An Hommage To Peter Brotzmann

On June 22, 2023 multi reedist, composer, improviser and fluxus alumni Peter Brotzmann has sadly passed away. This article is our way, after a long interview released many years ago, to remember him. Peter Brotzmann during the 1970 was the true face of European avant garde jazz, and along with his partner and mutual friend Evan Parker one of the pivotal figures of improvised music.

A close friend of visual artist Nam June Paik and others pertaining to the Fluxus movement, Brotzmann tried to incorporate elements of this iconoclastic idea into his own playing. Brotzmann style at saxophones is assertive, violent, abrasive and a little bit ironic. In the following years, after being cherished by Don Cherry and other American avant-garde artists more than by European critics, he started playing with musicians coming from the other side of the ocean like William Parker, Ronald Shannon Jackson and Bill Laswell.

This is a quick introduction to his discography. The first album you have to listen is Machine Gun (FMP, 1968). Here Brotzmann is leading an octet featuring Willem Breuker, Evan Parker, Fred Van Hove, Peter Kowald and Han Benning among the others. The music is surprisingly violent, with at the beginning the horns section imitating the sound of machine guns, in an attempt to give life to an  anti militarist concept. But the music is texturally rich, with the various musicians giving life to a multi structured creature.

You can find the same assertiveness on subsequent records like Nipples (FMP, 1969) and Fuck The Boere (FMP 1970), an album dedicated to the South African musician Johnny Dyani who died in the same years. An album that is worh of attention and of deep listenings, a true testimony of creativity and fantasy, is Schwarzwaldfahrt (FMP 1977), in which Brotzmann and mutual friend Han Bennink recorded a live set of free music into a forest, with Bennink beating logs and other natural elements with his sticks and Brotzmann utilising his many saxophones so to create a site specific music inspired by nature.

During the 1980, a period not favorable for experimentations, Brotzmann gave life to the quartet Last Exit, with U.S. musicians such as Sonny Sharrock, Ronald Shannon Jackson and Bill Laswell. The music here is even more heavy and dense, and in a way it anticipates what John Zorn at the end of the decade will create with his band Naked City. Now finally accepted as the uncompromising musician he is, Peter Brotzmann can finally manage to give life to various line up and various musical creations.

During the 1990s, his most important combo is the Die Like a Dog Quartet, an hommage to Albert Ayler that featured again U.S. musicians like William Parker, Hamid Drake and japanese trumpet player Toshinori Kondo. The quartet issued four albums of pure existential poetry, in which reflecting on life and death through notes is part of a project that is one of a kind. While in effect many musicians like Marc Ribot tried to hommage Ayler playing his own music, Brotzmann quartet gave life to new material instead of reproposing old tunes.

A second life, if necessary, was given to Brotzmann music during the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the new century by the Peter Brotzmann Tentet, featuring musicians such as Ken Vandermark, Jeb Bishop, Joe McPhee, Paal Nilssen-Love and Fred Lonberg-Holm among the others. The tentet and his various combinations in duos, trios, etc. gave life to a live adventure that brought Brotzmann all around the world performing fresh and harsh music, making the old master known to younger generations of musicians and fans.

As every master musician, Brotzmann is particularly fond in the art of soloing, even if that part of his own work is not completely above the banner of his most recognised art. Two albums in particular can be advised to the listeners issued in recent years: No Nothing (FMP 1991) where Brotmann imagines a different concept for each of his instrument like e-flat clarinet, alto sax, bass sax, tenor, tarogato, and I Surrender Dear (Trost 2019) where he reinvents classics like Lover Come Back to Me or Con Alma at tenor saxophone.

Having toured extensively during the last years, Brotzmann has played with an enormous variety of musicians, among which Keiji Haino and many others coming from all over the world: from the East to the West, many artists payed a tribute to the complex art of Peter Brotzmann playing with him. Impossible to imitate, difficult to be inspired by, Brotmann was one of a kind for technique and vision. Possibly his leaving is the sign of the end of an era.  

 

Steve Lacy & Evan Parker “Chirps”, FMP, 1986, reissued in 2022

Sometimes you’re uneasy or unfamiliar, at least at the beginning, with what comes out of your stereo or during a concert onstage, and sometimes this unfamiliarity or this sort of uneasiness is good for you. Terry Riley said once that when we’re at ease with music, it is because we project something about ourselves in it, and this is not completely good. I’m paraphrasing, but this is also what I think.

