Marc Ribot – Unstrung. Rants and Stories of a Noise Guitarist (Akashic Books, 2021)

If you don’t wanna to use Amazon to grab copies of books and records for your own – ideological and practical – reasons, it is harsh to find out what you’re looking for at the right time. In Milano, the town most near to the place where I’m currently living, you have to pay extra fees for import books and records once you’re ordering them. Things goes that way. So I put my hands on a copy of this book by Marc Ribot only after it was translated, unexpectedly, in my own native language one month ago.

Divided in four parts, and with only the first one devoted to music, the other three being dedicated to small novels in a style that reminded me the one that belonged to Bukowski – “bloody funny”, as Elvis Costello said – in a way, I was just reading a small novel about a Jewish girl that lived the first part of her life as a hippie and the other part as an attempt to become, after the harshness of life hit her, acceptable to her social milieu again before going to cinema to see the last movie by Arnaud Desplechin, the one titled Brother and Sister featuring two great actors such as Melvil Poupaud and Marion Cotillard.

Curiously enough, the story in the movie was at the opposite of the story narrated by Marc Ribot, that of a liberation from their social milieu, but in order to do so the main characters, both Jew interestingly enough, needed to get outside of the society that gave life to them. One writing more about himself, the other leaving France for Africa. What both the book and the movie have in common is the fact that they try to cope with what remains of our cultural heritage and roots as part of the Western civilization. Nothing less, nothing more.

One can think, superficially, that the best part of Unstrung is in its first part: the hommage to Henry Grimes, the narration of the life of guitarist Frantz Casseus, some notes on people like Robert Quine, Derek Bailey and Hal Willner, some liner notes for Ribot albums or the text for Ceramic Dog’s rap The Activist. Nothing more wrong than that. The entire book, even the most funny parts, is interesting because it is an attempt by a navigated musician to fight body against body with his culture and even his own life.

Obviously the book can seem at a first reading as not pretentius or even superficial – even if there’s a line by James Chance quoted by the guitarist himself here, “I only live on the surface – I don’t think people is very pretty inside”, that can explain the aesthetic of Ribot style as a writer. Not that Ribot is a “nihilist”, he is in fact more as someone very gifted with (sometimes black) humour, but this tinge is more a testimony of an ancient culture that survived the Holocaust and still ask itself how to believe in a God whatever, talking about a people or a culture and not necessarily about a single human being.

Interesting as it is reading this book, as a critic I’ll bring back that note about musicians laughing hard at the attempts by people like me to understand and making comprehensible to the masses – two different types of translations at the place of a single one, that means two different possible types of mistake – the work of a musician, complex as it can be. You can take as an example the beautiful passages of the book where Ribot try to explain the difficulties in playing non-Western music like the one created by Susana Baca and others, thansk to cultural and existential – I mean, experiential – difficulties.

In the end, Unstrung. Rants and Stories of a Noise Guitarist is a book worth reading, full of notes about the music we all love and full of fantasy and fantastic stories to pass some good time with. Like those discussions with a friend who traveled the world around a table and a beer, full of strange facts but also full of new, interesting things to learn and to store in order to enrich your own personal luggage. Curiously enough, the Italian version of the book, the one I own, was published by the same publishing house that issued the last edition of Mingus’ Beneath the Underdog. 

 

 

Your favorite critic is too busy with his own woman to mind about the future of the music

I have to admit it: since I write only for passion, without any income – I don’t even host banners on this blog, because I hate when I try myself to read something through my laptop or telephone and all those bright squares appear abruptly – it is easy to write what I want, being also my own publisher. But tonight I want, while I listen to some good music like Oliver Nelson’s The Blues and The Abstract Truth and Pharoah Sanders’ Thembi, to remove some pebbles from my shoe.

Fact is that Italy is a strange place if you want to be a critic. In every musical genre, the mantra is always “you don’t like it, you don’t talk about it”. This way, a critic is not a critic anymore. The market is full of horrorful material and art places are, or better said were, full of horrorful concerts. But let’s start with some order.

First of all: the ego affair. I was attending a concert by pianist Vijay Iyer some years ago. I was part of the press staff, since I was writing reviews for an Italian webzine called Mescalina. That meant I had my own seat. In front of me an old guy, another critic, told litterally everyone in the (deconsacrated) church near him: “Let’s see if tonight I’ll discover a great pianist as I discovered Brad Melhdau many years ago”. I didn’t knew who the guy was. But this is a first problem.

