2023-06-24 13:00:04
Peter Brötzmann, à Amsterdam (Pays-Bas), and 1987. FRANS SCHELLEKENS/REDFERNS
Born in Remscheid (Germany), on March 6, 1941, Peter Brötzmann died in Wuppertal (Germany), Thursday June 22. Saxophonist and clarinetist, he also played taragot and led insane ensembles. He is a major figure in European free music, with an energy as unbridled as his sound, recognizable among a thousand.
“All music will end up in elevator music, even Bach or Charlie Parker”, said the saxophonist Jean-Louis Chautemps (1931-2022). Brötzmann’s strength lies in having been able to avoid this disastrous fate. After studying plastic arts in Wuppertal, where he settled in 1962 with double bass player Peter Kowald (1944-2002) and other musicians, he leapt from his beginnings in a “dixieland” style to what he is agreed to consider as an experimental art. They will play with Pina Bausch (1940-2009) as soon as she lives in Wuppertal.
Both on the music and visual arts front, he collaborated with the composers Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007) and Mauricio Kagel (1931-2008) or the artist Nam-June Paik (1932-2006), performed with American musicians Don Cherry (1936-1995) and Steve Lacy (1934-2004). His path is traced, he will not budge. In 1963, during an exhibition of the Fluxus group where he had some success with his plastic works, he met Misha Mengelberg (pianist and composer, 1935-2017) and other Dutch musicians such as drummer Han Bennink. Brötzmann will illustrate many covers of his plethoric discography.
Rage to live
In 1964, Carla Bley integrated him into a quartet with Peter Kowald. Kowald with whom he produced his first album, For Adolphe Sax (1967). Swedish Sven-Ake Johansson is on drums. In August 1966, in Comblain-la-Tour (Belgium), we remember having seen Peter Brötzmann go wild with Han Bennink in the open air, in the rain: this appearance remains staggering. Emotional shock, rage to live, conflagration of all the senses, spark that lasts…
Read the portrait (in 2012): Peter Brötzmann, a flow, a flow, a torrent
It’s about limitless energy, the one that we find at work in Machine Gun, recorded in a club in Bremen (Germany) with the whole troupe, plus Bushi Niebergall (1938-1990, bassist), Evan Parker (sax and British clarinetist), Willem Breuker (1944-2010, sax and clarinet, Dutch as Bennink) , Fred Van Hove (1937-2022, Belgian pianist). With a strictly unsurpassable collective momentum, the album is a break, a promise, as much as it devilishly sticks to the time (1968).
It was in Paris, in 1965, that Don Cherry nicknamed Brötzmann “Machine Gun” (Machine Gun). Offstage, these people (including the pianist Irene Schweizer, also programmed at Comblain, in 1966), are the gentlest of beings, ecologists before their time, nature lovers, cultured and with a rare sense of humor. The film Rage. A Portrait of Peter Brötzmann (by Bernard Josse and Gérard Rouy, 2011) testifies to this.
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