarogato) and Günter “Baby” Sommer (drums and horn)

November 14, 2006

PETER BRÖTZMANN CHICAGO TENTET

Be Music, Night
OkkaDisk OD 12059

This CD may ruin saxophonist Peter Brötzmann’s long-held reputation as the ferocious, hard-hearted wild man of Free Jazz.

For the entire hour-plus CD by the German reedman’s mostly Chicago-based band is designed as homage to American poet Kenneth Patchen (1911-1972). Additionally, the longest – more than 42 minutes – of the three tracks features mellifluous-voiced Welsh poet Mike Pearson integrated into the ensemble reading selections from Patchen’s work that are, for all intents and purposes, love poems.

Patchen, an Ohio-born versifier who lived all over the United States, was a Beat fellow traveler, with a musical quality in some of his poetry. Even before similar experiments by Jack Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Alan Ginsberg, in the late 1950s he recorded LPs reading his verse accompanied by improvising jazz combos. In a way this CD is an extension of those experiments.

Framed by an all-instrumental prelude and even shorter postlude, BE MUSIC, NIGHT unfurls like a tone poem for chamber orchestra. Of course with the massed talent on display – three reeds, two brasses, two strings and two percussionists – the layering provide more than interludes. Mixing brass slurs and pedal tones, expressive reed continuo and stop-time percussion forays, the framing instrumental passages manage to be both lyrical and polyphonic.

Furthermore, to put to rest another Free Jazz myth, the German reedist’s playing has never been as coarse as his detractors insist. As long ago as 1984 he recorded a solo CD, since reissued as 14 LOVE POEMS PLUS 10 MORE (FMP CD 125), which featured improvisations inspired by Patchen’s “14 Love Poems”.

Multiplying the interpretations of the poet’s lyrics nine-fold here, much of the instrumental elucidation depends on tutti passages or impetuous and unexpected fortissimo ejaculations. Besides the horn brays and slurs, cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm is particularly effective in transforming his four strings into an electric guitar spraying discordant effects pedal timbres.

Almost deliberately old-fashioned at times, as if Pearson was reading Elizabethan sonnets, the verse is mixed with tender nocturne-like pitches that are almost as honeyed as the poet/actor’s near whispered tones. But romantic language doesn’t have to bring forth banal responses. Among the textures advanced by the saxophonists – most obviously Brötzmann, though Mats Gustafsson and Ken Vandermark clarinet passages are noticeable as well – are tongue slaps, vibrating key clicks and pops and slurred cries. Also especially effective are the grace notes buzzed by trombonist Jeb Bishop, whose valve-and-bell expansion often partners Pearson’s recitation.

An unexpected pleasure all around, BE MUSIC, NIGHT should appeal to those interested in dramatically recited poetry, those fascinated by the admixture of words and music, and those whose understanding of emotionalism encompasses sound and silences as well as lyrics.

-- Ken Waxman

Track Listing: 1. Be Music, Night Part 1 2. Be Music, Night Part 2 3. Be Music, Night Part 3

Personnel: Joe McPhee (trumpet and alto saxophone); Jeb Bishop (trombone); Peter Brötzmann (alto and saxophones, bass clarinet and b-flat clarinet); Mats Gustafsson (baritone saxophone and bass clarinet); Ken Vandermark (baritone saxophone and b-flat-clarinet); Fred Lonberg-Holm (cello); Kent Kessler (bass); Paal Nilssen-Love and Michael Zerang (drums); Mike Pearson (voice)

January 2, 2006

Multiphonics in the Middle East

Taking stock of Lebanon’s Improv scene
From CODA Issue 323

By Ken Waxman

“I was born the same year of the Lebanese war, and I lived in it until its end and in fact I’m more and more convinced that there’s a close relation between it and my kind of playing today,” explains Beirut-based trumpeter Mazen Kerbaj, 30. “A lot of my passion for this music [Free Jazz] comes from my childhood, it reminds me unconsciously of the soundscapes of bombs and rifles that filled my ears during my childhood.”

War and bombs aside, the CD that so affected Kerbaj and his friends and introduced them to Free Jazz, was Peter Brötzmann’s Machine Gun, complete with its war-like cover. This initiation soon led to he and other like-minded players amassing as many Free Improv CDs as they could by the likes of Evan Parker and Charlie Haden.

The lessons took so well that by 2000, Kerbaj and husband and wife improvisers, guitarist Sharif Sehnaoui and alto saxophonist Christine Sehnaoui – who spend part of the year in Paris – organized and played Beirut’s first improvised music gigs. Having established the only Free Scene anywhere in the Middle East outside of Israel, the three didn’t stop there. In 2001 they structured an annual International Festival for Free Improvised Music, called Irtijal – which means improvised in Arabic – in Beirut, and it’s still growing.

Having invited advanced players from France, Belgium, Germany, Norway and the United States to play alongside Lebanese improvisers in previous festivals, the most recent Irtijal festival and workshops, which took place in early July, came full circle to Kerbaj’s original influence. Saxophonist Brötzmann was a featured guest, playing in a duo with American drummer Michael Zerang. Among the other non-local participants were saxophonist John Dikeman and clarinetist Gene Coleman from the United States; British guitarist Mike Cooper; Swiss clarinetist Markus Eichenberger; and French guitarists Pascal Battus and Quentin Dubost, plus soprano saxophonist Stéphane Rives from Paris.

As well as their own solo spots, all the international musicians save Brötzmann played with local improvisers in formations ranging from trios to big bands. Additionally, improv concerts now take place outside the festival proper. In 2003, for instance, the Sehnaouis, Kerbaj and French-Vietnamese percussionist Lê Quan Ninh gigged in the village of Salima. This year the three Lebanese founders plus Zerang played in Deir El Kamar and adding Coleman, performed the first concert of improvised music in Zahleh, in eastern Lebanon

Zerang, who played in Cairo in the 1980s and in Yemen with Brötzmann in 2004 was impressed by the enthusiastic listeners. “I’m thrilled to be taking the music to a potentially new and different audience,” he declares. “I think this form of freely improvised music will reach a new audience at a very exciting time in their history. Having and icon like Peter [Brötzmann] here also gives the festival extra authenticity,” he adds.

Regarding his collaborations with local players, percussionist adds that “we western artists can learn a great deal from the artists in Lebanon, as their rich traditions of arts and culture are so obviously healthy and on display.”

Today, Lebanese audiences’ initial skepticism towards the music has disappeared, explains Kerbaj, with more than 100 people attending some festival concerts. “For a small country like Lebanon, that’s quite a lot.

“The audience is also special because they’ve never heard this music before and it’s a huge surprise for their ears and eyes. One day after a concert, for instance, a guy came up to me saying: ‘That’s great! You invented a new music.’ You rarely find these reactions in Europe.”

Even more gratifying to Kerbaj is the number of local musicians encouraged by the festivals and workshops who now play improvised music themselves. Although the number is small, the players come from different backgrounds including rock – sucvh as guitarist Charbel Haber – contemporary, ethnic musics and theatre – like bassist Raed Yassine, who is also an actor.

There are also limited opportunities to play outside the country, mostly in France where the Sehnaouis live, although Kerbaj himself did a short tour of the United States in 2004. Surprisingly, notes the trumpeter “our most incredible experience with a good audience was in Damascus [Syria].” This enthusiasm was for a trio made up of him, guitarist Sehnaoui and bassist Yassine, was “in a country where you can hardly even find a rock CD,” he adds.

More international players are finding their way to Lebanon and earlier this year a new label dedicated to improv called Al Maslakh (the slaughterhouse in Arabic) was created. Al Maslakh has so far released CDs by Rouba3i – which means quartet in Arabic – made up of Kerbaj and the Sehnaouis plus one additional instrumentalist, and Kerbaj’s solo disc.

Despite the country’s somewhat fractious political situation, an outgrowth of the 1975 to 1990 civil war and subsequent Syrian presence, the trumpeter maintains that improvisers are never bothered by censorship “because we are mainly ‘underground’ and nobody really hears about us, except people interested in what we do.”

With CDs available, more gigs with locals and outside players, Kerbaj hopes that one day what he describes as “the first Arabic scene for improv” will spread to neighboring countries like “Syria, Jordan and maybe even Iraq.”

Festival link: www.irtijal.com

Improvisers Website: www.zwyx.org/mill

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Lebanese Improv on CD
:

•Rouba3i5: Mazen Kerbaj, Ingar Zach (Norwegian drummer), Christine Sehnaoui and Sharif Sehnaoui (Al Maslakh 02)

•Brt Vrt Zrt Krt: Mazen Kerbaj trumpet solo (Al Maslakh 01)

•Abu Tarek: Mazen Kerbaj and Franz Hautzinger trumpets (Creative Sources CS 025)

•Franz Hautzinger’s Oriental Space: Mazen Kerbaj, Franz Hautzinger ,Sharif Sehnaoui, Helge Hinteregger (Artonal ARR 08)

•A: Mazen Kerbaj, Sharif Sehnaoui and Raed Yassine (Thèque ) –the first CD of Arab improv every released

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Improvisers active on the Beirut scene
:

*Marc Codsi - electric guitar

*Charbel Haber - electric guitar

*Mayalynn Hage - voice

*Jassem Hindi – clarinet and mixing board

*Abdallah K - laptop

*Mazen Kerbaj - trumpet

*Bechir Saadeh – clarinet and flute

*Christine Sehnaoui - alto saxophone

*Sharif Sehnaoui - electric guitar

*Raed Yassine - double bass

September 7, 2005

Northern Sun, Southern Moon, Europe’s Reinvention of Jazz

By Mike Heffley
Yale University Press

By Ken Waxman
July 23, 2005

Gifted with an imaginative thesis – the migration of innovative free music from the African-American community of the United States and its adoption and mutation by Europeans – Mike Heffley’s book encompasses interviews, analysis, musicology and philosophical concepts. Unfortunately, the academic emphasis makes some of it a hard slog for the lay reader. Often non-linear, as benefits a book on Free Jazz, the narrative is so discursive at points that it resembles those John Coltrane solos where the variations so outdistanced the theme as to almost make the head an afterthought.

Heffley, who has a PhD in ethnomusicology from Wesleyan University, has over the past quarter-century worked as a writer and editor – his previous (1996) book was The Music of Anthony Braxton – as an educator, teaching both music and creative writing, and as an improvising trombonist, most prominently with Braxton.

Northern Sun, Southern Moon is the first comprehensive English language study of what Heffley terms Euro Jazz’s Emanzipation; the period after 1960s when local jazz musicians went beyond the previously paramount American influence to shake off centuries of Western music conventions and create unique sounds. As French, bassist Didier Levallet says: “With the advent of free jazz the breakdown of forms believed to be eternal opened the door to all possibilities … the lesson the ‘new music’ taught us was to finally become ourselves”. Taking his cues from psychiatry and sociology as well as musicology, Heffley describes the change as empowerment or more theatrically “kill the fathers”.

Although the book’s subtitle is Europe’s Reinvention of Jazz, the author’s attention is more focused. While he devotes some space to innovations in the rest of Europe, including the former Eastern Bloc, his concentration is on Germany, both its western, and – most definitely before the fall of the Berlin Wall – its eastern section. Described by some as a Utopia of Free Jazz, Germany was where entire Outside Music festivals flourished while even individual concerts were sparsely attended elsewhere in Europe.

A series of socio-political considerations were responsible for this situation, explains Heffley, who intertwines the growth of the seminal Free Jazz label FMP plus mini-portraits of about a dozen or so pioneering Free Jazzers to make his point. According to his thesis – which is buttressed or diverted by secondary information, so frequently do multiple footnotes decorate these pages – Germany, at least since J.S. Bach, has been the centre of Europe, and thus of contemporary serious music.

Brushing off the assertion that one Free Jazz centre, Germany’s Ruhr Valley region, was with its agricultural economy and peasant population “something like the American South”, he’s on firmer ground when he points out that African-American saxophone and brass traditions that fed directly to jazz – and gave German musicians a base against which to rebel – itself grew out of the brass bands prominent in the U.S. before the beginning of the 20th century. Fascinatingly, the loudest and most accomplished players then were of German origin, he states.

After the Second World War, when Nazi xenophobia tainted previously glorified Teutonic music associations, the German tradition of self-criticism dating back to Goethe found an outlet in improvised sounds. Simultaneously a strain of anti-Americanism, which reached a pitch in the 1968 leftist student uprising throughout the continent, and especially in Germany, solidified this focus on distinctive Free Jazz.