Mr. Iyer was still discovered. Blow Up, an Italian magazine that is our version of The Wire – mine is a conservative country so we always copy everything from foreign countries, artistically speaking – still issued reviews of records and concerts by the New York based pianist and composer. There was no need to re-discover him. What the critic meant was possibly: Iyer need to be brought to the masses. I’ll do it. What the critic unconsciously was saying was: Iyer need to be brough to my ear because if I don’t know something, this something is previously unheard by virtually all those who matter.

And this is the ego affair. There’s no such thing as humility in the music world. Every critic – even me, for what it worths – has his own idiosyncrasies – let’s talk about mine: I can’t stand melodic jazz if played after bebop was born, with notable exceptions by singers like Nina Simone, but as far as pianists they have to beat it or prepare it, at the opposite if you’re a drummer and don’t own little percussions you’re out.

Obviously I listen to every styles of music, but when it comes to jazz it has to be as much distorted. I’m joking about myself, but if you don’t play free jazz in the present time you’re not adventurous enough for me. And this is a limit, because I heard a beautiful Italian singer dedicating a project, an entire CD, to David Sylvian few years ago and I didn’t even write about it because the arrangements were too smooth to me. See what I mean?

Now, let’s get over it. Every critic has his own idiosyncrasies, that was the main point. But every critic – even me? I’m asking myself right now and I don’t have so a proper answer – at least in my own country believes his own tastes are the only tastes that matter. That’s why it would be interesting to have other hands to strum that laptop keyboard for this blog other than me. But I’m a maniac of control as everyone else in this business. I think it as to do with the fear people would write with too much indulgency.

Now, let’s move forward to the second point. In this industry, you have to be controversial to be successful (and be paid). This is often misinterpreted for having your own vision. Let’s make an example. There was a guy, another critic, who now is one of the spearheads of a famous Italian jazz magazine. Before, he had his own blog as me. Being older, possessing a record shop and having more time than me to listen and read is a good difference. Another are his own judgments over my world, that of free jazz and improvised music in general.

Nothing against Coltrane or Ayler, but Dolphy as an example was not completely at ease with composition during his career for this guy – maybe I suggest because Dolphy died at an early age and always had few money in his pockets: why aren’t we talking about all the musicians that left the business to play litterally along the road like Giuseppi Logan or Charles Gayle? And the reason was? The business in itself, not giving enough money to the musicians and leaving the most part of it to the labels and their managers.

But the judgment about Dolphy was motivated in his dissertation about some recent re-releases of Chico Hamilton featuring the multi-instrumentalist, so I have nothing basically against it but that if you are a music critic you also need to be a little bit of an historian and an sociologist. Just a little bit, because you cannot always know everything, but it helps a lot. And what about Peter Brotzmann? This guy wrote in his blog many years ago that the German reedist was a “paper mache figure”, with no further explanation.

The guy also wrote and published a book full of judgement more argued and debated, but this is the tenor, more or less. Interestingly enough we had an email exchange in which I asked him why music and jazz also worldwide was, with notable exceptions, deteriorating. During those years the Turkish scene was exploding, and it was a good thing for the experimental music scene in general, but at the same time I heard in my country people whose attitude was really the one stigmatized by Mingus like, “fuck the school, I’ll play free”.

I was invited in person to attend at concerts where the musicians involved, releasing records also for their own little label, were not even able to LISTEN the one the other and react properly. Same in the world of contemporary music. So, I asked this now famous critic what were his thoughts about it, and he wrote me something like he was too busy with his own woman to think about this topics. I think he was saying I was loosing my time trying to separate the sheep from the goats.

This leads me to the third point: there’s no critic at all. An Italian musician once told to a friend of mine, that as me wanted to write about music: if [name of a famous American saxophonist] plays in a way you don’t like it, you can always write or say that he “played like it was”. This, with the other advice other people gave to me about “you don’t like it, you don’t talk about it”, it’s the end of my (unpaid) job.

