Peter Brötzmann 1941-2023

I’m listening to Catching Ghosts, a beautiful recording of Peter Brötzmann’s set at the 2022 Berlin jazz festival, in whch he was joined by the Moroccan guembri player Majid Bekkas and the American drummer Hamid Drake. Brötzmann died last week in Wuppertal, his hometown, aged 82; the cause was chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, from which he’d suffered for some time, exacerbated by the arrival of Covid-19. His final public appearances were earlier this year at Café Oto in London.

A formidable figure. Brötzmann was famous for the volume (in every sense) of his saxophone playing: not just the prodigious decibel level but the volume of notes and the volume of energy, urgency and passion that poured out of his alto and tenor saxophones, his clarinet and bass clarinet, and his Hungarian tarogato in countless live appearances and scores of recordings. He lived as hard as he blew, and there’s pathos in the thought that the ferocity of his playing over the course of 60-odd years may have contributed to his fatal illness.

I first set eyes on him in November 1969, when I took time off from covering the Berlin Jazztage to visit what most people referred to as the anti-festival: the second annual Total Music Meeting, held in the Litfass, a café in Charlottenburg. It was the brainchild of the New Artists Guild, a group of young German musicians who objected to the way the line-up of official festival (whose stars that year were Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Stan Kenton, Sarah Vaughan and Lionel Hampton) was failing to include exponents of the new European free jazz.

I remember hearing the pianist Alex von Schlippenbach there for the first time, and the tenorist Rüdiger Carl. Brötzman was leading a band including three British musicians — Evan Parker, Paul Rutherford and Derek Bailey — along with the German bassist Buschi Niebergall, the Dutch drummer Han Bennink and the Belgian keyboards player Fred van Hove. Without disavowing its influences, this was becoming a truly European idiom.

Several of these musicians had been involved in the recording of Machine Gun, the octet album released the previous year on Brötzmann’s own label. Taking its cue from John Coltrane’s Ascension and Albert Ayler’s Bells, but raising the collective intensity to unprecedented levels, Machine Gun acted as a manifesto. Today it retains, like Jimi Hendrix’s Woodstock version of “The Star Spangled Banner”, its ability to shock and amaze in real time while also carrying the mind back to the conflicts and social turbulence of the time and place in which it was made.

“We saw our task as building a different foundation for music,” Brötzmann told Reinhard Köchl of Zeit Online early this month, in his last interview. Out of that second Total Music Meeting in 1969 came a label called FMP (Free Music Production), the brainchild of Brötzmann and the producer Jost Gebers. Starting a few months later with Manfred Schoof’s European Echoes, FMP went on to release more than 200 albums on vinyl and/or CD — including, in 1971, the first of several reissues of Machine Gun.

It was also the home of several albums by one of my favourite Brötzmann groups, a quartet with the trumpeter Toshinori Kondo, the bassist William Parker and Hamid Drake on drums. Die Like a Dog was the name of their first album, subtitled “Fragments of Music, Life and Death of Albert Ayler”, and it became the name of the band. My favourite of the quartet’s albums is a 1999 session recorded in Berlin and released under the title Aoyama Crows. In an interview included with that album, Brötzmann reflected on mortality. “We’ll just play until we drop,” he said. “It’s not because we’re heroes. We have to. There isn’t much else for us to do but to carry on playing.”

He was not necessarily the easiest person to deal with, even for someone who admired him greatly. When Tyshawn Sorey agreed to be my artist in residence at Jazzfest Berlin in 2017, we discussed possible projects. I suggested that a duo with Brötzmann might be a good idea. Tyshawn was immediately enthusiastic. I made the approach, only to receive a message from Brötzmann saying that he had no intention of being part of “a circus”. That was a pity; it could have been a colossal meeting. Perhaps it was me. Anyway, I’m glad my successor, Nadin Deventer, had better luck in 2022.

By that time the onset of physical limitations may have shorn Brötzmann’s playing of some of the Sturm und Drang elements that characterised his prime years. But exposed to a clearer view in Catching Ghosts is a kind of lyricism which entwines beautifully around Majid Bekkas’s traditional Gnawa chants and the sprung rhythms set up by the guembri (a three-stringed bass lute) and the drums. Brötzmann gave us late work worthy of his long and extraordinary career.

* The photograph of Peter Brötzmann is by Anna Niedermeier. Catching Ghosts is out now on the ACT label.