Music as a matter of personality - Part 2

Fluxus, art, fellow musicians: taking the risky way 
Interview with Peter Broetzmann

Milano, May 8, 2011

Words + Photos: Gian Paolo Galasi

Artwork: Peter Broetzmann

Onie Onstadt Kunstsenter, Feb., 2011

Did you try to sing sometimes?

No, not really … but jazz horn, as how I see the music, has a kind of very personal voice, and a voice is telling stories, is telling about yourself, and your problems, your feelings, it forever belongs to you …

Working with Fluxus artists have you ever …

Fluxus movement was completely unfairy to, it had nothing to do with feeling, it was very contractive. These guys understood that very well at that time, they didn’t want any kind of big expression, they wanted all this stupid art get rid from; they organized very simple pieces, there is this famous Olivetti piece from Maciunas, or Bill Higgins, I can’t remember …

It was George Maciunas …

He performed a couple of times, and you just got it … you know, that Olivetti count machine …

Yes …

… of course you do … they produce that kind of little paper and so everybody got a piece of this paper and the number set different meanings, so everybody was reading papers and whenever there was a fight when you had to do this, so it was very mechanical way of producing things, away from the arts, away from the art business, away from the human. But it was a very understandable reaction from what was going on in the arts. So that was for me a good piece to learn, of course it was not my way of doing things, but it was good to know that things like that can work and we had fun, we had really some nice performances, and I had learned a lot from that …

… as an example? …

… mmm

… something you brought in your expression with the saxophone …

… you know, there was a piece, I think I brought from a piece of Paik he performed and it was called Piece for Violin. We had a guy who was actually our driver, he was a trumpet player, so we didn’t have a violin to do something, but he had his trumpet, he went onstage, he opened up the trumpet case, showed a little the trumpet to the audience and that was the violin piece. To lead things up ad absurdum, sometimes is a very good idea. So this kind of things I learned from the Fluxus guys, but from Paik I learned, in his early times, how to make prepared pianos, out of Cage pianos. He made it his way, with much more fun, much more Butoh …

Less Zen, maybe …  

Paik had very explicit meaning about Zen: “you can forget all the books written in Europe about Zen”. I did a piece, I was sitting on the toilet reading the newspaper; that was for him very much Zen. Paik started with his first television things, well far away from the very technical business he did in the last years, so just, for example, an empty TV wooden case, old fashioned, and the Buddha on it … So he was sitting there, and  the audience came in sometimes, things like that …

He was working on images; image as a language, something that comes before language, something that’s right there, like … this cup of coffee …

Yes, That’s true …

Sirene, 1979, Metal, wood

And when you play, I mean, I was listening to your old Die Like a Dog records; maybe that’s something coming from my side, but I feel a strong connection with painting … listening to you, Toshinori, William and Hamid, there are some references to music, to Ayler’s music, there’s  Toshinori playing some blues lines right in the middle of the flux of the music, but it’s more related to painting …

As a painter, I’m very connected with landscapes; whatever I do I see as a kind of landscape; I think I do in a way that’s the same in music, kind of picture that flows from one valley from the next mountain, and, especially this collaboration with Kondo, I mean, we are old friends, he’s one of my first Japanese friends, we still work together, and even if we’re not walking together we see each other. We are quite very close together ….

How would you describe him, as a person?

He’s very much as a Japanese of the ancient times, a samurai. The good thing with Paik was the same: when he got famous with the first day to business, when everybody was done and he has his six pack of beer and he opened up his Korean food in tins … so radish and all stinking shit … [we both laugh] … so we were sitting there after everybody was gone and in the night he was telling stories, usually laughing. With Kondo it’s the same, as much as we take what we are doing serious, but you always have to keep distance to it, and look at it from a little far away. You always quest on things, then you try next case, different and better, or going somewhere else.