It’s the end of the games, the end of the music also. No critic, no aspiration to create interesting, fresh and new music to be defined as such. No new music, welcome to the ego trip occupying the space originally devoted to creativity. I started with the last point, but now the cycle is complete I believe. Now. In Italy there is a horrible situation for music. In the world is the same. The old masters are leaving us, the young ones are interesting, sometimes very interesting – a couple names we discussed also here: Mary Halvorson, Patrick Shiroishi, Lao Dan – but none of them is renewing the palette bringing new colors to the light, at least this is my opinion.

Maybe it is not the right time: politically speaking this decade is worse than the 1980s. Economically and socially our civilization is in pieces. It is not a surprise we have great talents, but no innovators – I’d love to discuss this topic in the future with Anthony Braxton, after rereading some of his books – the real problem is that no one wants to talk about it. I lost an interview many years ago – my entry ticket to the press in my country on paper – because of my attitude, my need to define what’s good to me and what’s not, taking my own risks.

Because, if I look at what’s happening in my country, this is the scenario. On one hand, you have trap music dominating the hit parade, together or aside with Italian pop music. On the other hand, you have virtually nothing. People who are in their 20 years or less are not even interested in rock, alternative or experimental music. People of my generation, the Seventies, think ‘serious music’ is only Pink Floyd or Led Zeppelin – or The Cure, or Depeche Mode – they don’t even know about Idles or Algiers, who are rock bands of the present time.

As far as music played live, it is full of 40/50 years old people playing that kind of rock music for old boring people as them. Young guys are interested mostly in people like Dark Polo Gang and their values: money and success. There is no such a thing as a counterculture in my country anymore. I truly believe this is also your future if you don’t pay attention to it. From where do we want to start, right now? 

 

 

Nina Simone – You’ve Got to Learn (Verve, 2023)

Nina Simone was a pivotal and exceeding figures during the decades she lived in. A revolutionary activist, a classically trained pianist, a soul voice, a jazz arranger, sometimes she also touched the realms of ethnic music, a label that during those times didn’t existed yet. The recording we’re talking about in this brief note is a live recording of one of her concerts at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1966 and donated by promoter George Wein to the US Library of Congress, finally released by the label Verve.

The album is 32 minutes long, and features Miss Nina Simone at piano and voice, plus guitarist Rudy Stevenson, bassist Lisle Atkinson, and drummer Bobby Hamilton. The audio quality is good, except for the first seconds where Simone’s voice is not correctly amplified, but it’s one of those fails you can accept since the quality of music involved in the record. The opening track is Charles Aznavour’s You’ve Got To Learn, curiously also translated in Italian and a success in my country during the 1950s sung by Aznavour himself as “Devi Sapere”.

A nice, dramatic crescendo, the song is followed by a dramatic and almost perfect rendition of the classic I Loves You Porgy, from the classical Porgy and Bess. Recorded also by trumpeter Miles Davis, by the Modern Jazz Quartet and by the couple of Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald, Simone’s version is one of the most intimate and touching. Blues for Mama is the first recording of the song, co-written with singer (and drummer Max Roach’s wife) Abbey Lincoln, in chronological order. 

While Be My Husband, played only with voice and drums, is the most faithful to the studio recording, Mississippi Goddam is less amphetaminic and more swinging than the correspondent version from the classic album Nina Simone in Concert issued only two years before this rendition. The song is inspired by a sadly famous murder of four African-american little girls at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963.

A completely swinging version of the song, this new edition enlisted in this live album is nonetheless rich of pathos and drama. The closing of the album is the beautiful Music For Lovers by Bart Howard, another first recording as Blues for Mama previously in this record, embellished by Bach’s quotes interspersed during the execution here and there.

This is one of the most intriguing new reissues this year, along with the Coltrane&Dolphy album we’ll review later on, when able to listen to that album in its entirety – I broke my foot last month and I have to buy myself a copy of it yet. An intimate set, with Simone magnetic personalty able to bring the audience together and to give life to her uncompromising idea of music and art. Possibly an appetizer for those of you who are less familiar with ‘classical’ jazz vocals, even if Nina Simone is far from clichés of any of the many musical genres she touched thanks to her personality. 

 

 

Tristan Honsinger has died

Sadly passed away on August 5, 2023, Tristan Honsinger was a hidden gem in the vast ocean of free improvisation. Known mostly for his work with pianist Cecil Taylor and guitarist Derek Bailey, but an accomplished musician on his own, Honsinger during his career collaborated also with post punk bands such as The Pop Group and The Ex. This remarkable folding of collaborations can give you also an idea of his style, that span from nervous glissandos to melodic quotes traken from Albert Ayler or classical music.