These manifestations took different forms, as his profiles attest. German trombone master Albert Mangelsdorff, for instance, started off as a mainstreamer, and after a free flirtation, has returned to his roots. Pianist Joachim Kühn, whose church musician associated upbringing in Leipzig historically links him to Bach, mixes a strain of romanticism into his work – an outgrowth of a long residency in France. His earliest recorded work bordered on free form and he is the only pianist to have recorded in duo with Free Jazz avatar saxophonist Ornette Coleman. But – and Heffley’s linkages between Bach and Coleman gives weight to this – it’s likely the Texas saxophonist valued Kühn for his non-Free Jazz conception. Certainly most of his other work has bounced among modern New music, jazz-rock and contemporary jazz with so-called classical inferences. Interestingly enough, both Mangelsdorff and Kühn achieved American fame long before any of the others profiled here.

More generic to the tome are the careers of saxophonist Peter Brötzmann and pianist/band leader Alexander von Schlippenbach, who are among the founding fathers of West German Free Jazz. Schlippenbach, like vibist/reedist Günter Hampel, who also figures in the tale, was one of the German hard boppers converted to free sounds in the 1960s; and who has stayed true to them ever since. Spiritual and philosophical, his Globe Unity Orchestra, which has existed on-and-off for three decades, was a non-hierarchical, collective big band dedicated to the universality of Free Music, matching organized arrangements with the talents of Europe’s top improvisers.

With influences ranging from pan-Germanism and other ethnic sounds, contemporary classical echoes and standard jazz – as a pianist Schlippenbach was impressed by Oscar Peterson as well as Thelonious Monk and Cecil Taylor – the band’s performances and records were as often frustrating as triumphant. Mostly now the pianist concentrates on trio work with British saxophonist Evan Parker among others.

Referring to Brötzmann, Parker has said “… the music [is an] expression of a way of life. On-stage, off-stage, it’s all one thing: an intensity of experience which has to be communicated. Peter embodies that...”

If anyone symbolically couples what the author calls “the barbaric spirit of the Northern forests” that flourished in German pre-history with the unbridled freedom of avant jazz, than it’s the Wuppertal-based saxophonist. Growing up in what was then a small town removed from the action, Brötzmann’s involvement in leftist politics and the Fluxus art movement helped him evolve “a sound so big and dirty that one note implied within it all the notes in the octave”. His first LPs, Machine Gun and For Adolphe Sax, defined his – and many other Continental improvisers’ – go-for-broke, try-anything aesthetic, which in a multitude of settings from solo to big band with fellow international players, he’s maintained until today.

The heart and most fascinating part of the book however, is shaped around telling the back-story of the members of East Berlin’s Zentral Quartet: pianist Ulrich Gumpert, self-described Saxon drummer Gunter “Baby” Sommer, saxophonist Ernst-Ludwig Petrovsky and trombonist Konrad Bauer, who started as a rock singer with a large youth audience which, incredibly, he brought along with him to free music.

Facing a pseudo-Stalinist culture that supported so-called socialist realism like sanctioned Gebraunchmusik or “useful music” over free expression, their situation was much different than that of Free Jazzers in prosperous West Germany. Paradoxically this led to government support as often a repression, since jazz was as often seen as reflecting a cry against racism and decadence, with its Nazi era echoes. Fittingly, Heffley explores the pre-free roots of East German jazz in comprehensive details, mentioning almost-forgotten gigs, LPs, band leaders, art, literary and threatre influences and visionary soloists.

“East Germans were not only less worried about being seen as imitators of Americans, they were also less guilt-ridden about their own German history,” he writes. When translated into free music, this added a Teutonic strain – a variation of East German blues – “Afro-Slavic soulmating” plus a use of old Germanic hymns as a basis for improvisation – that had been ignored and self-suppressed by West Germans. With visits by Western players and East-West collaborations more common, regular concerts broadcast on the state-supported radio networks and series of East German LPs on FMP available, East German musicians’ profiles rose. Acclaim and steady work, first in Eastern Bloc countries, then West Germany and the rest of Europe eventually appeared.

Although theoretical Gumpert states “for me there is no such thing as GDR [German Democratic Republic i.e. East Germany] jazz” the situation for free jazzers in the GDR changed with unification. With Western commerce in all its manifestations replacing state support, Gumpert and Petrovsky, the later of whom said ironically before the fall of the Berlin wall that jazz musicians “didn’t have enough problems”, are now often mere jobbing musicians, the later concertizing with his pop-jazz-gospel singing wife. Sommer has a teaching position and often tours, whereas Bauer is a festival fixture throughout Europe and North America.

“It does seem clear that Petrovsky and Gumpert enjoyed relatively more fulfillment than frustration of their gifts in the GDR, that Sommer and Bauer were more chafers at the bit, and that the latter are having an easier time of it now that the bit is removed”, Heffley notes.

Leaving aside this important reportage and analysis, the rest of Northern Sun, Southern Moon, links to earlier sections and becomes progressively more theoretical and academic. Seemingly intent on wrapping every musical current into the volume, Heffley uses German bassist Peter Kowald’s many international musical alliances as the lead-in to a necessarily cursory discussion of non-Western improv and its links to earlier Western music. “It seemed to me that the more people try to make something that is new to them, the further back they go into the depths of time, to the old, in their own sphere”, he writes. This theory however, sounds like it could be the basis for an entire other volume of work.

Like Petrovsky and Gumpert in their milieu, it appears that the author has “relatively more fulfillment than frustration of [his] gifts” when writing about the GDR than the twists and turns of Free Jazz as part of the global commercial music business.

Additionally a thickset of charts, graphs and tables begins haunting the pages around this time. Earlier on, and in these sections, his discursive detours into historical, social, political and cultural contexts of the music slows down the narrative, and as the chapters unroll the non-specialist begins to feel guilty for not possessing a thorough knowledge of the theories of Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin among many others. Especially in the expository, rather than the descriptive sections, Heffley sometimes falls prey to cumbersome overwriting. For instance, one obtruding run-on sentence is 138 words [!] in length. Furthermore words like “hetarchy”, “individuation” and “liberatory” aren’t in most persons’ vocabularies. Conversely, although at times they distract from the narrative, Heffley’s minute analysis of important Free Jazz sessions adds to the significance of this volume.

At his best – when dealing with German free music – Heffley has produced a ground-breaking and insightful volume. Non-specialists may wish however, that there wasn’t so much rococo decoration around its solid core.

July 25, 2005

EVAN PARKER TRIO & PETER BRÖTZMANN TRIO

The Bishop’s Move
VICTO cd 093

A extraordinary face off between veteran improv titans or as they prefer to say at the Victoriaville festival, un première mondiale, this meeting combines British saxophonist Evan Parker’s touring group with German reedist Peter Brötzmann’s Northern American band. More of a rapprochement than a battle royal, the 73½-minute session, recorded live at Quebec’s Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville in 2003 categorically accentuates the similarities rather than the differences between the two improv power trios.

Could it be otherwise? Although Parker is famous for highly technical extended reed techniques like everlasting circular breathing, and Brötzmann is portrayed as the emotional, heart-on-his-sleeve Free Jazzer, they’ve collaborated at various times since the late 1960s. Parker, for instance, is on the German saxophonist’ seminal MACHINE GUN session in 1968. Brötzmann’s association with German pianist Alexander Von Schlippenbach, here officially as part of the Parker band, goes back even further and is more intense, since the two were initial members of the Globe Unity Orchestra. Parker recorded with New York bassist William Parker of Brötzmann’s trio in pianist Cecil Taylor European Orchestra in 1988. Only percussionists Paul Lytton, a Belgium-dwelling-Briton, and Hamid Drake of Chicago don’t have an extended history of playing with members of the other bands or each other. But considering both are among the most prominent on-call drummer in the global improv scene, connections have long been made.

That said, while “The Bishop’s Move” is a notable piece of high-intensity improv, there are only patches of interaction between members of the different trios, let alone among all six musicians at once. Customarily one threesome plays alone, followed by another triad grouping. Most of the time its Von Schlippenbach’s characteristic solos cum accompaniment that bridge the gap between both bands, especially when reed extravagance is highlighted.

Both woodwind players widen the playing field with distinctive slurs and snorts, after the initial Brötzmann renal explosion commences the onslaught. Shortly after the primary statement though, Parker’s trio takes centrestage. Mixing the saxman’s slurring, quacking counter tones and irregular vibrations with the pianist’s contrasting keyboard dynamics and high intensity fantasia of splayed notes, the section turns on Lytton’s pinpointed shattering clatter. Shadowing Parker -- his playing partner of 30-odd years -- the drummer uses cymbal snaps and snare rumbles to modulate the saxophonist’s timbres from elongated, repetitive snarls to the whorls and sprints of circular breathing.

Unexpectedly the pianist’s low frequency tremolos and descending runs not only reinforces a less programmed approach from Parker, but also help orchestrate a Free Jazz, rather than Free Music orientation. With the reedist pitch-vibrating and tongue-stopping, the three display triple counterpoint, each expressing complementary but very separate lines.

Von Schlippenbach’s resounding recoils from the piano innards test the instrument’s balanced tension and abrasively signal Brötzmann’s entry, first with a broken counter line to Parker, then almost immediately, with screaming altissimo and extenuated smeary honks. Power chording from the pianist also overcomes the faint thump of Parker’s bass, until Drake’s ratcheting snares and the pop of hollow percussion moves the sound into the other trio’s corner. Abrasively stroking his hourglass-shaped djembe and other surfaces with sandpaper-like swipes, Drake’s interlude, coupled with an interjection of metronomic arpeggios from the pianist, sets up the German reedist’s utilization of the tarogato for oddly accented, serpentine lines. Added to this is constant ascending pressure points from the bassist.

After Brötzmann’s distinctive choked screams and triple-tongued action finally brings out a split-second of screaming flattement from Parker’s sax, the German-American trio reconfigures itself. Drake’s African-oriented cavernous djembe reverberations serve as the perfect counterweight to the mellow, European-oriented chirrups Brötzmann produces from his clarinet. True to his reputation however, the German reedist is soon exploring the register above coloratura, making incursions to nephritic territory. When he quiets down though, hearty, iron-fingered pizzicato plucking is evident along with restrained portamento color.

Climax is reached as both saxophonists display their idiosyncratic tenor tones, the German snorting and the Briton flutter-tonguing. On top of the bassist’s shuffle spiccato and Drake’s cross sticking, they draw closer together, ejaculating screaming overtones that wouldn’t have been out of place in the militant days of 1968. Egged on by

dynamic patterns from Von Schlippenbach, the two echo one another’s note-placement in the instant composition’s penultimate minutes, with the finale a cross patterning of the pianist’s cadenzas and restrained breaths from the saxophones that fade to dead silence.

Subsequent tumultuous applause characterizes how exciting the ride has been, with only crotchety reviewers eager for more distinct trio interaction.

-- Ken Waxman

Track Listing: 1. The Bishop’s Move

Personnel: Evan Parker (soprano and tenor saxophones); Peter Brötzmann (tenor saxophone, tarogato, a-clarinet); Alexander Von Schlippenbach (piano); William Parker (bass); Paul Lytton (drums and percussion); Hamid Drake (drums, djembe and percussion)

March 28, 2005

RAPHE MALIK QUARTET

Last Set: Live at the 1369 Jazz Club
Boxholder BXH 042

BRÖTZMANN CLARINET PROJECT
Berlin Djungle
Atavistic Unheard Music Series UMS/ALP 246CD

Getting an understanding of the situation for committed free improvisers in Europe as opposed to the United States in the mid-1980s is pretty obvious when listening to these two live CDs, recorded about two months apart, both of which happen to have William Parker in the bass chair.

In early November 1984, German reedist Peter Brötzmann put together an international, all-star, 11-piece “Clarinet Project” for a special concert in a Berlin theatre as part of that city’s Jazzfest. Beside himself the clarinetists were Tony Coe from England, Louis Sclavis from France, East German Ernst-Ludwig Petrowsky and J. D. Parran and John Zorn from the U.S. But that’s not all. The ensemble also included Japanese trumpeter Toshinori Kondo, East German Johannes Bauer and Briton Alan Tomlinson on trombones, with British drummer Tony Oxley supplying the bottom along with Parker. By all accounts the one lengthy piece was welcomed by the audience.