Not that this Chirps, recorded live in 1985 in Berlin at the Haus am Waldsee, is a particularly difficult record to handle. Not at all, if you still know the music of the two masters involved in this album. Steve Lacy started the most vital part of his career as a sideman for Thelonious Monk, and he transposed that ‘hip’ language, so angular, peculiar and full of spaces between the notes, on his own instrument, the soprano saxophone.

After all, soprano is one of the most difficult horns to play. Being a straight reed instrument, it doesn’t warm or round the microtones every instrument carry with itself. So, instead of try and hide the mistakes, Lacy started to exacerbate them. His peculiar way of playing soprano starts from that point. An italian follower of Lacy, the mourned Gianni Mimmo, once explained that to an AAJ interviewer.

And Roscoe Mitchell once said to me he was try and build new curved sopranos in order to have some more enjoyable and able to be mastered instruments. Strangely enough, but undoubtedly, from Monk another road lead to the soprano. This other path passes through John Coltrane and his tritones, his almost binaural sound.

An idea that had a further development thanks to Evan Parker. Parker is not a simple musician to handle, you cannot put him in a box quickly, because he passed through various phases and his sound and techniques have evolved during the passing of time forming a wider palette. So before listening to this particular record I thought I would listen to two different way of playing soprano and their attempt to mix together in a way or another.

Obviously the album is different from what I thought at the beginning: Parker and Lacy try to come close the one to the other. If Lacy initially seems to be the more keen on his usual style, the one we have described before in this post, Parker demonstrates a great ability to dialogue and fold his techniques in order to create the best music in order to accompany his partner.

Only at the end of Full Scale, the album first track, Parker explodes in something that can be related to his binaural outbursts sculpted into the void, with Lacy following him. For the rest the relationship between full (of sound) and void are fiercely lacy-esque. What changes between this record and others outputs – I think particularly of a 1986 release of Lacy and Potts – is that Parker share a similar idea of time and recollection.

If you’ll listen to the second track, Relations, you’ll hear the usual Lacy’s angularities interspersed with Parker attempts to create a more fragmented sound, something unusual since Lacy looks often for less abrasive, more grandiloquent partners in order to create a contrast and have some propulsion for his own statements.

It seem to me, this way, that this music is really one of the best attempts, even more than Lacy supported by another partner, pianist Mal Waldron, to be loyal to Monk heritage, not literally but as a matter of spirit. The final four minutes of Twittering present another dialogue where some phrases are taken from one instrumentalist to the other in order to build variations and diversities yet in a perspective of unity.

My final advice is not to be disappointed by the shortness of the album (only 41 minutes and 31 seconds) because this kind of dialogues need time to develop themselves; on the other hand it would be easy for such navigated improvisers to try and amaze the audience with longer performances emptying all the pockets with tricks and techniques. The interesting thing about this record is, instead, that the musician kind of want you to take your time and enjoy the music, leaving you with the opportunity to listen to it again more than once. You’ll want more for sure. 

To listen to a track of the album click here

Blue Notes “For Mongezi” (Ogun 2008, reissued in 2022)

Mongezi Feza was one of the best trumpet player to come out of South Africa. Born in Queenstown in 1945, he started studying his instrument at the age of 8. In 1962 he joined pianist Chris McGregor, altoist Dudu Pukwana, bassist Johnny Dyani and drummer Louis Moholo-Moholo in the Blue Notes. Their first concerts, as testified by my latest review, were an hommage to the flamboyancy of Charlie Parker and bebop and the hipness of Thelonious Monk, to whom many themes of their original fist compositions are paying openly hommage.

The Blue Notes played in different clubs and venues, universities comprised, even if with great difficulties and always clandestinely, being a racially mixed band. After 1964 and their appearance at the Antibes Festival, they started to reside first in Europe and then in the UK, where they had a huge influence both on the scene of improvised music and of rock music. After playing together in a large ensemble called The Brotherhood of Breath, Feza eventually died on December 14, 1975.