Born in 1949 in Burlingon, Vermont, Honsinger had music lessions at a very early age, so he gave concerts on a weekly basis with other members of his family since when he was 12. After he studied classical cello first in Boston then in Montréal, where he became conscious and interested in free improvisation. In 1974 Honsinger moved to Europe, particularly in Amsterdam where he became a pivotal figure of Netherlands improvised scene.

A musician that, according to the Dutch ‘Volkskrant’ journalist Erik Van de Berg “hasn’t lost his childhood fantasy entirely”, Tristan Honsinger can be taken as a representative figure for what European Improv scene is: for such musicians in fact ‘playing’ means not only expressing yourself through music, but also to take risks. While many would cite irony as a main topic for such improvisors, more than that their attitude is that of a child curious about what sound he can obtain from his instrument.

Spanning through his discography, a must have are his records with pianist Cecil Taylor, but there are also interesting collabortions with conductor Butch Morris, records for solo cello and duos with Derek Bailey and saxophonist Sean Bergin. The more adventurous listeners can try and find a copy, as a mere example, of his record with Steve Beresford, David Toop and Toshinori Kondo for Double Indemnity issued in 2001.  

 

 

Jason Kao Hwang Critical Response Trio “Book of Stories” (True Sound Recordings, 2023)

It is almost a commonplace the fact that “fusion”, born in the middle of the 1960s, burned itself after a fist and beginning incredible, creative season leaving the most adventurous listeners dry and thirsty becoming a catchy and more pop-rock oriented (i.e.: simplified) style of music.

In fact, after the fist creative outputs by the like of Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock as On The Corner and Sextant, after incredibly skilled musicians such as Jaco Pastorius, after creating a music that mixed the principles of improvisation with instruments coming from all over the world like Trilok Gurtu’s tablas and tampouras, “fusion” became a label for sometimes easy to create and to play music, sometimes cerebral and unproductive experimentations.

The same thing happened with post-rock at the end of 1990s, with band such as Tortoise giving originally life to a music that was funk but also hardcore punk – at least in spirit – but that degraded in few years into a mere juxtaposition of different elements in order to find out the most rare approach to various notes, instruments and styles of music. 

A complete different path, reminiscent of the famous Loft Era we talked about in the past, is that of a leader of those faraway days, violinist Jason Kao Hwang. While for more info on him we recommend another review of one of his last year works, one of the most important issued in these times, this new album titled Book Of Stories (True Sound Recordings, 2023) is played by the Critical Response Trio.

The trio features Hwang at electric violin, Anders Nilsson at electric guitar and Michael T.A. Thompson at drums. The music is flavored with funk and reggae hints and spices here and there, but the compositions, all by Hwang, are anyway adventurous enough to be interesting for all fans of improvised music, even non idiomatic, because the most recognizable parts are in a way ‘abstracted’ and conducted into climaxes or moments of rest that are fully dynamics and that can bring the listener a lot of fun, being a mix of the ‘mental’ approach of spontaneous improvised music and the more enjoyable characteristics of popular music without being ‘populistic’.

This way, compared with the previous Hwang release in duo with J.A. Deane, the album offers the listener another face of the instrumentalist and composer way of understanding and exercise creativity, likewise interesting and daring. Powered by the experience of the musicians involved (Anders Nilssen played guitar with William Parker, Paquito D’Rivera, Elliott Sharp and Ken Filiano among the many others, while Michael T.A. Thompson was a solid drummer for musicians such as Charles Gayle, Joe McPhee, Matthew Shipp, Henry Grimes and John Patitucci), the record is solid enough to make you want to listen to it more than once.

The album opens with The Power of Many in the Soul of One. Violin phrases, and subsequent silences, are interspersed with rhythmic outbursts while the guitar arpeggios embellish Hwang phrases. A sense of urgency and, together with it, a meditative quality, are mixing together in what seem to be an attempt to create a dramatic peak that abruptly diminishes into a more introspective, even if electrical, interaction.

A pedal change atmosphere leaving then space to a beautiful drum solo, after which electric guitar explodes in different rhythmic approaces on an atonal basis. After the guitar express itself in full, it’s time for the effected violin to recall all the musicians involved into a more meditative mood, played almost until the end of the track. Many nuances and the overall approach makes you think about the Loft Era music, but played through a more contemporary vision.

