Music as a matter of personality - Part 1

Interview with Peter Broetzmann

Milano, May 8, 2011

Words + Photos: Gian Paolo Galasi

Artwork: Peter Broetzmann

Onie Onstadt Kunstsenter, Feb. 2011

It’s the beginning of May, and I’m in Bologna just to follow the first AngelicA weekend. The night before my trip there, I was in O’ following an exhibition of Gak Sato and Steve Piccolo, part of the MiLand Festival. Filippo Grieco, who’s part of MiLand and TRoK! team, asks me if on Sunday morning very early I could go on Malpensa airport, just to take Peter Broetzmann, that at night will play with Gianni Mimmo on reeds, Xabier Iriondo on guitar, and Cristiano Calacagnile on drums, so to drive him at his hotel. Then, there would be a couple of hours, time to prepare a room for Mr. Machine Gun, for a talk. I rapidly mind at what will occur me, from Bologna to Milano in Sunday, and then back after the interview (I’ll miss the concert but I just planned yet to see Wadada Leo Smith and Roscoe Mitchell playing) and give my positive answer. I’ll not go to take Peter Broetzmann with my car, since I don’t have one; another guy will lead him there, but it’s still ok for the interview. Me and Peter met at 9.30 a.m. in the hotel room. We met yet in Oslo, when he played with pianist Masahiko Satoh; there, I asked him just to sign up a copy of one of FMP last output, but at the end of that concert, outside Onie Onstadt Kunstsenter doors, me and my friends widely greeted him for their astounding performance. We had a couple of hours, sat in the hotel little garden inside, smoking and talking freely. This is the almost unedited transcription, in which Brotezmann talked to me about his entire career: the beginning as a painter, Nam June Paik, the Fluxus movement; his fellow musicians Toshinori Kondo, Peter Kowald, Ken Vandermark and Mats Gustaffson; politics, art and music world; the past and future of music business, and the meaning of it all, as a matter of personal view, the one he built up in almost 50 years of career. A very relaxed chat, a good environment in which to talk openly. After the interview, he told me that the day before his performance in Milano he would fly in Istanbul just to play with konstruKt fellows, about which there would be material coming on Complete Communion within few days. But our chat begins with him complaining about not getting in touch anymore with the Italian improv music scene of the present times.

The Berkshires, Watercolor on paper, 2005

So you are more aware of the older generation of musicians, like Tiziano Tononi maybe … the drummer from Italian Instabile Orchestra …

Yes, but there’s not any much to play for us in Italy, so there’s not really a contact to Italian musicians. Only guy I’m working with is Massimo Pupillo, and you don’t see them in the other parts of Europe, you don’t see them in Germany …

Pupillo played in the U.S. because his last record was published by Mike Patton, Zorn’s fellow … so they made a little tour there … I was talking with Wadada Leo Smith and he was telling me that in the last ten years there weren’t that much musicians trying to make things from anew, some new forms of music or of art, and he was prompting that no one in this moment has the courage of doing something different, of going outside the mainstream, be it improvisation or other styles of music … maybe, there were times in which lots of people were doing new things, like Ornette out of the Sixties, but there are times in which you have only to try and understand what people do, and this is satisfying …

Oh, I don’t believe in these new forms of music, new forms in arts. It all develops, and if you’re listening now to Ornette Coleman, to the music out of the Sixties, it’s very nice reed music, not the revolutionary thing we thought in those years. You do hear Coltrane nowadays in every fucking diner in the U.S. I would complain that there is very little of ideas, of new organisation coming from the very young ones; in the Fifties we were dealing with the same problem: in Berklee School of music, or in Cologne Music Highschool, it’s all the same shit they learn, it’s everywhere the same, it’s all boring music, and it’s so bad music actually; out of this schools nothing will come, I think. And another point also very important is, even the young guys want to make some money, and you can’t make money if you’re out of the mainstream, on the edges. And the mainstream, as I can see in our northern part of Europe from Germany to Scandinavia, is getting narrow, more and more, and what is on the side of it doesn’t count anymore. So lot of the young people of course they want to make money, I understand that truly well.

But when you started your career, it was the same?

It’s always the same, the problems look a little bit different, but of course music industry nowadays is much more narrow, focused on money making than it was in the Sixties when I started. And the whole music scene was much more spread out and there was space for everybody, but nowadays it’s really this money making mainstream. If you want to do something different, you have to be strong, very patient, you have to know what you want, and you can’t forget about making money, so you have to look for some other sources, which I did in my early years too: I did all kind of jobs to survive. But I’m missing ideas of the young people … it’s my seventy years, and I’m still avant-garde, then something is wrong. That is the point.