This album, For Mongezi, originally issued only in 2008 and now reissued this year, comprises the music originally played at Mongezi’s memorial service. The original music, here in this reissue completely restored, was longer than 2 hours. It is useless to describe point by point what this music sounds like. It is obviously vital, forceful, dense, intense, of impact. Differently from the last record reviewed, this album is not devoted to bebop or post bop music. It is, indeed, a session of music that is keen on free improvisation and roots music, as Coltrane’s Kulu Sé Mama, if we want to find out a far away relative.

On many occasions we can hear Dyani great work on bass, pinched and arcoed, accompanied by drums and small percussions, McGregor ability to play atonally, influences coming from the US more than from UK anyway (The Blue Notes improvisations are never “non idiomatic”) and also from South African folklore, mixed with Pukwana and Moholo-Moholo invocations. Pukwana style on alto seems to have been developed from the original Charlie Parker influence to that of the late great Jimmy Lyons, with that oblique melancholy and bitterness who abruptly develop itself into a cascade of notes without being a clone.

But this record is important, as it is the memorial service for John Coltarne where Albert Ayler played captured in the monumental box set Holy Ghost, because we can feel how much different for African-American culture a departure is from European culture. It is not a matter of believing in the spirits or in a different life, or maybe is, but mostly is a difference related to agency. I remember you, so I’m here playing for you. I’m not only feeling emotions, but I’m sharing those emotions with the world, so maybe, I argue as a critic and as a listener, you are still alive with us throughout our playing, as a source of  inspiration.

Music to be listened to carefully, music filled with love and compassion, music that gives you at once that feeling of intensity and those nuances of depth into the souls of the players involved. If, as someone said to me, the Live in South Africa from 1964 showed us some musicians in love with jazz and willing to recreate that music but not completely mature, this For Mongezi instead leavea us listening the music of four complete and original musicians.

One can hear how important this music was for European improvisers, giving them that feeling of being rooted somewhere even if maybe only technically. Possibly Evan Parker, Alan Skidmore and Mike Osborne were compelled to develop their style incorporating that ritualistic element you can hear through this record. I wonder, as an example, if the binaural sound of Parker, that is his ‘playing through the void’ as he asserted during one concert I attended in London, was influenced somehow by Pukwana and friends’ way of creating music.

Obviously every music need an element of grounding, every form of art. The Blue Notes developed an intense link with ancestor’s rituals, stripped from their original believing – or maybe not? – but dedited to create a sound and a meaning that is modern and ancient at the same time. After all, music is still a ritual nowadays. For many people is a way to meet their idols and the community of listeners to have some fun, for others is a way to beign recognized by and recognize a community, for others again is a way to develop human skills as compassion and brotherhood, but always the spirit of the music is trying to uplift people outside of the everyday problems giving you the opportunity to enter into another dimension so that you can take it and bring it into the realm of reality. To make it better.

 

 

Orchestre Tout Puissant Marcel Duchamp "We're OK. But We're Lost Anyway" (Bongo Joe Records, 2021)

In 2011 or 2012, when I wanted to quit writing (and I did for quite some years devoting myself to photography) I wanted to leave with a couple of articles: an interview with young Stefania ‘?Alos’ Pedretti (available on the italian webzine Mescalina) and an article about a young photographer (available on the italian webzine Culturame). But, what made me quit writing? It’s simple: the quality of the music I was listening to at the time.

Something was going terribly wrong. I listened to a lot of young musicians in London the year before and if I loved the ‘great old men’ of the avant-garde (Evan Parker, Louis Moholo-Moholo to name a couple) on the other hand I felt little or no empathy with the young improvisers or experimental musicians, with some notable exception. And I was feeling as Mr Jones (as in Bob Dylan song Ballad of a Thin Man, when he sings “And you know something is happening but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr Jones?”).

So my idea was: “I don’t know where the music is going, I know only it is going badly, in sad places, so I want to explore art as an artist in order to understand better, on my own skin, what’s going on”. So I did photography and then theatre for many years, and finally I came back to writing. It was not a dramatic come back. I was always putting a review here and there, even in this blog. But finally, thanks to a colleague, I found out the perfect album to talk about this lost decade. 