Across the ocean in Boston, hometown boy trumpeter Raphe Malik was doing a series of local club dates with a trio filled out by Parker and drummer Syd Smart. This CD, recorded at Cambridge’s 1369 Jazz Club, is particularly notable, since the trio was joined by pioneering New Thing tenor saxophonist Frank Wright in his only Boston-area gig. A long-time expatriate and Paris resident, Wright died in 1990. Here too the audience is enthusiastic, but you get the feeling that for most Bostonians -- heck, Americans -- this performance could be dismissed as just another club date by players too stubborn to adopt the fashionable fusion or neo-con styles of the time.

Unsurprisingly -- for pertinent pure improv is about a lot more than in-the-moment fashion and audience accessibility -- both performances feature considerable musical values that recommend them.

Take LAST SET for instance. Undeterred by the fact that this was just another club date, Malik, Wright, Parker and Smart give their all. Maybe they didn’t know how to improvise any other way. Wright especially is so caught in the moment that when he’s not forcing out emotional reed riffs he vocalizes quasi-verbal exhortations during the others’ solos.

This mostly tales place on “Companions #2”, the almost 30-minute centrepiece of the disc. Performed hell-bent-for-leather, it shows that neither front-line partner had lost any efficacy from his so-called 1960s (Wright) or 1970s (Malik) prominence.

From the beginning, Wright slurs and slides and growls and overblows, putting R&B-flavored mid-range vibrated snorts and deeper-pitched honks into his solo. As he mutates variations of the blaring theme, he masticates sounds from the lowest section of his horn’s bow up to the cork attached to his mouthpiece. Malik’s broken octave accompaniment converges with rapid, spiky triplets and sprightly hide-and-seek timbres.

As the trumpeter solos, Wright, caught up in the moment, begins a weird sort of Free Jazz style vocalizing filled with mumbled asides, Bronx cheers and lip trumpet action. Behind him Parker’s speedy arco line reaches a sul ponticello crescendo, while Smart, who labors as a public school teacher as well as playing as a valued local musician, uses his bass drum and sock cymbal to resonate heavy nerve beats and drum paradiddles.

One climax is reached as Malik spews machine-gun style triplets that are soon joined by Wright’s irregularly voiced tenor. As the saxman’s mid-tempo variations on the theme turn to variations on variations -- featuring only a few R&B snorts -- Malik come up with a separate, but complementary theme of sweet, high-pitched grace notes and some bugle-call intimations. Swaying spiccato from the bassist slow the tune down for the finale with splattered triplets from Malik serving as the coda.

Featuring heraldic trumpeting from Malik, double-tongued fanfares and the odd satisfied grunt from Wright, “Sad C”, the first track, is more of the same. However, “Chaser” the final number is an exercise in freebop, which judging from its title, may be a contrafact, with a new head superimposed upon the existing set of changes from Monk’s “Straight, No Chaser”.

Wright’s influences are blusier than bop, however, and his slurred pitch and wide vibrato encourages Malik to sound plunger-focused theme variations as Parker walks and Smart plays a shuffle. Ever heard finger-popping Free Jazz? Here is it in volume. Soon the reedist is snorting raucous riffs over and over again as Malik shrills rubato broken chords in tandem with him. Pedal point chortles and bubbling colored air confirm that the band is still in free territory, but the audience reacts as if it was in attendance at a James Brown performance.

With three times the brass capability and six times the reed power, Brötzmann and company’s polyphony has much more volume but about the same amount of energy as Malik’s quartet on its single almost 50-minute piece. Strangely for a clarinet showcase, the CD begins with a Scottish bagpipe-type air from Brötzmann’s tarogoto that’s quickly joined by the wavering pitch of the other reeds, including Sclavis’ wiggling bass clarinet.

Using tongue slaps for emphasis, the theme’s first development leaves the rhythm section to cleave to the bottom as the horns increase the volume while spurting squeaks and trills. One quarter of the way through, the brass finally asserts itself, with elephant-like trumpeting plus hippo-like snorts and snores from the trombone. Cutting through the responding reed pitches are oddball, vocalized static and whistles, probably courtesy of Zorn’s clarinet mouthpieces. Playing entire passages in ear-splitting altissimo, he alternates harsh raspberries, duck-like quacks and plush toy squeaky timbres. Oxley’s anvil-like bass drum blows and clip-clop cymbal tempos keep things on an even keel until a parlando trombone solo, possibly from Bauer, rouses the audience’s applause.

As Parker’s strums and Oxley’s rhythmic power reins in the jagged peaks and valleys of the horn lines, one sibilant romantic tone supersedes the others. Probably from the clarinet of Coe, whose experience encompasses studio and commercial big band work as well as freer episodes, it provides a moderating influence on the contrapuntal discord around him that starts to resemble ornithological mealtime. With the muted ‘bones supplying rubato counterpoint, the reeds form quivering accordion-like harmonies leading to a finale of sky-high honks and twitters.

The bassist’s screechy sul ponticello lines and the drummer’s irregular patterning on cow bell, wood block and ride cymbal seem merely an afterthought or solo reward for yeoman accompaniment service. Recapitulating the beginning, Brötzmann reintroduces the tarogato and attempts, on pure lung power, to go one-on-one with Oxley. Percussion strength barely triumphs, but only because a posse of other reeds joins in for a postlude of polytonal split tones.

A singular experience BERLIN DJUNGLE produces some memorable textures and must be admired for Bötzmann’s decision to broaden his compositional range. Yet LAST SET also proves that plenty of good music was also being produced far from the spotlight, and which -- like this session -- has only been preserved by happenstance.

-- Ken Waxman

Track Listing: Berlin: 1. What A Day First Part 2. What A Day Second Part

Personnel: Berlin: Toshinori Kondo (trumpet); Johannes Bauer and Alan Tomlinson (trombones); Peter Brötzmann (clarinet, tenor saxophone and tarogato); Tony Coe, Ernst-Ludwig Petrowsky, J. D. Parran (clarinets); Louis Sclavis (clarinet and bass clarinet); John Zorn (clarinet and mouthpieces); William Parker (bass); Tony Oxley (drums)

Track Listing: Last 1. Sad C 2. Companions #2 3. Chaser

Personnel: Last: Raphe Malik (trumpet); Frank Wright (tenor saxophone and voice); William Parker (bass); Syd Smart (drums)

February 28, 2005

B.E.E.K. (BRÖTZMANN/ELLIS/ENEIDI/KRALL)

Live at the Spruce Street Forum
Botticelli 1015

Marco Eneidi is a brave musician.

When it comes to improvising, the diminutive, Bay area alto saxophonist will match his skills against anyone’s. Which is why LIVE AT THE SPRUCE STREET FORUM is such an explosive document. The five longish tracks feature Eneidi facing off with a reedman universally acknowledged since the 1960s as one of the most ferocious on his instruments: German saxist and clarinetist Peter Brötzmann.

Aided and abetted by Vancouver-born, California-based bassist Lisle Ellis and New York drummer Jackson Krall and recorded in San Diego, the CD is a caterwauling yawp of a session. It proves how in the right circumstances it only takes four committed improvisers to make enough characteristic sounds to create their own version of John Coltrane’s ASCENSION, which featured 11 musicians or Brötzmann’s MACHINE GUN which featured eight.

In the years since he helmed that session in 1968, Brötzmann has played with nearly every major figure in international improv. Ellis has worked with the likes of Vancouver pianist Paul Plimley and upstate New York’s Joe McPhee, while Krall is drummer of choice for pianist Cecil Taylor. As for Eneidi, fire-breathing tenor men don’t phase him: he had a longtime relationship with the late Oakland, Calif.-based reedist Glenn Spearman.

Here, hard and heavy reed textures snap all over the place, with great hairy honks from the tenor meeting up with rough, flutter tongued altissimo pitches and irregular vibrations from the alto. Yet, even as the split tones, foghorn honks and glottal punctuation combines into an elongated scream, you realize that there’s more to this creation than exuding pure emotion. Variations of beauty and order endure, along with historical references.

Sometime during the first tune, for instance, Brötz spews out a phrase identical to what Albert Ayler would have sounded during the latter’s ESP-Disk heyday. Aylerian suggestions peek from among other reed punishment elsewhere, while consciously or not, one of the final phrases ejaculated by the veteran closely resembles the connective riff on the original “Machine Gun”.

Promulgating broken counterpoint along with his darting, airy note splatters, Eneidi often works himself and the older saxist into polyphonic and polyharmonic double counterpoint. With bell-shaking screeching obbligatos spilling from both horns simultaneously, there are points where the freak-note tag-teaming resemble that of altoist Marion Brown and tenorist Archie Shepp or altoist John Tchicai and tenorist Pharoah Sanders on “Ascension”.

Unlike Young Lion recreations, those inferences are just that. The two reedists aren’t out to emulate anyone -- not even, in Brötzmann’s case, his earlier self. His clarinet work, which steeplechases from moody chalumeau flattement to trilling aviary undulations proves that here. Meanwhile, neither Brown nor Tchicai, Eneidi’s game plan can encompass a sudden lucid balladic line cut with a bit of steel, as he does on the second tune, or elsewhere where he shreds upper partials with intense triple tonguing. Swaying lines, he can create trumpety tones from his reed as easily as Brötz forces out wide vibrato tongue stops and deep-in-the-body-tube snorts.

Ellis and Krall aren’t left behind either. When he can be heard clearly from within the cacophony, the former rarely walks, but instead displays timbres that include pacific pizzicato chording and a solo that moves from stopping the string and stroking the bass’s ribs to accelerating the rhythmic impetus.

Krall reserves his brushes for the brief periods Ellis solos -- and he can surprise with a standard beat if need be. But most of the time he thumps out backbeats, ruffs and rattles, and equally valuably, exhibits a decisive resounding splat to signal the end of certain tracks.

Looking for excitement? The folks at the Spruce Street Forum would agree that with this CD you’ve come to the right place.

-- Ken Waxman

Track Listing: 1. No. 1 2. No. 2 3. No. 3 4. No. 4 5. No. 5

Personnel: Marco Eneidi (alto saxophone); Peter Brötzmann (alto and tenor saxophone, clarinet, bass clarinet); Lisle Ellis (bass); Jackson Krall (drums)

January 10, 2005

PETER BRÖTZMANN CHICAGO TENTET

Signs
Okkadisk OD 12048

MS4
PETER BRÖTZMANN CHICAGO TENTET
Images
Okkadisk OD 12047

More than five years after it was first organized, German reedist Peter Brötzmann’s mostly Chicago-populated Tentet has become a welcomed presence on the international improv scene.

In the tradition of the Globe Unity Orchestra -- of which Brötzmann was also a member -- the reed-heavy band plays long, involved compositions more concerned with spur of the moment interpretation than elaborate arrangements. Yet, as this matched set of live and studio material demonstrates, the 10-piece band actually sounds best when organized patterns and section work are added to the massed firepower.

Overall, the tentet is most impressive as a full-fledged band. Yet only Ken Vandermark takes full advantage of its varied colors on his more than 37-minute “All Things Being Equal” on IMAGES. Most ambitious and the longest tune on either disc, its overture is made up of gathered horn cadenzas, resonating hand drumming from Hamid Drake and a walking bass line from Kent Kessler. Soon second drummer Michael Zerang pounds out a counter rhythm and, in sections, the brass and reeds pile on top of one another polytonally.

Irregular backing figures from the band, give Joe McPhee’s trumpet the space to push out higher notes with flutter tongue ornamentation. Next up, saxist Mars Williams sprays a circular set of splayed, staccato notes before the theme is reprised for the first time. The split tone sopranino solo continues abstractly -- falling from pinched altissimo to unrefined low timbres -- as the dual drummer pitter-patter and pop behind him. Then, from among the polyphonic harmonies appear sul tasto tremolos from cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm, muted wah-wah trumpet counterpoint, and a gentle pastoral eclogue from the others.

Trombonist Jeb Bishop introduces rubato slurs that bounce off trumpet trills and spiccato sweeps from the strings. Blowing harshly, he gets most of his individualism from echoes. Following is a series of tongue slaps plus key percussion and glottal punctuation from Swede Mats Gustafsson or Vandermark on baritone. Adding lip-smacking verbal tones to ponticello bass movements and hand drumming, this orchestral formation adds up to the DKV trio writ large. Then, trilled slurs from the trumpeter, snaky chalumeau lines from Brötzmann’s clarinet and ride cymbal patter from Zerang are added.