I didn’t see people asking you so much about you being a painter … In your first years, you started with Nam June Paik and Joseph Beuys …

I had the great chance to work for Nam June Paik for a couple of his exhibitions, and I of course did know Beuys, and the guys from the Fluxus movement, which was for me of course very important and very encouraging too, because these was the only people that always said, ’Brotzmann, do your thing’: in the early Sixties the musicians around me they all said ‘oh no, come on ..’; if I showed up some, people started to laugh or to run away …

Before other musicians like Carla Bley, Don Cherry, or artists like Nam June Paik, people like that …

The Americans were very helpful to me, people like Carla, but much more people like Steve Lacy: he was living already in Paris these years, and he toured in Germany quite a bit, solo or with his trio and quintet, and I met Steve very very early, and he was always very very helpful, he made the connections to Don Cherry, to Carla Bley. I would say, from musicians side, Don Cherry and Steve Lacy were not really influent but good people behind me, a good background, good friends.

And that maybe it’s more important than making money, at some point, to have people near you …

Yeah, it’s very funny when Don Cherry invited me for a weekend to come to Paris and join his quintet with Gato, Karl Berger …

… Aldo Romano …

… or this young Danish guy, I can’t remember. When I came back home then, people respected me, you see how the trouble goes, stupid as it did; soon after that, Carla invited me, and the first time I met Cecil Taylor, Jimmy Lyons, and Andrew Cyrille, with whom I later worked quite a bit together with. So I must say even a man like Lee Konitz when he heard me the first time, came to me and said ‘hey Brotzmann, don’t worry’ …

Landscape, 1959, Tar paper and earth on canvas

… he was more open minded …

… oh yeah, that’s sometimes a good thing with Americans …

… maybe because being a musician he was able to understand you directly, usually criticians have more boundaries …

Yeah, but Americans in general, and American musicians, compared to Europeans. Europeans always like to put things in boxes: you as a free, and you as a bebop, and you as a big band … all bullshits: if you look at American jazz history, the best music just appeared when, for example, Rollins played with Coleman Hawkins, and Paul Bley was in the band: these guys are much more open.

Like yesterday night, in Bologna, with John Tilbury playing with Leo Smith … after the concert, a friend told to me that Wadada was the one who was improvising, but in the end the thing is, the music is working, so, who cares …

If it’s working is fine. I played before he died with Walter Perkins, a drummer who started with Robert Barry together in the early Sun Ra band in Chicago, and then he went through all the bebop times, he was long time member of Sarah Bonds and Lou Donaldson. A real bebop guy, and I met him while William Parker and him decided to do a little tour in the States. That was so fine, to be together with this old experienced man, we played exactly the same what he ever did. Coming together was one of the best times of my life, and then he soon planned a European tour but he died of cancer and very quickly. So, it’s all bullshit to put things in boxes, you just have to listen. American music history is full of very strange combinations, people in Europe shouldn’t be so afraid of each other, it’s nonsense.

So when we usually look at the United States thinking about those guys with war paranoia, it’s the same for us, culturally speaking …

[thinking about it, then really convinced]  … yes …

Maybe they are more pragmatic, that’s why they feel free to play with people and mix things, never mind about being, for example, an improviser that has to play with a contemporary musician …

I see the music I’m doing, the history of jazz music as a history of personalities, much more than of styles. I’m interested in finding, even if I look among the younger ones, personalities that know what they want to do without getting disturbed by anything, so I found, my friends in Chicago, of course because I’m quite free in it, but I found in Europe Mats Gustaffson and Paal Nilssen-Love, a great drummer in its young years … I need people who can pursue something, and then I can respond, and then music starts to develop … in my band, the Tentet, or in the smaller bands I never tell people what to do, I do my thing and I try to do it very clearly, but I wait and I see what respose I get, and all the things converge together …

As far as self-expression, Peter Kowald said that when he was playing the bass, he could express every aspects of his personality, that maybe socially he couldn’t, like, using his words, “I can cry on the bass, and people can feel that, whereas, going on the street, I really can’t start crying” … as a matter of being true with yourself, in some way, to what you feel …

That’s what in general art is about … writers sit and write their bullshits, and we as musicians are trying to do the same in our language. I see music as a kind of language too, and of course standing in front of an audience, if you want or not, that’s the way it goes, you have to open yourself and give some pieces and parts and thoughts and feelings a way … when I was very young and listened first times to jazz music I always wanted to be a singer but I was not courageous enough, so I needed a horn …