I was reading an old interview in which you were talking about yourself and this ‘illusion’ that were in the Sixties, to change the world … [he laughs] … but it was an illusion because nobody changed the world, but artistically there were lots of things that were put on the table and that were really new … not because ‘new’ is something good by itself, but maybe, thinking that you can really change your situation, and the situation of other people around you, can help you to do something, really …

You can imagine, it was happening in Italy too, it was happening in France even; but for us Germans, born in the bore and cooling up in the afterwar times, in the first time of our government there was all the old Nazis in. Of course we didn’t want that, we didn’t want a new army, we said ‘Never again!’, that was what we really believed: we wanted to have a much more open society, a much more free society, and we though that music can be a part of that and make things possible, and of course we were on the loan. In the theater it was the same, and in the art world, we were trying to change really everything, get away from the all shit. But as it goes, no politics thought to drove money to rule the buck, and to fight against that is so think of impossibility but, what you can do? I still believe that and I’m sure about that, you can change with the music people’s mind, you can open people’s mind, you can give them a chance to see things differently; after a concert and before, and so you can work on that in very little steps.

So it’s a matter of working on your feelings and refining them, also?

That’s my fee, yes … I worked a lot in the last years since the East block opened up in Poland again, in Ucraina, sometimes in Russia, in Israel or in the Middle East, so to go especially to Poland, for example, as a German, with that history on my back, it’s not my fault but it’s my shame I carry around; and to go in Israel, and find there people of my age or even older speaking German to me, with a blue number on the arm, and they’re still friendly to me, that you can reach in music, a very deep experience. I had long discussions in my last trip to Ukraina, not in the big cities, to smaller places, and of course there was a lot to discuss but people were frontly open. I like being in my studio doing my painting and my artwork, it’s a nice place, and I like to work, to smoke, paint and to handle all kind of shit I’m working with. Sometimes I stay a longer period, let’s say four weeks at home, but then I have to go out, and play somewhere. Because with music the good thing is, you can get really very direct to the people. Just at the moment, and you can’t run away, it’s a very direct confrontation. I need that, I need that response, to convince an audience, at least one in the audience.

Workshop Freie Musik, 1972, Silk-screen print/DIN A1

So, you were saying to me before that when you usually play you don’t mind about the structure of music, so I think that is stupid to ask you how much composition and how much improvisation there were in Globe Unity Orchestra or there is in the Tentet now … the music changes because there are other musicians involved …

There’s thousand ways to make music, and for everybody it looks different, but I just can talk about my way, my understanding on which you’d work. I think you mentioned the Globe Unity since the best years of the Globe Unity have been when the orchestra decided just to improvise and forget about pieces and zones, and Kowald and I left after a concert we played in Montreux or somewhere. Because the Orchestra came back to very old fashioned structures, back the bebop business, back to all the things we had thrown away, and to come back to such things that didn’t make sense for us, so we left the band; and the way my Tentet works, not my Tentet but our Chicago Tentet works started because I was asking whoever wants to bring in pieces, ideas, little pieces of paper; people like Ken Vandermark, that like to write scores, really old fashioned then. In the first years it was a good way of getting close together, but then there was a moment after about five years I set around a rehearsal and said ‘ok, let’s throw away all the papers, forget them, tonight we’ll play just improvising’. 

You got to a point in which you knew each other so well …

I had the feeling that everybody knows how to find his way, and since we do that way, we were quite successful; we just set a fourteen days tour, and had three days in London, three days in my hometown, and that was looking so really fantastic, really great. So if I see that there is always a little more potential, more things to reach, more directions to go, and everybody contribute and everybody feels responsible and everybody takes his duties and works for the band and for the music, than it is really a very good feeling, and just the music for the very beginning was not only music for me, it was kind of a social experience too; and I think jazz music is the only music that still has that possibilities and abilities, and there’s a fascinating thing. As I said before, I never was kind of a bandleader, that tells ‘ok, I want this here and that there’, and ‘you play this and … ‘, no I always use my little ideas to get the people playing and finding their own ways to make things happen and this is a kind of risky way, because you can fall deep down [laughs] but I like that, the risk is very is important for art …