The clarinet’s spittle squeaks soon meet up with baritone snorts and staccato interpolations from the brass. Pushed to a quicker tempo by two drum kits’ rough smears and irregular flutter-tonguing invigorate the reeds as Bishop’s slide ranges over the thematic variations. The climax refreshes all concerned, as horns, percussion and strings meld into a miasmic legato howl, with an Ornette Coleman-like folksy finale arriving with polyphonic counterpoint.

Inspirational in their own way, the other tunes pale in comparison to this one, with the exception of Brötzmann’s title track on SIGNS. But even here, the piece that’s almost exactly half the length of “All Things Being Equal” is most convincing because most of the players get to strut their stuff. With polyharmonic and polytonal passages reminiscent of John Coltrane’s “Ascension” or Brötzmann’s “Machine Gun”, there are instances of the band members improvising every which way as their dissonant textures mass then explode -- a musical foliage of smears, burrs, cries, hoots and snorts. Electrified -- but playing acoustically -- Lonberg-Holm rampages out flat-picked notes as the horns join for hocketing, squealing pantonality.

A double-tongued alto solo from Williams vibrates its way into R&B territory, trailed by battering percussion and stentorian runs from the two baritone saxists. Finally, after Brötzmann snakes out some nasal tarogato notes complete with glissandi, chesty-toned fortissimo reeds circle back to riff counterthemes and the cellist scrapes his strings as if he was severing them at the bridge.

Individual passages stand out elsewhere, but all the other tunes are made up of little more than isolated passages from different instruments with no attempt to bond them into a whole. Impressive they may be, but when soloists are heard a cappella or as duos in isolation, they raise the question of what the other band members were doing -- and why they were present at all. The other glaring oversight here is proper identification of soloists. Much of the description above is based on knowledge and guesswork.

Followers of any of the musicians may rate these sessions more highly -- and there’s certainly nothing second-rate or offensive about them. It merely seems that with the massed talents on display from Chicago and Europe -- not to mention upstate New York’s McPhee -- much more could have been done in terms of arrangements and organization.

-- Ken Waxman

Track Listing: Signs: 1. Bird notes (for Bengt Nordström) 2. Six Gun Territory 3. Signs

Track Listing: Images: 1. All Things Being Equal 2. Images

Personnel: Signs and Images: Joe McPhee (trumpet); Jeb Bishop (trombone); Peter Brötzmann (alto and tenor saxophones, A clarinet, tarogato); Mars Williams (sopranino, alto and tenor saxophones); Ken Vandermark(tenor and baritone saxophones, Bb clarinet); Mats Gustafsson (tenor and baritone saxophones); Fred Lonberg-Holm (cello); Kent Kessler (bass); Michael Zerang and Hamid Drake (drums)

December 6, 2004

CAPOTE

Avenue X
Ninth World Music NWM 029 CD

THE WILD MANS BAND
The Darkest River
Ninth World Music NWM 027 CD

Difficult to imagine, but there are times during AVENUE X when the consolidated sounds of the Capote quartet are so harsh and brutal that in comparison the Wild Mans Band (WMB)’s output appears as restrained and serene as that of the Modern Jazz Quartet.

Not meant as a criticism, this state of affairs merely points out how effectively the vocabulary of pioneering fire-breathers like WMB’s reedman Peter Brötzmann and guest guitarist Pierre Dørge has permeated the fabric of modern improv. From the 1960s on, in the German saxophonist’s case and from the 1970s for the Danish guitarist, they and others proved that noise, speed and volume could just as easily be adapted to jazz as rock music.

The challenge then was having the taste and skill to deal with these add-ons. Subtlety may be lacking from both bands, but both make a go of not burying the improvisations under heavy metal.

A co-op effort between Brötzmann and Danes Peter Friis Nielsen on electric bass and Peter Ole Jørgensen on drums, WMB has a guest on each of its previous releases. Dørge, known for leading the New Jungle Orchestra is featured on this, the band’s third CD, but he played individually with the other three in concerts as early as 1989. His fiery lines and attainable effects mix with the saxman’s nephritic outbursts in the front line, while the bassist and drummer contribute what they can.

Reminding listeners that more Black Metal bands than jazzbos come from Scandinavia, Capote’s molten output could at times be termed Punk Improv or Heavy Metal Jazz, How does No Wave Improv sound?

Intimal to its sound is twin guitars of Copenhagen’s Jørgen Teller and Englishman Rex Casswell. Teller’s background includes what he terms “electroacoustics, black rock, free-form, improvisation, African guitar and rhythm, computer-music, drone-guitar and microtonality”. Casswell has been part of improv rock bands like Bark! and Stock, Hausen & Walkman.

Rounding out the quartet is American freeform alto saxophonist Jeffrey Morgan whose improv associates have included Britons, guitarist Keith Rowe and drummer Paul Lytton as well as German synthesizer manipulator Joker Nies. Drumming is handled by P.O. Jørgens, a member of Cockpit Music, a local band that plays in a similar style. Jørgens uses the name Jørgensen in WMB and seems to revel in the confusion this creates.

There’s nothing refined about Capote. With almost the same instrumentation as the Dave Clark 5, the four race through nine tunes in less than 44 minutes, with no more pauses or downtime than the Ramones brought to their oeuvre. Although there are some intimation of turntable scratching and vinyl hisses on the first and some subsequent numbers, this above all is a guitar band the same way as Wishbone Ash was.

Overall, the most common licks are the irregular pulsation of feedback-laden strings and amplifiers. There’s enough shrieking guitar feedback to impress Merzbow followers, including noisy, buzzing textures and echoes coupled with phaser drones and buzzes that jump from axe to axe. With the drummer’s power pushing right behind them, the two fretmen strum, drone or cascade distorted guitar lines. Without pausing they apply metal bars, capos, e-bows and other implements to the strings to produce acicular tones -- and don’t forget the circuit-breaking buzzes that come from the amps -- plus judicious use of the delay pedal.

One person who does have to pause for breath, though, is saxist Morgan, Most of the time his growling obbligatos, traffic horn squeaks, snaky sax trills, smears and flattement are much closer to Albert Ayler than say, Paul Desmond. Less so-called jazzy than most of his other sessions, at points here his work seems to fit in the mold of No Waver James Chance -- if Chance had more technique and command of his instrument. Among techniques on show are reed chomping and note retching plus inchoate screams. Throughout, his tones are as jagged as barbed wire and as piercing as if they’re being pushed through a strainer.

Jørgens hold up his end with noisy textures that include internal squeaks, heavy press rolls, smashed cymbals and general beat mongering. But true to his improv origins there’s never the mindless pounding you associate with rock music.

On THE DARKEST RIVER, he under his homonymic percussion name -- offers drags, wiggle ratamacues, bounces and rebounds. There are ride cymbal shivers on show and sometimes he almost produces a Native American pow-wow beat. Meanwhile Nielsen maintains the shifting pulse with some rumbling pulsation, buzzes, double stops or thumb pops as needed.

Dørge moves from speedy jazz-rock licks, a fuzztone buzz reminiscent of the beginning of “Day Tripper” and guitar hero histrionics to strategies that would more comfortably fit in the improv world. He creates refractive textures with his phaser and often colors the tunes with polyphonic smears. He strokes high up on the fret board and under the bridge for maximum spikiness and in the penultimate minutes of one tune unleashes some sliding blues-based licks.

Showpiece for the CD is the more than 19-minute “Bioluminescence”. Slower-moving, almost balladic, it centres on the saxman’s snaky ney-like alto playing and slurred, shivering guitar chords that could easily come from an oud. Here Brötzmann snakes his way around the others’ parts, intersecting, but not colliding with the bassist’s steady pulse, the drummer’s thumping cross rhythms and the guitarist’s Arabic-sounding strums. True to form, he sounds out pitch vibrations -- overblowing into the altissimo range -- as well as a steady, renal tone which brings out polyrhythmic cross sticking from Jørgensen and finger picking from Dørge.

This is just a momentary respite, however. “Dead Water,” the almost nine-minute blow-out that follows, has Brötzmann, on woody taragot, double-tonguing, slurring, crying and overblowing as per usual, expelling sound as much from his belly and bowels as his throat and lungs. Dørge too turns up his volume knobs and pedals to meet the saxman’s ejaculations with broken counterpoint of jarring pulse, finally downshifting to feedback drones.

Overall, Longtime Brötzmann followers may link this version of WMB to the co-op Last Exit of the 1980s. Nielsen may be a better bassist than Bill Laswell, but Dørge and Jørgensen, respectively, aren’t the individualists the late Sonny Sharrock and Ronald Shannon were.

In truth, when bands such as Capote have cornered the market on aggression, Brötzmann’s playing with the WMB is more engaging than it was in the 1980s.

-- Ken Waxman

Track Listing: Avenue: 1. Exigency 2. Somatization 3. Antenna 4. Heavy pitch 5. Radar 6. Zita 7. Tolerance 8.Gletscher 9. Ataxia

Personnel: Avenue: Jeffrey Morgan (tenor saxophone); Rex Casswell and Jørgen Teller (guitars); P.O. Jørgens (drums)

Track Listing Darkest: 1. Eastern Messenger 2. Old Mens Pleasure 3. The Darkest River 4. Aeolus 5. Nostromo 6. Bioluminescence 7. Dead Water 8. Rafting

Personnel: Darkest: Peter Brötzmann (alto and tenor saxophones, bass clarinet and taragot); Pierre Dørge (guitar); Peter Friis Nielsen (electric bass); Peter Ole Jørgensen (drums)

November 22, 2004

REVOLUTIONARY ENSEMBLE

The Psyche
Mutable Music 17514-2

PETER BRÖTZMANN
FMP 130
Atavistic Unheard Music Series UMS/ALP244CD

Reissues of two hard-to-find LPs from the mid-1970s point out the differences that had developed between European and American improvisers even at that early date. While both approaches are equally valid, it’s ironic to consider that at this point the Europeans were catapulting harsh, screaming textures reminiscent of the New Thing’s beginning, while it’s the Americans who were more concerned with form and structure in their compositions. Almost 30 years later, the situation is almost completely reversed, though the participants here are mostly committed to their original vision.

Recent reports have had German reedman Peter Brötzmann mellower then he was when this example of European powerhouse improv was released and quickly went out of print. There’s no sign of moderation on this disc, recorded by the saxman and his trio of Dutch drummer Han Bennink and Belgian pianist Fred Van Hove.

Bennink too, when he’s not indulging in schtick, varies his playing a bit more nowadays -- he doesn’t scream at the top of his lungs or bang every bit of junk percussion in sight as he did in 1973. Only Van Hove, who plays both piano and celeste here is as moderate and melodic as he is today, He left the trio, Van Hove says, after he realized he often couldn’t hear his own playing underneath Bennink’s percussion barrage. Still, his present-day, carefully focused projects undertaken with simpatico players like British saxist John Butcher and German trombonist Johannes Bauer, will never be confused with mainstream jazz -- or Van Hove with Oscar Peterson.

On the other hand, the Revolutionary Ensemble was the progenitor of string-focused bands that would follow in its wake both in Europe and North American. True, viola/violist Leroy Jenkins now spends much of his time writing chamber music and in solo performances. But on his own or in groups with saxophonist Joseph Jarman, among others, he still brings the same fire to his playing as he did as an early members of Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Music.

Bassist Sirone, who is both sure-footed and unconventional in his soloing on this nearly lost 1975 session, works in post-bop groups, usually in Europe. Percussionist Jerome Cooper, who prefers playing solo, adds odd metre drumming and high frequency pianism to THE PSYCHE, utilizing the sort of rhythmic thrust that’s anathema to the more precious string-driven improv bands of today.

Ripping through 10 tunes in less than 40 minutes, the Brötzmann crew makes it clear that they’re ripping a hole in the jazz tradition, even if they figuratively have to do it with their bare hands. The three with others had already recorded LPs under Brötzmann’s name with such unlovely titles as MACHINE GUN, FUCK DE BOERE, NIPPLES and BALLS, and in this last gasp of 1960s radicalism were still going to épater les bourgeois.

Take “Konzert für 2 klarinetten”, for instance. A series of off-putting yells rents the aural surface at times, as if the shrill, ear splitting variations in the clarinets’ highest register from Brötzmann and Bennink wasn’t enough of an aural affront. And “Paukenhändschen im blaubeerenwald” ends with a shout from the drummer and a blaring honk from the saxman. It begins with steady snorts from Brötzmann’s horn and Van Hove sounding an accompanying line on the celeste that morphs into a cousin of “Ain’t She Sweet”. Brötzmann holds low notes on his bass sax for such an extended period that he could be prefiguring late 1990s electronica. Meanwhile Bennink revels in his primitive percussionist, smashing all items in his roomful of percussion as hard as possible over and over again, so that even non-resonating surfaces resonate.