The Album is “We’re OK, but We’re Lost Anyway” (great title, indeed) by the incredible Orchestre Tout Puissand Marcel Duchamp. An italian magazine of music made me aware or these guys, and the first time I listened to their music through youtube – a mix, as Stefano I. Bianchi wrote on Blow Up, of ‘afrobeat, Ex, Stereolab, Folk, jazz’ – I felt this sense of melancholy and sadness that was not coming from the notes played by the musicians, but kind of ‘in between’ the music, but being the most part of it.

So I kind of felt that all the sadness for the lost of music – there are only few record shops left in my town where I can find CDs or vynils of free jazz, improv and contemporary music and I hate Amazon so there’s no way I’m gonna use it to purchase records, plus the last one was kind of a ‘lost’ decade: I mean, apart from few musicians, even apart from the musicians you’ve found during this years on Complete Communion there was not that much great music to listen to – was here, better said: instead of listening to a new record, I was listening to all the sadness of the decade. 

This is the best part of “We’re OK ...”. But before analysing the album, few words for the band. The orchestra has born in Geneva in 2006, thanks to the bassist Vincent Bertholet who basically wanted to give life to a group of musicians who could play together around Europe. Initially fueled by six players, the band during the years became a 12tet and now it is a band of 14 elements. The band has a kind of political consciousness that makes it very nice to my ears and heart.

“From Mexican Zapatists to Chiapas rioters, we stand aside every person who wants to destroy capitalism through the dismantling of great commercial empires in favor of local agricultural enterprise” states Bertholet, and this is really the less we can do in this world right now. But what about the music? After an introduction so heavy, the music has to be at least incredibly good. And it is, even if its best part for me is I won’t say ‘not intended’, but ‘unconscious’. 

The album opens with Be Patient, where an accordion lead the listener though his microtones and minimal melody to Bertholet patterns embellished with violins twirling around the bass. Then drums and horns enter. The atmosphere is full of rage, while we start listening to the voice. If I have to make a comparison, the last Portishead come to my mind. But the trombone and the guitar mumbling together comes from experimental music, and so memory goes to records for instrumental ensemble and voice like “Les Stances A Sophie” and “Raining on the Moon”.

Empty Skies shows us what drums and strings can do if combined together exploring repetition through different pitches. Voice sweetens the listener while guitar and strings develop a distorted unison that is possibly what made Bianchi, the italian journalist above, think about the Ex (accompanied by Tom Cora I guess). So Many Things (To Feel Guilty About) is based on the dynamics of a guitar counterpointing a vocal chorus. Drums give depth to the ensemble, vibraphone too as it takes its turn. 

Blabber, as I was hoping to hear, is opened by vibe and drums, plus cello and voice playing a game of underlines to which all strings add tasty spices here and there, while We Can Can We is driven by horns, cello and drums. The rhythm is undoubtely that of Fela Kuti’s music, with a guitar dipped into minimalism as the vibraphone. Flux is a delicate journey into a dream made of horns, voice and vibraphone, whereas guitar adds a punk rhythmic ad a certain point. Drum’s colors set on fire the male rap, again with the guitars developing a rock drama made of multiple grating.

Connected is a couple-of-minute-divertissement for chorus and guitar, Beginning, the last five minute track on the album is their first song I listened to in a live version you’ll find at the end of this review, and it is made of a rhythm mimicking the circularity of afrobeat with a minimalist guitar and multiple horns, percussions and strings to set the music on fire. It has that warrior spirit, but also that not intended but real melancholy I was telling you more above. But the silence is over.

The album terminates with the one and a half minute of Silent, the closing of the courtain with a pinched cello, strings, voice and the desire for an uprising. My dream now is to take the band to play a live concert in one of the many squatted centers in my town. Maybe, having some contacts, this will be possible in the future. It really would be the best venue for the Orchestra’s fire music and at the same time, the encounter point for an awakening of both music and people. Together. 

 

Apocalypse Trio feat. Paolo Angeli – Live at Fasano Jazz (Jazz Engine Records, 2017)

I've always been a fan of Richard Teitelbaum and of his records with the likes of Anthony Braxton. That mood, that feeling, jazz with a nocturne feeling, jazz widened through its extremes, jazz and electronics. I'm also a fan of a record, issued few years ago, featuring Evan Parker and Grutronics. So, I was happy to see Paolo Angeli, one of my Italian heroes, playing with an electro-acoustic trio as in the album “Live at Fasano Jazz”.

