Peter Brotzmann, Cecil Taylor, Roscoe Mitchell: The Last Masterpieces?

A couple of years have passed since I grabbed my copies of three records I wanna review even if some other years are passed after their release. The point is that these albums have marked the passing of time and maybe they have put the word ‘End’ to the possible evolution of a musical genre like jazz. A jazz contaminated with both contemporary music and tradition, but it’s not by chance that this backlash comes from three aged musicians – one, Taylor, died four years ago.

In fact, I can’t hear novelties in the world of free and contemporary jazz, even if there IS interesting stuff – search in this blog for any – from younger musicians, but they are quite often incomplete. Some are missing the developing of a personal language, some are missing the developing of a structure that can sustain their personal language, some lack vision. So, since these three discs have collected enthousiastic reviews, I wonder if by chance they are the last word on a world of sound, on a vision, on a musical practice.

Let’s start with Cecil Taylor’s At Angelica 2000 Bologna. I’ve written extensively about Taylor’s music through this post so I ain’t gonna repeat myself. Taylor was the most important pianist to mix contemporary music and jazz music, and still is nowadays. Every contemporary pianist, from Andrew Hill to Matthew Shipp, owes him something, even indirectly. Angelica, instead, is an important and renowned festival that takes place in Italy since 1990 and that hosts the most interesting music in the fields of contemporary jazz, contemporary music, experimental music.

I remember when I had the opportunity to listen to the precious music by Pauline Oliveros, Roscoe Mitchell, John Tilbury and Wadada Leo Smith in 2011 on May 8, on various combinations. Angelica not only gives us the opportunity to hear such music, but also releases on CD and vinyl some of the most intriguing performances. In 2020, the I Dischi di Angelica label released an intriguing double album by Cecil Taylor. The first disk features the solo performance held at Angelica 2000 by the maestro, while the second features a one hour long interview with Taylor.

The music in this album is Cecil Taylor at his best. Not only you can hear the melodic and the strumming phrases he is well known for, but also the structure of the music – do you remember when Taylor talks about Calatrava bridges? – is quite audible and comprehensible. Obviously one pays the price for Taylor fire, for his poetry, for his mastery in mixing hints of stride piano and contemporary structures, but this is in my opinion, after hearing many of his records and having seeing him also live with his Feel Trio (with Tony Oxley on drums and William Parker on bass), his best performance ever, his spiritual and musical will.

To accomplish this mission there’s also a beautiful libretto with the text of the interview, for those of you who don’t understand english as native language and can have difficulties in listening to an american man talking. The second album for this collective review is another solo, Peter Brotzmann’s I Surrender Dear. Apparently less iconoclastic, noisey and harsh than his usual outputs, this solo album released by Troast Records in 2019 with a beautiful cover by Brotmann himself with crayon on cardboard is like an intimate confession.

I still remember a concert I attended in Oslo in 2011 where he played with pianist Masaiko Satoh but leaving us with a beautiful coda of solo tenor with all our tears spread along the road of our listening experience. This album is different because in a way we can hear, as someone wrote in another review, Brotzmann in an intimate situation, playing standards of jazz but giving them new shape and blood, on the other hand this operation will push us to ask ourselves what is an intimate act – this is, in fact, the Fluxus side of Brotzmann.

In fact we all are accustomed to listen to solo standards as something personal – paradoxically: as far as it seems, in jazz you are yourself the most when you play other people’s music, and the oldest as possible: it is a true topic or it is a convention? – and this is what Brotmann tries to do, but transcending the pieces of music in a personal way, even if renouncing to his usual confrontational approach. Surprising as it can be, a similar attitude will leave the listener with many questions more than with the pleasure of a ‘beautiful’ sonic experience. And this is Brotzmann at his best, conceptually and practically.

And now for the third album, another double: Roscoe Mitchell’s Bells For The South Side, released by ECM in 2017. The oldest of this trio of albums, is also possibly the most fascinating. I still remember when I was reading in my own language the books by philosopher Davide Sparti, who was applying Foucault theories to jazz music. According to him, jazz music is the music of musicians who know where they start but don’t know where they will arrive to, and who they will be at the end of the performance.

But in listening to this trio performances of compositions by Mitchell, who sometimes acts as a musicians and sometimes lead the trios, you don’t hear such trasmutation, but something new: like a Zen quality of being, immutable and eternal, like the definitive expression of a pure soul. Described by some critics as the best compositions of music after Beethoven’s last quartets – I ain’t joking, the review is available through the internet although written in Italian – Mitchell’s pieces of music represented here were mysterious to me at a first listening, but they have this quality of reproducing sound cells and expressions in a way that really remind me the Zen meditation process.

This way, Mitchell pushes jazz faraway over its boundaries. From a research for a new identity to the affirmation of pure being. Pianos, trumpets, reeds, electric guitars, percussions, drums, noise, all is worth to create a realm of sound that give the listener the sensation of being absorbed in something that is out of time or fully in time, for what is worth. We will not hear easily music of such beauty as the one contained in these three records. So I really believe they are a milestone in contemporary jazz and it’s time for youngest musicians to get over it but starting from it. Unluckily it’s not time for enthousiasm in the realm of music, I can hear more struggle to tell the truth ...