On “Nr. 6”, which is the ninth track -- go figure -- Brötzmann’s initial reed figure appears to be played at the top of his lungs, with his sax bell pressed against a sheet of metal. Van Hove uses a tune-up trick to get him to moderate -- the pianist pumps out a high frequency rapid tremolos to counter the reedist stop-and-go rhythms. Finally Brötzmann ejaculates chorus after chorus of overblown split tones as Bennink rolls wooden stick on the studio floor and growls from deep inside his throat.

Maybe the seeds of Van Hove’s later dissatisfaction in such uncompromising noise assaults can be noted among the musical thunderstorms the two Bs bring to the disc. At various time the pianist produces low-key pastoral timbres that wouldn’t be out of place at a chamber music recital, relaxed, walking bass expostulations, choruses alive with a Spanish tinge, and a descending chorus on “ Nr. 4” that could have come from Lennie Tristano.

Some of those performances may have been conceived of as burlesque in 1973. But when Van Hove later compared what he was playing with Bennink’s caveman yells and sandpaper hard runs and Brötzmann’s solos that suggest he was excising his spleen through his horn’s bell, the piano man may have had second thoughts.

They don’t make ‘em like they used to, and if your tastes run to hell-bent-for-leather improvising you won’t want to miss out on FMP 0130.

A similar situation exists with THE PSYCHE, the Revolutionary Ensembles fabled lost LP, put out on its own RE label in 1975 and only briefly available, mostly in Europe, and never re-pressed. By this point Jenkins, Cooper and Sirone had evolved into three musicians outstandingly attuned to one another’s strength. In the spirit of true democracy each contributed a composition to the date.

Sirone’s “Hu-man” is mostly a forum to show off the members’ individual talents. Made up of the standard theme-variations-reprise of theme, the bassman uses the middle section to slide from walking bass lines to strums, slaps and individual note pinpointing. Meanwhile Cooper rumbles along with constant cymbal accents and Jenkins squirts out elongated lines, triple stopping and shuffle bowing.

More substantial is Jenkins’ “Collegno” (sic), named for a playing technique that uses the wood of the bow on the strings. Underlying the entire performance is an ostinato of scraped and scuffed tones created by Sirone. At times the droning pressure become thicker, with the bassist’s scuffed and scraped textures creating a distinctive thematic grouping. On top of this -- almost definitely not col legno -- the violinist embroiders an ethereal, staccato melody, while the drummer produces duple and single beats. A crescendo of swelling string sounds ends the piece.

Showpiece at almost 26½ minutes -- or more than half of the CD’s length -- is Cooper’s “Invasion”. Filled with dramatic interplay as the three divide successive themes into smaller and smaller motives, included are transformations and adaptations of techniques and styles. Mixing chain ratting and snare beats, Cooper introduces steady syncopation from his cymbals. Joined by Sirone’s walking bass, the theme soon splinters as the bassist first strums, then double stops harder pitches. Similarly, Jenkins shuffle bows a long lined tremolo that leeches into viola d’amore territory.

Midway through, Cooper unveils low frequency, meandering piano vibrations and circular semi-tones. Soon he’s engaged in a prolonged fantasia that speeds up the tempo to such an extent that he enters player-piano territory. Sirone proves that he’s able to produce as many timbres with his four strings as the piano can, then downshifts to bass clef timekeeping.

That motive seems to be a clue for Jenkins to reenter, scratching at higher pitches, then exhibiting a shaking side vibrato with the bow skewed in such a way to get both harmonic forward motion and multiphoinics. Sirone strums his strings as Cooper’s cymbal chiming reappears. With the viola squealing out shrill pitches, plus the snares and toms banging, rhythmic movement rests with the bass. Then the piece just ends.

An appreciation that the journey is just as important as the destination is needed to fully understand The PSYCHE. Still anyone usually attracted by the Revolutionary Ensemble, Leroy Jenkins or merely fine, uncomplicated improvising will be impressed by this date.

-- Ken Waxman

Track Listing: 130: 1. For Donaueschingen ever 2. Konzert für 2 klarinetten 3. Nr. 7 4. Wir haben uns folgendes überlegt 5. Paukenhändschen im blaubeerenwald 6. Nr. 9 7. Gere bij 8. Nr. 4 9. Nr. 6 10. Donaueschingen For Ever

Personnel: 130: Peter Brötzmann (clarinet, alto, tenor, baritone and bass saxophones); Fred Van Hove (piano and celeste); Han Bennink (drums, khene, rhythm-box, self-made clarinet, gachi, oe-oe, tins, home-made junk, elong, dhung, kaffir piano, dhung-dkar and voice)

Track Listing: Psyche: 1. Invasion 2. Hu-man 3. Collegno

Personnel: Psyche: Leroy Jenkins (violin and viola); Sirone (bass); Jerome Cooper (drums and piano)

June 21, 2004

GIANLUIGI TROVESI OTTETTO

Fugace
ECM 1827

GLOBE UNITY ORCHESTRA
Globe Unity 2002
Intakt CD 086

One potential horror comedians are always joking about is a world where the transportation schedules would be set by the Italians and the restaurants run by the British and Germans.

As humorous as this may sound as a situation, these CDs by mid-sized (eight- and nine-piece) bands shows that remarkable sounds can still result if countrymen act antithetically to their clichéd national characteristics.

FUGACE finds eight legendarily anarchistic Italians settling down for 16 short, arranged improvisations that touch on a variety of genres. Conversely, GLOBE UNITY 2002 features nine supposedly restrained Britons and Germans creating almost 74 minutes of some of the most cacophonous hullabaloo since John Coltrane and 10 other improvisers recorded ASCENSION in 1965.

As a matter of fact, Globe Unity, (the band) has always been in the tradition of all-out passionate expression that characterized 1960s aggregations like the Jazz Composers Orchestra, with the added fillip of being international. Over the years since the band’s first LP in 1966, membership has swollen to a high of 19, with American, Italian, Dutch and Polish musicians included, until it officially disbanded in 1986.

This one-time, live concert reunion 15 years later finds most of the longtime Globers on hand and confirms that the spirit and excitement the band engendered in its lifetime still exists. As well, 30 years on, a serene quantity has crept into some of the playing.

Leader Alexander von Schlippenbach, for instance, may begin the proceedings with intense, emotional, Romantic arpeggios, but during the course of the one long piece here he’ll relax into almost conventional jazz club comping and fills. Then when it comes time for his extended solo, his playing seems more bop-like and connected than the style of his first influence, Thelonious Monk. He uses careful voicing and portamento to glide across the keyboard. Building up tension in the Free Jazz sense with serpentine chords and echoing vibrations, his swiftness can resemble that of a player piano. Yet his unaccompanied coda is near pastoral, well modulated and definitely two-handed.

Trumpeter and, flugelhornist Manfred Schoof, who started off as a German version of a so-called Progressive jazzman, reverts to form in his solo spots. At one point he reveals long-lined patterned and focused grace notes that evolve to note-perfect brassy triplets, at another builds up mellow flugelhorn filigree, which when combined with the backing orchestral figures recall MILES AHEAD.

Others have intensified the way they first played 30 years ago. Evan Parker offers a five-minute plus exhibition of louder and softer circular breathing from his soprano sax, that appears to have an unmistakable bagpipe echo. Meantime fellow Briton, trombonist Paul Rutherford, growls and mumbles and rants within his trombone bell, with his snorts and Bronx cheers finally calling forth dampening metallic rim shot action and cymbal crashes from the dual percussionists. His direct musical descendent, German trombonist Johannes Bauer, also exhibits some double-tongued slurs backed with only piano accompaniment.

Dissonance, in all its ear-wrenching glory still inhabits the playing of the two remaining horn men though: Ernst-Ludwig Petrowsky on alto saxophone, clarinet and flute and Peter Brötzmann on tenor saxophone, tarogato and clarinet. One reedist -- though likely not Parker -- ejaculates some split-tone altissimo squeaks near the beginning of the extended piece, the likes of which haven’t been heard since the heyday of Giuseppi Logan. Much later, peeping tarogato timbres meet up with woody bass clarinet tones, arching from dog-whistle to bird trilling territory.

Then there’s a point just past midway where the “Ascension”-style total band hubbub slackens to expose a protracted series of screeches and multiphonic blasts from the tenormen. The yells and applause from the audience makes it appear that for it, this was the highpoint equivalent of Paul Gonsalves’ protracted solo on Duke Ellington’s “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blues” at the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival.

As all this is going on, the proper tempo for clangorous explosions and feather light interludes is provided by the Pauline duo on percussion -- England’s Paul Lytton and Germany’s Paul Lovens.

Trovesi’s Ottetto features two drummers as well, but that’s about the only symmetry between the two sessions. Old enough -- he was born in 1944 near Bergamo -- to be part of the Globe Unity generation, multi-reedist Trovesi mixed his jazz with studio work earlier in his career. Part of the first generation of Southern European musicians to assert themselves internationally, Trovesi is known for his folklore-tinged work with trumpeter Pino Minafra, and membership in the all-star Italian Instabile Orchestra, which also includes ex-Globe Unity trumpeter Enrico Rava.

Like his other octet sessions though, FUGACE resides in a space of its own, where traditional Italian operatic drama coexists with improvisation, and where the references include veteran local comic Totò as well as Louis Armstrong. Thus on the three-part “Totò nei Caraibi”, as the pizzicato plucking of the three string players suggests a cartoon cat sneaking across the horizon, other sounds form the band reference a funeral march and echo calypsos.

In the same way, “Ramble” begins with a note-perfect Dixieland emulation with the drummers exercising their kits with ratamacues and a clip-clop rhythm like duple Baby Dodds, as Trovesi on clarinet makes like Baby’s older brother -- and Armstrong associate -- Johnny. But trumpeter Massimo Greco reaches for augmented notes too modern for Satchmo, the clarinet is soon trilling in a modernistic folk style reminiscent of Jimmy Giuffre, and you’d never hear Marco Remondini’s arco cello slices anywhere in Trad Jazz. Blasts from trombonist Beppe Caruso, who leads his own fine brass band, form a countermelody that doubles and triples the tempo until the end.

In contrast to the Globe Unity veterans, the reedist’s is a younger band, made up in the main of musicians who have played with him for about a decade. With Remondini and percussionist Fluvio Maras adding electronics to the mix the Trovesi Eight proffers some unique textures, including a series of linking interludes that sound as if they were created on an electrified harpsichord that snuck in from a Yardbirds session. Thus while Trovesi may sometimes echo Benny Goodman and the unison string section get a bit overwrought in the 1,001 strings tradition, plenty of other slants arise as well.

“Blues and West” for instance, starts off with enough reverb from the electronica and electric bass slaps plus monochromic drumming to make it sound like a rock band has invaded the studio. In between riffing horns, Trovesi on alto creates some cosmic bop-inflected squeals and Greco plays a soaring, slurred trumpet line. “Canto di lavoro” goes in the opposite direction. It starts off with an Armstrong-like trumpet cadenza, introduces chalumeau clarinet trills and finishes with a sound that ping-pongs from outer-space whistles from the electronics, and someone, somehow -- perhaps the top strings of the electric bass -- producing a quivering Jimi Hendrix-like electric guitar distortion.

Massed horn riffs often appear to be half banda and half James Brown’s horn section, Trovesi’s split tone can often take on a distinctive Arabic inflection and the dual backbeat, if from hand drums, can be as much Savannah as Sardinia.

Improvised music has become such an all-encompassing category that a group can perform in a variety of ways to produce outstanding music, despite national clichés. Globe Unity and the Ottetto demonstrate two excellent versions of these methods.