The Apocalypse Trio features Vincenzo Deluci (trumpet), Camillo Pace (double bass) and Giuseppe Mariani (electronics). Vincenzo Deluci (b. in Fasano) started studying trumpet as a child, and took his degree in 1992. Finalist in different contests, he won the International Contest 'Astor Piazzolla' in Castel Fidardo as Best Musician. He is author of the Lp “La Rana Dalla Bocca Larga” who sold 1000 copies in only 15 days.

After a car accident, who put him on a weelchair, he came back to the music with the live show “VianDante”. Camillo Pace (b. in Taranto) graduated as a bassist at Monopoli's 'Nino Rota' Conservatory and then he took a degree in jazz music disciplines, specializing in history and musicology. He conducted studies as ethnomusicologist in Kenya and South Africa.

Giuseppe Mariani, born in Noci, studied trumpet as a child and graduated in 1999 at the 'Nino Rota' Conservatory in Monopoli. Between 2001 and 2002 he lived in London where he worked with saxophonist A. Wilkinson, drummer S. Ritchie and bassist Bellatalla. Since 2002 he took interest in other musical forms, and the relationships between improvised and electronic music.

The Apocalypse Trio

Special guest on the record is Paolo Angeli, an extraordinary musician who plays a self-built instrument. Born in 1970, he started to play guitar at 9. He traveled up to Bologna, where he started playing with different ensembles and musician, one of whom is the great Fred Frith. His instrument, a sardinian prepared guitar, is the result of Paolo Angeli's interest in both avant-garde music and folk music.

This record start with 'Apocalypse', an original composition of the trio that sees trumpet and guitar having a conversation surrounded by electronic sounds popping by. Then is the turn of another composition, 'Impro', who is very reminiscent of glitch music, followed by 'A Child is Born' (Jones/Wilder) lunar and crepuscular. Composer Ennio Morricone has his hommage paid by the 'Morricone Suite', featuring the themes from “Nuovo Cinema Paradiso” and “Once Upon a Time in America”.

And then is the turn of 'Nature Boy' by Nat King Cole, where one can enjoy the richness of the textures provided by Paolo Angeli; the record finish with 'Procession', an original composition by Deluci where improvised music takes the foreground over electronics, dominated by the trumpet and the doodles of the cello/guitar.

I'm enthousiast to hear such young musicians expressing passion and knowledge, and the record will become for sure one of the best albums of the year 2017. Listen and enjoy this record, and then my advice is to recover the other records I mentioned at the beginning of this post, to have a wider landscape about the history of the encounters between jazz and electroacoustic music.

Remembering Misha Mengelberg (1935-2017)

Misha Mengelberg with Thomas Heberer, The Stone, 2008

Last week pianist Misha Mengelberg has died, aged 81. Mengelberg was born in Kiev, Ukraine, in 1935. The son of the Dutch conductor Karel Mengelberg, his family moved back to the Netherlands in the late 1930s and the young Mengelberg began learning the piano at age five. He studied architecture briefly before entering the Royal Conservatory in The Hague. There, he won the first prize of a jazz festival in Loosdrecht and became associated with the Fluxus movement.

His influences count the likes of Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington and John Cage. Mengelberg was one of the very first perpetrators of the revolution of the free jazz/avant garde jazz of the 1960s but from an European perspective. His first appearance on a record is on Eric Dolphy's final recording, Last Date (1964). On that record appears also drummer Han Bennink, marking the beginning of a long friendship and collaboration.

Mengelberg and Bennink founded later a quartet with saxophonist Piet Noordijk and many different bassists. The quartet played at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1966. In 1967 Mengelberg co-founded the Instant Composers Pool, an organization that, similarly to the AACM on the other side of the Ocean, promoted avant garde jazz performances and records, with Bennink and Willem Breuker.

Mengelberg played with a large variety of musicians: quite often he performed in duo with fellow Han Bennink; other collaborations included guitarist Derek Bailey, and saxophonists Evan Parker, Peter Brotzmann, and Anthony Braxton. He also wrote music for other performers (leaving some space for improvisation) and oversaw some music theatre productions. On the other hand, he made known to the public the works of pianist Herbie Nichols.

Related Links:

Misha Mengelberg discography on Discogs

An interview with Misha Mengelberg by Dan Warburton