-- Ken Waxman

Track Listing: Fugace: 1. As strange as a ballad 2. Sogno d’Orfeo African Triptych: 3. Wide Lake 4. Scarlet Dunes 5. Western Dream 6. Canto di lavoro 7. Clumsy dancing of the fat bird 8. Siparietto I 9. Blues and West 10. Siparietto II 11. Il Domatore 12. Ramble 13. Siparietto III 14. Fugace 15. Siparietto IV 16. Totò nei Caraibi

Personnel: Fugace: Massimo Greco (trumpet, electronics); Beppe Caruso (trombone); Gianluigi Trovesi (alto saxophone, piccolo, alto clarinets); Marco Remondini (cello, electronic); Roberto Bonati (bass); Marco Micheli (bass, electric bass); Fluvio Maras (percussion, electronics); Vittorio Marinoni (drums)

Track Listing: Globe: 1. Globe Unity 2002

Personnel: Globe: Manfred Schoof (trumpet, flugelhorn); Paul Rutherford and Johannes Bauer (trombones); Ernst-Ludwig Petrowsky (alto saxophone, clarinet, flute); Peter Brötzmann (tenor saxophone, tarogato, clarinet); Evan Parker (soprano and tenor saxophones); Alexander von Schlippenbach (piano); Paul Lovens and Paul Lytton (drums)

December 1, 2003

THOMAS BORGMANN/PETER BRÖTZMANN/WILLIAM PARKER/RASHIED BAKR

The Cooler Suite
GROB 539

Serendipitous accomplishment, this live quartet disc is one of those unplanned sessions that ends up being released when it’s discovered that the night’s work was better than anyone imagined.

Flushed with the go-for-broke excitement that characterizes the best Free Jazz, the CD is a cleaned up version of what was recorded over an a cheap ferro cassette of demos that German saxophonist Thomas Borgmann shoved into the mixing board one night in 1997. A DAT recorder wasn’t working.

The place was a now-defunct Manhattan dive called The Cooler and the dramatis personae the Münster-born, Berlin-based Borgmann on sopranino and tenor saxophones; Wupppertal’s Peter Brötzmann on alto and tenor saxophones and a-clarinet; plus two Americans: bassist William Parker and drummer Rashied Bakr, who together make up the rhythm section of Other Dimensions in Music. Brötz and Borg are also old buds; Parker has played often with Brötzmann; and Borgmann’s American associates are numerous, although excepting Bakr, who usually toils as a social worker.

Maybe because no one thought of this as anything other than a regular gig, the pressure was off for anything but creation of the music.

Beginning with a raw burst of glossolalia in Brötzmann’s distinctive reed-shredding style, the two, almost half-hour tracks develop as the saxman, seconded by Borgmann, pours on the power and is met by the equal power from Bakr and especially Parker. Due to another miscalculation, the bassist, plugged right into the mixing board, comes across so “hot” that at times his tugs, strums and reverberations threaten to submerge even Brötz’s improvising.

Not that can happen. Beginning with undulation of unalloyed screech, his reed work -- backed by a complementary counterline from the other tenor -- forces Parker to quadruple stop and the drummer to keep up a steady rat tat tat on his snares and a woodblock. Speaking of wood, Parker often seems to be sawing it as much as he plays on it, as he strokes and manipulates his instrument and the four strands of catgut mercilessly. After Brötz switches to clarinet, the piece become even more of a duet for a time with the saxman’s gangling chalumeau vibrations spurring the bassist to guitar-like strums, double stop up high near his pegs and walloping his strings foursquare.

Although Bergmann’s double-tongued trills on his sour, Eastern sounding sopranino try soon to mellow the proceedings, the others have none of it. Split-tones, honks and reed-biting obbligatos push Wuppertal’s finest further, so that he ends the piece shrieking like a horror movie werewolf, newly liberated from a dark cave. “Part 1” is all tension and no release.

“Part 2” continues in the same jugular vein, with Brötzmann’s renal squeals turning first to spetrofluctuation, then to nasty growls as the drums roll and ratasmascue and the bass timbres fluctuate from triple stopping to wooden board-like hammering. Abandoning timbres that resemble chalk scratching a blackboard, the clarinet and sopranino mix floating tones -- a half step apart -- until the rhythm section pulse reaches such a crescendo of musique brut that Brötz inserts the larger horn into his mouth again and enters stratospheric, ear-splitting territory. Blowing higher, harder and with enough diffuse notes so that his reed vibrations have vibrations, he brings Borgmann back into the mix as they combine into a weird harmony of blowing and honking. Ending is a single press roll from the drummer.

With the audience as pumped as you would hear at a Punk or Heavy Metal concert, THE COOLER SUITE shows that a quartet of men in their forties and fifties have to take back seats to no one when it comes to producing surges of white hot excitement.

It should be noted, though, that this is no audiophile recording. Besides the over-recording of Parker’s bass, the sound is sometimes unstable and cuts out for several seconds a couple of times. Like the Dizzy Gillespie-Charlie Christian sessions at Minton’s or Albert Ayler’s at Slugs, a decision has to be made here whether music or high fidelity is of paramount importance to you.

-- Ken Waxman

Track Listing: 1. The Cooler Suite Part 1 2. The Cooler Suite Part 2

Personnel: Thomas Borgmann (sopranino and tenor saxophones); Peter Brötzmann (alto and tenor saxophones, a-clarinet); William Parker (bass); Rashied Bakr (drums)

October 13, 2003

PETER BRÖTZMANN

More Nipples
Atavistic Unheard Music Series UMS/ALP236CD

Prime cuts of Peter Brötzmann and company at his most ferocious, the 40 minutes of music on this CD were literally forgotten until 2002 when FMP founder Jost Gebers discovered this cache of unreleased tapes in his archives.

Living up to the series title, the three tracks were recorded at the same 1969 session that produced NIPPLES (Atavistic/Unheard Music Series UMS/ALP 205 CD), one of the German saxophonist’s most distinctive early sessions, that itself was out-of-print for years until reissued in 2000. Unlike that disc, British saxophonist Evan Parker and guitarist Derek Bailey are only featured on the title track. The other two highlight the reedist’s quartet of the time, completed by Flemish pianist Fred Van Hove, the late German bassist Buschi Niebergall and Holland’s Han Bennink on drums and percussion.

Among the likely reasons that these tracks weren’t released at the time of recording is that in contrast to the original LP, the more than 17-minute tune with the two Englishmen sounds closer to certified, restrained BritImprov than the expected balls-to-the-walls Continental variety.

The top of the piece initially features rapid runs or laid back arco work from the bassist, rubato piano cadenzas, irresolute plinks and clinks from the guitarist and drumming that’s more shake and rattle than anything you would imagine from Bennink today. Van Hove’s flashing octave jumping and right-handed tremolo lines appear to share lead duties with Bailey’s flat-picking, with the others almost struggling to keep up. Only when the saxmen shows up does Niebergall assert himself with a buzzing output that takes on jagged, top-of-scale, violin-like qualities. Then Bennink, who could be making music with a collection of pots and pans -- so brassy is his sound -- starts to clatter away at greater volume, while Bailey retreats. Using Van Hove’s high-intensity arpeggios ranging over the keyboard as backing, Brötz and Parker make like an avant-garde Griff & Jaws produced an onslaught of curved split tones. Characteristic wild gouts of overblown notes tumble from the German’s horn, and, surprisingly, he’s answered in kind by the Briton. Before an oscillating bass line and simple piano end the proceedings, Brötzmann has asserted himself with long nasal yowls from his horn

Using the same rattling, metallic percussion, Bennink also introduces timbres that could come from struck wood block and hand-spanked conga drums on the quartet tracks, recorded in another studio six days later. With his cymbals quivering like aluminum pie plates, the Dutchman’s playing starts to resemble what you hear from Third World junkeroo bands that find their percussion instruments in garbage heaps and trash cans. However the bassist is more energized, probably spending as much time resolutely hammering on the wood with his fists and rapidly striking the front of his strings with the bow as he does bowing and plucking. As for Brötzmann, on both tunes he works himself into an altissimo, artery-bursting fury, yanking multiphonics and irregular vibrations from his reed in a style that’s half bar walking R&B tenor sax and half intestinal shrieks. It gets so that any duck quacking overblowing he exhibits is overtaken by unaccompanied renal screams, that under pressure from the rhythm section’s rapid response move into a higher and more feral range.

You have to remember that this was a time when Albert Ayler was still alive and other tenor men like Pharoah Sanders, Charles Tyler, Frank Wright and Archie Shepp were playing at their most vehement. With Teutonic meticulousness Brötz seems to be going them one better.

Is this an essential disc then? Well, it’s different and certainly interesting, but only in spots offers more than expected. Still if you’re a follower of any of the men involved --and/or need another fix of unfettered Free Jazz preserved in its rawest form -- the CD will unquestionably excite you.

-- Ken Waxman

Track Listing: 1. More nipples* 2. Fiddle-faddle 3.Fat man walks

Personnel: Peter Brötzmann, tenor saxophone; Evan Parker (soprano saxophone)*; Derek Bailey (guitar)*; Fred Van Hove (piano); Buschi Niebergall (bass); Han Bennink (drums)

October 6, 2003

BRÖTZMANN/PARKER/DRAKE

Never Too Late But Always Too Early
Eremite MTE 037/038

FRODE GJERSTAD TRIO WITH PETER BRÖTZMANN
Sharp Knives Cut Deeper
Splasc (h) CDH 850

More than 35 years after he roared onto the international Free Jazz scene, German reedist Peter Brötzmann’s playing still seems as ferocious as ever. This is a good thing. For unlike some of his contemporaries who have settled into a sort of middle-aged timidness, the tenor saxophonist still improvises with the same intensity and commitment at 60 as he did when he was 25.

Those who now hear a newly toned down Brötzmann are also a bit deluded. For the saxman’s playing has never been out-and-out raunchy and, as these two -- actually three, one is a two-CD set -- sessions demonstrate, his creations, are as solid or as subtle as he wants them to be.

Furthermore, Brötzmann, whose very first trio -- with the late German bassist Peter Kowald and Swedish drummer Sven-Åke Johansson -- was an international affair, has continued to maintain his non-German connections. Case in Point, NEVER TOO LATE is a record of his American trio with bassist William Parker and drummer Hamid Drake, while SHARP KNIVES adds Brötzmann to the working trio of alto saxophonist Frode Gjerstad of Norway, filled out by fellow Norwegians bassist Øyvind Stroresund and drummer Paal Nilssen-Love.

Dedicated to Kowald, who first explored the then new music when they were both teenagers in their hometown of Wuppertal, the tracks on NEVER TOO LATE are alternately as stormy as the music the initial trio first made, and as sombre as a threnody should be. Kowald died of heart failure in September 2002 between the recording and release of this live set.

Encompassing three tracks, the title tune begins with mournful clarinet tones from Brötzmann and restrained arco work from Parker. Unsurprisingly the reedist keeps the growled melancholy theme going for several minutes, only occasionally heading into higher, screech mode as the bassman produces thick and solid chords and Drake appears to be doing little more than merely touching the drums. Although an instant composition, the band probably decided to use it as a memorial since the subsequent solo by Parker, who also had a longtime association with Kowald, is rooted in the creation of simultaneous tones, overtones and undertones that the German bassist would have appreciated.

By the second track, Brötzmann on tenor, is keening like a traditional Muslim widow, sluicing out slipsliding shrills and overblowing tones. Drake has turned to harder rock-style drum beating, as the saxman seems to relinquish his control and turn to multiphonics -- if it’s possible to quadruple-tongue, he’s doing it. Finally, as the rhythm section gradually slows down then speeds up its accompaniment, the beat settles and the saxman’s irregular vibrato gets so frenzied that it almost seems as if he’s about to levitate. Ghost notes, false fingering, flutter tonguing combine as entire passages are taken in sopranissimo pitch. Soon the entire audience is screaming as Brötzmann honks out elongated tones to the climax.

“Half-hearted beast” seems almost anti-climatic in retrospect, with an re-energized reedman screeching a cappella as if he playing a hunting horn leading a charge at the foxes. Meanwhile, Drake’s free, but rhythmically powerful, rim shots complement Parker’s unvarying tone. Construction is almost pure soulful R&B, if you can accept that description of a German avant gardist’s work.

The first CD is pretty powerful as well, with Brötzmann’s renal cry announcing his presence almost from the beginning. Taking up the first four tracks of that disc, “Never Run but Go” finds the saxman rolling forward like a tank battalion, using his slightly nasal tone and split tones to push obstacles away. Not that the bassist and drummer are obstacles. Parker’s pizzicato pulse holds the beat to the road, while Drake uses cow bell, snare and ride cymbal to roll and slide out his All-American commentary on the blitzkrieg. Throughout the Chicago-based percussionist subtly alters the tempo underneath Brötzmann’s explosions.

Listen closely as well, and you’ll hear Parker quote from “Boogie Stop Shuffle” at one point. This is appropriate, since the New York-based bassist seems to have inherited its composer, Charles Mingus’ mantle not only as a first-class bassist, but also as an organizer and bandleader.

Although the emphasis here is on the reedist’s collection of nephritic cries and intestinal tones plus Drake’s roughs and drags, nothing seems to faze the bassist. By the end of the mini-suite, using his bow, he’s managed to get the others to halve the tempo to such an extent that the piece becomes almost quiet and reverent. Then again Brötzmann squealing in tongues is as close to “Taps” as Free Jazzers can play.

If that piece is quiet than “The Heart and the Bones” almost sounds like restrained BritImprov. After introducing the theme with abrasive steel wool-like string tones, Parker stands aside for muted squeals from Brötz and hand drumming from Drake. Soon the beat turns hypnotic as the bassist begins revealing the distinctive string sounds of the Donso Ngoni or Malian hunter’s harp. The coda relates a lot more to his pinpointed strums than the reedist’s squeals.

Recorded eight months later, SHARP KNIVES is a reunion of sort for Brötzmann and the veteran alto saxist, who recorded as a duo CD in 1998. Here, as a matter of fact, they start out this disc unaccompanied, with Gjerstad playing short nervous cadenzas on clarinet, while Brötz pushes out dark-colored continuum on bass clarinet. The German continues to go south with his sound as Gjerstad moves higher until all hell breaks loose with the entry of Stroresund and Nilssen-Love, pumped as if they have to run the four-minute mile.

Like Parker on the other disc, Stroresund holds the pulse, while Nilssen-Love, who has recorded with everyone from saxists Mats Gustaffson to Ken Vandermark, relies on press rolls to keep things on an even keel. Meanwhile the two woodwind players are getting louder, biting down on their reeds and vocalizing notes in the aviary range.

Pressure cooker pulses continue to appear for the remainder of the session, with Brötz’s taragto at times adding a bit of Eastern European color to the proceedings. For his part Gjerstad often clambers up the scale, spearing high pitched notes and operating in dog whistle territory. Together, the mixture of claxon calls and growling multiphonics from the two saxists often produces something that could be the soundtrack for feeding time at a zoo filled with particularly bad-tempered carnivores.

Everything reaches a climax in the final -- and longest -- track, when chalumeau clarinet tones matched with bowed bass lines are superseded by irregular drum beats and reed expositions that vary from whines to Bronx cheers. As the drummer channels Sunny Murray on rat-tat-tat snares and echoing cymbals, Brötzmann lacerates the melody, double and triple tonguing as if he was pulling notes straight from the very marrow of the saxophone. Gjerstad responds at higher intensity and higher pitch to such an extent that the dense notes and tones are packed tighter than the passengers in a Tokyo subway. With each woodwind note seemingly bent, simultaneous rattling drum and bowing bass push the tempo faster until the tune finally ends.

What’s left behind from the sax-created ostinato however is the promise that either of these veteran saxmen could have continued to blow all night.

As Kowald’s death at 58 proved, no one lives for ever. But on the evidence of these CDs, veterans like Brötzmann -- and come to think of it Gjerstad -- appear to have plenty of spunk left in them for many years to come.

-- Ken Waxman

Personnel: Never: Peter Brötzmann (tenor saxophone, taragato, clarinet); William Parker (bass, donso ngoni); Hamid Drake (drums)

Track Listing: Never: Disc 1: 1. Never Run but Go I 2. Never Run but Go II 3. Never Run but Go III 4. Never Run but Go IV 4 5. The Heart and the Bones Disc 2: 1. Never Too Late But Always Too Early I 2. Never Too Late But Always Too Early II 3. Never Too Late But Always Too Early III 4. Half-hearted beast

Track Listing: Sharp: 1. Sharp Knives Cut Deeper Part 1 2. Sharp Knives Cut Deeper Part 2 3. Sharp Knives Cut Deeper Part 3 4. Sharp Knives Cut Deeper Part 4

Personnel: Sharp: Frode Gjerstad (alto saxophone, clarinet); Peter Brötzmann (tenor saxophone, taragato, bass clarinet); Øyvind Stroresund (bass); Paal Nilssen-Love (drums)

July 7, 2003

BRÖTZMANN/VAN HOVE/BENNINK

Balls
Atavistic Unheard Music UMS/ALP 233CD

FRED VAN HOVE
Complete Vogel Recordings Collection
Atavistic Unheard Music UMS/ALP 229 CD

All good things must come to an end. Thus it was no surprise that in 1976

the pan-European trio of German saxophonist Peter Bötzmann, Belgian pianist Fred Van Hove and Dutch drummer Han Bennink (BVB) dissolved their partnership after nine years.

Although the band was highly influential during its lifetime, with discs like BALLS, listening to it in tandem with Van Hove’s solo and duo discs from the same period you can hear why things had to come to an end. The trio was renowned for its pure power, most obviously expressed in the saxophonist’s overblowing and the drummer’s manhandling of a giant kit. The pianist often seems like the odd man out and the reason he gives for BVB’s demise was that any attempts at intricate playing on his part was drowned out by Bennink’s battery of percussion.

On the two-CD VOGEL RECORDINGS from 1972/1973/1974, his solo excursions explore other options than were available with BVB. Also, self-evidently, it wasn’t Bötzmann’s wild man woodwinds that bothered him. On eight duo selections here he’s partnered by Cel Overberghe, a fellow Fleming, whose tone and expression are often more over-the-top than the German saxophonist’s.

Along with the a quartet session with trombonist Albert Mangelsdorf, 1970’s BALLS is one of the seminal small group sessions Bötzmann led at that time. Part of a body parts trilogy, along with NIPPLES and TSCHUS, it featured the saxophonist and drummer in all their unrestrained, hairy-chested glory -- check the photos of a stripped-to-the-waist Bennink for confirmation of this. Furthermore, the LPs’ original four selections have been augmented with two newly discovered untitled tracks from the same date.

Throughout, the CD could be heard as a dictionary definition of so-called Free Jazz. Overblowing, smearing and screaming from his keys and reed, Brötzmann, who sticks to tenor saxophone, produces nephritic cries and internal buzzing trills, at times sounding like American saxist Rev. Frank Wright at his most unhinged. Not content with that, on one of the untitled tracks he extends his improvisations into the baritone range, honking more fervently than any bar-walking R&B soloist. Besides this, he exhibits an extended a cappella section on the last of the original LP’s tunes.

Bennink, who is described as playing “voice” as well as miscellaneous percussion implements, introduces a few clamorous mumbles and cries to the proceedings. Elsewhere it sounds as if he has emptied the contents of junkyard filled with metal shards into his studio space, at one point appearing to pound an aluminum sheet with a hammer, and at another sounding like he’s noisily testing a work bench full of tools. That, however, doesn’t stop him from worrying the sides, rims and drumhead surfaces of his kit with bells and cymbal tones, mixed with pummeling of his oversized bass drum.

Interestingly enough, his style on the first of the new untitled tracks is in variance to all this. He sounds his stack of so-called little instruments like an Art Ensemble of Chicago member and pecks away at his rims and cymbals as if he were at Britain’s Company Week, not involved in the Göterdämmerung of a German-centric session. Perhaps the tenderness of this response was so in conflict with what he and Brötzmann wanted to project at the time that it was decided to leave that improvisation in the can.

Convincing Van Hove of Bennink’s tenderness may have been more difficult at the time, of course. As early as the title track when the pianist tries to introduce what sounds like a half-prepared (piano)-half romantic theme, it’s all but is buried under the percussion strokes, screams and shell-blowing of Bennink. It’s almost the same story on “Garten”, as the pianist gradually increases his dynamics and introduces high frequencies just to be heard, so that his arpeggios soon turn to glissandos to match Brötzmann’s smears and renal shrieks. Behind, the drummer seems to be hitting everything in sight. On those and other tracks, it appears that Bennink’s sense of cooperative dynamics couldn’t compare with those of Sunny Murray playing with Cecil Taylor and Jimmy Lyons, an obvious antecedent for this trio. Still Van Hove plows ahead, deepening his keyboard dips and relying on note playlets and tremolos.

Tension shouldn’t be confused with inferiority however and it’s this creative tension that makes BALLS, the first LP commissioned by the nascent FMP label, so outstanding. As a matter of fact that sort of quivering ferment is missed in the two-thirds of the VOGEL RECORDINGS where Van Hove plays solo.

Still, as soon as he’s on his own, both his classical training in theory and harmony and his knowledge of the jazz tradition become obvious. On the first disc, for instance, many of his keyboard excursions sound like what would be produced if you mixed the modern experimentation of Jaki Byard or Mal Waldron with the rent party boogie woogie of Little Brother Montgomery or Jimmy Yancy. At a time when BVB seemed to be tearing down musical structure, here was Van Hove on his own coming up with more pre-modern piano references than any American pianist of his age would create.

This traditional inventiveness, mixed with the purity of his classical tone is more evident on “Boven alle verdenking verheven”, the title of which may mean a lot more to Flemish speakers. Melding higher and higher frequencies with tremolos and repeated arpeggios his approach is definitely two-handed with spraying note crescendos helping to make his point. On the next track, does the ear detect a quasi-parody of “God Save the Queen” in between those cadenzas that could have migrated from a Cecil Taylor session? Even more surprising is “Better grounds”, that at the beginning appears to be a tender ballad treated the way Hank Jones or Red Garland would play it. Complete with a swinging staccato passage, the tune mostly centres around tremolos, with the occasional excursion into lower frequencies. Finally, in the penultimate section, he begins reaching inside and using the duplex scale to produce sympathetic vibration as he plinks and plunks the copper wires.

A couple of years later a live recital offers “Sprookje: ridders, draken, olifanten, kasteel, prinses [schrappen wat niet past]”, a fantasia taken andante where the dynamics vary according to the hand used and vibrations and high frequencies define the piece. Later on there are times he seems to be gliding across the keys, while a part of “Muziek bij stomme film” has enough pedal action and ragtime/stride references to suggest a tribute to Tin Pan Alley and 1930s film music.

More pointed, the eight tracks with Overberghe, who appears to have vanished from the music scene since then, finds a freer Van Hove ready to mix “Chopsticks” and Chopin with his cadenzas. Probably the strangest track is “Beter tien vogels in de lucht”, where the (surely overdubbed) bowed bass notes and shuffle drumbeats are attributed to Overberghe, who also plays saxophone. Squealing Albert Ayler-style military marches view for supremacy with what sounds like a minstrel show ditty and it’s possible the pianist isn’t even present. Elsewhere, as on “Wie heeft dat vogeltje”, during which church bells seem to sound or “Bas la police (lope lope de gardevil)” -- how’s that for a 1960s-style title? -- the saxist’s snaky, snarkey pitched tone roams between the avant garde and vibrato-laden blues. Van Hove responds with speedy high frequencies featuring a honky-tonk tinge at one point and what could be a classical étude elsewhere.

Overberghe -- who introduces the musique concrète sounds of a jackhammer and a moving tram to a couple of tracks, adding more anarchy to those times that he and the pianist seems to be playing in different modes -- has Van Hove working the organ on “Alle eendjes” More circus calliope than church accompaniment, the pianist’s touch is such that you can hear individual notes sound as the tenor man squeals and trills, expanding his tone with lip vibrations.

No way as concise and focused as BALLS, time dated novelty vies with musical dexterity on the VOGEL RECORDINGS. But they too showcase a seldom seen side of the usually staid Van Hove when European free music was being forged.

-- Ken Waxman

Track Listing: Balls: 1. Balls 2. Garten 3. Filet Americain 4. De daag waarop sipke eindelijk zijn nagels knipte, en verder alle andere a moten voor hem openstonden I.C.P. 17 5. Untitled 1 6. Untitled 2

Personnel: Balls: Peter Brötzmann (tenor saxophone); Fred Van Hove (piano); Han Bennink (drums, gachi, shell, voice)

Track Listing: Vogel: CD 1: 1. Suite 1.2.3/1 - ahisma: het streven Om geen schade aan Te richten 2. Gusts rock 3. Boven alle verdenking verheven 4. Suite 1.2.3/2 - het streven om niet vertrapt te worden 5. Better grounds 6. Het is de hoogste tijd 7. Wie heeft dat vogeltje+ 8. Beter tien vogels in de lucht+^ 9. Ons lijsternestje+ CD 2: 1. D’er was een vogeltje+ 2. Alle eendjes*+ 3. Vogeltje gij zijt gevangen+ 4. Kreem gelas+ 5. Bas la police (lope lope de gardevil)+ 6. Intrede 7. Sprookje: ridders, draken, olifanten, kasteel, prinses [schrappen wat niet past] 8. Speel doosje speel 9. Compositie met toonladders 10. Pauze met accordeon 11. Pling plong 12. Tussenspel 13. Discussie tussen links en rechts waarbij natuurlijk klappen vallen 14. Muziek bij stomme film 15. Woordenschat

Personnel: Vogel: Fred Van Hove (piano, Hammond organ*); Cel Overberghe+ (tenor saxophone, bass/drums^)

March 3, 2003

MANFRED SCHOOF

European Echoes
Atavistic Unheard Music UMS/ALP 232CD

ALEXANDER VON SCHLIPPENBACH
The Living Music
Atavistic Unheard Music UMS/ALP 231CD

Multi-reedman Peter Brötzmann always insists that when pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach and trumpeter Manfred Schoof first heard his pioneering free jazz band in the mid-1960s “they just laughed their asses off. At that time they played the Horace Silver-style thing”. But, by the end of the decade as Brötzmann widened his circle to include other experimenters like Dutch drummer Han Bennink and worked with American jazzers like trumpeter Don Cherry and soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy, his fellow Germans began to come around as well.

They began to come around to such an extent that by 1969 Schlippenbach and Schoof were recording the outside session showcased on these discs, both of which featured international casts, definitely including Brötzmann and Bennink. Since that time the pianist has maintained his free jazz affiliation, most notably in a long-running trio with British saxophonist Evan Parker, who is also on EUROPEAN ECHOES. The trumpeter, on the other hand, sticks more to a mainstream style, when he isn’t writing and playing contemporary classical music.

Recorded first THE LIVING MUSIC was an indirect nod to Julian Beck’s experimental Living Theater group that had recently set up shop in Europe. It was also a smaller-sized version of Schlippenbach’s on-again-off-again-massive Globe Unity Orchestra (GUO), with British trombonist Paul Rutherford and Bennink joining the five Germans players.

In a way it’s those two, as well as Brötzmann, who are most impressive on this session. The trombonist who had already worked with London’s Spontaneous Music Ensemble and GUO and would go on to play throughout Europe, is credited with the invention of trombone multiphonics. Here his avant-gutbucket tone intertwines among the other instruments, stylistically neighing in his way like Tricky Sam Nanton did with Duke Ellington’s band. Using what sound like a regular kit expanded with a marimba, a thumb piano, a massive Oriental gong and who knows what else, Bennink has more percussion on hand than Ellington’s flashy Sony Greer ever had.

Like Greer, he uses it judiciously, however, smashing, banging and thumping enough to bring the discordant darker toned instruments together. At times, though, when the pianist attacks the keyboard with particular ferocity, Bennink become even more bellicose, becoming Sunny Murray to Schlippenbach’s Cecil Taylor.

However, since he began playing professionally almost at the same time as CT, Schlippenbach is more a Thelonious Monk man. As a matter of fact, his introductory solo on “Tower” has a pianistic conception that’s definitely Monk-like. Furthermore, despite Brötz’s overblowing -- no Charlie Rouse he -- and Bennink’s relentless pounding, the pianist’s nearly 11½-minute composition sounds like one of the tunes recorded by those mid-sized Monk ensembles.

Schlippenbach’s cadences and arpeggios are less adventurous elsewhere, especially when Schoof, on cornet, takes the lead. Influenced at that time as much by Ted Curson and other freeboppers as Cherry, the brassman’s “Wave” suggests The Jazz Messengers playing Ornette Coleman. Vying with swinging, foreground percussion, Schoof’s solo is all flourishes, fanfares and note building, facing counterpoint from the saxophone section and Rutherford’s smeared lines. Elsewhere, the British brassman combines with Bennink for exercises in free march time and otherwise -- perhaps aided by Niebergall’s little-heard bass trombone -- stacks up against the buzzing saxophones and relentless percussion with elongated tones that sometimes sound like the braying of animals.

Throughout, Brötzmann is a holy terror, pumping out notes as if from a machine gun and asserting himself more than anyone else. On one occasion he explodes into a cappella multiphonics, then works his way down his horn, tossing out variations on the theme as he goes along. Although as part of the Schoof Quintet and later on with his own band and work with Lacy, Luxembourg-resident Michel Pilz would be quite well known, he’s oddly reticent here. Only on the cornettist’s Stan-Kenton-meets-Don-Cherry arrangement of “Past Time” do his tart clarinet tone make any impression.

On the other hand, nearly every one of the 16 musicians present gets some solo space on EUROPEAN ECHOES, another of Atavistic’s FMP Archive Edition, recorded two months after Schlippenbach’s CD under Schoof nominal leadership.

It seems nominal because a soon a the fist drum beats echo through the studio, by means of the dual percussion of Bennink and Swiss drummer Pierre Favre, it’s obvious that this almost 32-minute composition is going to be some wild ride. Appropriately named, the disc features all the player on the first CD save Pilz plus Parker and German tenorist Gerd Dudek on saxophones; Italian Enrico Rava and Dane Hugh Steinmetz on trumpets; Fred Van Hove from Belgium and Irène Schweizer from Switzerland on pianos; British guitarist Derek Bailey and bassists Peter Kowald from Germany and Arjen Gorter from Holland.

With the examples of controlled chaos that other large ensembles like New York’s The Jazz Composer’s Orchestra, GUO and Brötzmann’s “Machine-Gun” band already created, this disc is most valuable providing aural views of important EuroImprovisers early in their career. Diffident Bailey, for instance, creates some wild, almost rock-oriented electric picking here with such vigor that it overwhelms the dual drummers. A far cry from his present persona as a balladeer, Rava produces some brassy, Don Ayler-like shakes. Meanwhile the triple keyboardists seem to be reconstituted as Cecil Taylor triplets, although during the course of the piece, one -- likely Schweizer -- offers up some inside piano harp glisses, along the lines for which she would later be better known.

Another small big band session that may have been on everyone’s mind at the time was John Coltrane’s less-than-five-years-old ASCENSION. Facing off against one another with cymbals and snares, flams, press rolls and march beats, Favre and Bennink are no Rich vs. Roach but suggest Elvin Jones times two. Additionally, some of the piano chording relates more to McCoy Tyner’s work with Trane than Taylor’s. All three trumpeters appear to be trying to see who can squeal the highest in bugle range as the theme is elaborated, though the plucked bass parts -- when they surface from the din -- may be more advanced than what Art Davis and Jimmy Garrison played on ADSCENSION. Dudek, Parker Brötzmann too generate enough screaming split tones to match Trane’s, Archie Shepp’s and Pharoah Sanders’ multiphonics on ASCENSION, often spitting out several bent notes simultaneously. Finally, as musical shards explode all over like bombs at an anarchist rally, the massed ferment builds to a combative crescendo, ending with the sustained single cymbal echo.

Too young or distanced to have experienced the excitement of 1960s’ Free Jazz? These two discs are the next best thing to being there.

-- Ken Waxman

Track Listing: European: 1. European Echoes Part 1 2. European Echoes Part 2

Personnel: European: Manfred Schoof, Enrico Rava, Hugh Steinmetz (trumpets); Paul Rutherford (trombone); Peter Brötzmann, Gerd Dudek (tenor saxophones); Evan Parker (soprano and tenor saxophone); Alexander Von Schlippenbach; Fred Van Hove, Irène Schweizer (pianos); Derek Bailey (guitar); Peter Kowald, Arjen Gorter (basses); Buschi Niebergall (bass and bass trombone); Han Bennink, Pierre Favre (drums)

Track Listing: Living: 1. The living music 2. Into the Staggerin 3. Wave 4. Tower 5. Lollopalooza 6. Past time

Personnel: Living; Manfred Schoof (cornet and flugelhorn); Paul Rutherford (trombone); Peter Brötzmann (tenor and baritone saxophones); Michel Pilz (bass clarinet and baritone saxophone); Alexander von Schlippenbach (piano and percussion); J.B. Niebergall (bass and bass trombone); Han Bennink (drums and percussion)

December 16, 2002

PETER BRÖTZMANN

For Adolphe Sax
Atavistic Unheard Music Series ALP 230

Americans might have been in the middle of the psychedelics-fueled Summer of Love in June 1967, but things were a little more complicated in Europe. Especially in the northern part of the continent, politically committed revolutionaries were a lot easier to find than hippies. Educational, generational and societal unrest was rife, protests against racism, colonialism and the Viet Nam war were routine, and the situation existed that would culminate in demonstrations in 1968. European radicals were more likely to be wearing red armbands than flowers in their hair.

Even improvised music reflected this. While the appeal of jazz-rock fusion and pop-jazz hit making was infecting many American musicians, things were more serious overseas. On this, a reissue of his first album, German sax blower Peter Brötzmann and his associates were staking out their own turf with the sort of sonic landmine explosions committed in-your-face risk takers like Albert Ayler, Charles Tyler, Pharoah Sanders and Archie Shepp -- all saxophonists -- had experimented with a couple of years before.

The world was a lot bigger then before satellite television and MP3s. Brötz and others heard about rather than heard the nascent New Thingers. And the German sax man has always maintained that he was happy to hear Ayler’s earliest discs because it meant that someone else beside him was experimenting with overblowing, multiphonics and the non-song form.

While not as mind-altering as MACHINE GUN, which in 1968 extended this cacophony to a larger group, FOR ADOLPHE SAX, initially issued on the saxophonist’s own Bro label, is still a pretty impressive achievement. For here are two musicians from Wuppertal -- Brötz and bassist Peter Kowald -- plus an errant Swede -- drummer Sven-Åke Johansson producing hard, exhilarating pan-European jazz. Naming the LP after the Belgian inventor of the saxophone was a challenge, not a conceit after all.

What strikes you the most about this session, which has been expanded on CD with the addition of a nearly 10 minute piece which adds Belgian pianist Fred Van Hove to the trio, is the utter lack of dynamics. The Brötzmann of 2002 is Coleman Hawkins compared to the 1967 model, which solos with the ferocity and subtlety of a tank. At the same time, all the musicians look so much younger, as they were, and sound as if they were full of piss and vinegar -- at least that’s one way to characterize German wine and beer.

All the tracks are dominated by the saxophonist’s high-pitched, nephritic moans that seem designed to show that his output could be just as ferocious as Ayler’s, whose first ESP-Disk was three years old at the time. Often beginning with a whine, Brötzmann quickly moves into heavy shrieks and keeps up a constant repertoire of glossolalia and note flurries. Highlighting an ever-expanding dissonant tone, every so often he’ll slow down enough to let loose with one of those renal honks which defines his style to this day. Like Ayler, though, and very few others, there are variations in his screams as there are in the wordless shouts of the best soul singers.

Only 23 at the time, Kowald’s presentation is slower and less supple then it would become in subsequent years, but he’s able to match Brötz stroke by stroke. Using his bow to create a swarm of high-pitched buzzes, he’ll unexpectedly fall into the bass clef. “Sanity” (sic) -- the shortest track on the album -- allows him more scope since his quieter passages don’t have to jockey for real estate with acres of triple tonguing and overblowing.

As an aside, one wonders if the saxophonist’s frenzied playing on the 16 plus minutes of “Morning Glory” was what first created the tale that he literally burst a blood vessel during performance; it certainly seems to be hernia-creating music. That tune is memorable for another reason as well: for a few seconds the riff that would define MACHINE GUN makes its appearance.

While all this is going on, in the background Swedish drummer Sven-Åke Johansson bangs and crashes different parts of his kit like Sunny Murray on those early Ayler LPs. Paradoxically, for someone whose country was becoming a haven for war resisters, his approach often changes from suggestions of door knocking to hearty rat tat tats that almost sound military.

Van Hove, who would go on to be a long-time partner of the saxophonist in a trio with Dutch drummer Han Bennink, is in full energy piano mode on the last track, which

from a radio broadcast, is not as well recorded as the other three. He has to be, though, considering that the intensity of the other three is still there. Brötz also shifts to the baritone, but considering the high-pitched overtones he gets from it, there doesn’t seem to be much variation in sound from his tenor playing. The other overall drawback of all these tunes is that each seems to end rather than come to a logical conclusion, a sensitivity that would only come with maturity.

Thirty-five years later each of the musicians represented here plays differently, but with no loss of commitment. All may be less interested in waving a fist at the bourgeois as they did then, but that stance was necessary at the time. This reissue is still a powerful, rotgut blast of uncompromising free jazz and should be heard for precisely that reason.

-- Ken Waxman

Track Listing: 1. For Adolphe Sax 2. Sanity 3. Morning Glory 4. Everything*

Personnel: Peter Brötzma