Music continues with Upside Circle Down, and more than of the Lofts it it reminiscent of the first AACM experiments – I’m thinking in particular to the first releases in the 1970s by Anthony Braxton with Dave Holland on cello or Kenny Wheeler on fluegelhorn. Brief assertions are interspersed with silence, inviting people to listen to the music and themselves more carefully, but the drums’ almost funky groove creates a first difference, almost a new idea of “fusion”, and a recontextualization of experimental music from the end of the 1960s.

Guitar arpeggios create a magical atmosphere, as you can listen through works such different but with a similar emotional approach as In A Silent Way by Miles Davis and Andrew Cyrille’s Lebroba – notably with two pairly sensitive guitarists as Nilssen like John McLaughlin and Bill Frisell. A Silent Ghost Follows is a slightly shorter composition introduced by the colors of mallets and a contemporary claim by the violin, making us remember Anthony Braxton again or the AEoC.

This time the use of different pitches – the violin looks for very high notes, the guitar opens up to middle tones – captures the listener, again carried in a past era still harbinger of stimuli for the future – the violin creates almost modern electronic textures into the solid structure we depicted. Dragon Carved into Bone takes the same matter on another temperature, with violin soloing on higher pitches and drums depicting a more bustling sonorous landscape, while the guitar gently deconstructs a melody into parts and pieces so to rebuild them together in another, interesting shape.

More quiet parts are alternating with denser structures, while drums nod to some reggae/dub or blues rhythms. Last piece, Friends Forever, is an hommage to the musicians that in the past gave shape to the music here present, through ages and through all the difficulties that didn’t prevented anyway many of them from creating beauty. The piece is the most melodical of the lotto, even if doesn’t lack the blues scrape but also the sweetness typical of the genre.

Living on the other side of the ocean, I’m not completely aware of what Hwang and friends future steps will be. For the moment, enjoying this music is an unexpected gift that deserves to be shared with fans of improvisation. The album has been released on June 30 this year and is available also through the artist Bandcamp page. 

 

Tom Waits: The Island Years Remastered (1983-1993)

Twelve years have passed since Tom Waits’ last effort, the album Bad As Me (Anti-, 2011), was released. Never officially retired, the singer, songwriter, musical experimentator committed in these last years more with cinema than with music, appearing in such movies as Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza (2022). While rumours affirm that he is back to work on writing new music, is time for an engagement with his most daring and interesting period in my opinion, which are his 1980s and 1990s, that will be reissued in almost its entirety this fall.

During that period, after marrying his wife Cathleen Brennan, collaborator and sound designer for Francis Ford Coppola with a respectable background in contemporary music, Tom Waits, who co-opted his spouse in order to write new intriguing material, changed shape and skin definitely passing from the bluesman and the jazz crooner of the 1970s to a more interesting experimental musician, collaborating on records and in live concerts with people as avant-garde guitarist Marc Ribot, just to name one, in order to deconstruct rock music and give life to a new world populated by unlikely and absurd “American dreamers” like Frank, the main character of his triology as we will speculate in the following lines. 

This trilogy begun with the 1983 output Swordfishtrombones, first to be released by Chris Blackwell’s Island Records. If the title, and the music, made hangry Captain Beefheart who felt someone has stolen his inspiration for the album Trout Mask Replica (Straight, 1969), we can praise it as one of the most interesting albums coming out of the NY – where Tom Waits relocated from Los Angeles with his family – experimental music scene of those days.

As every post modern music, Swordfishtrombones is composed by songs where melodies and structures are apparently mongrelized while at the opposite they are deconstructed and reconstructed in order to give the listener the feeling of being put into another, but yet familiar (thanks also to Ennio Morricone and Kurt Weill inspired melodies), world, as if the music itself would be an invitation to reconsider the place we’re living in with new eyes and, above all, ears. 

The purpose is to put Frank, the lead character of the songs of the trilogy composed also by the following Rain Dogs (Island, 1984) and the double Frank’s Wild Years (Island, 1985), under the light as an American dreamer who, thanks to his passiveness – he goes looking for a new life in a new land always by train – is destined to failure and to loose himself. And if the trilogy will culminate in a theatrical play put on the scene by the famous Steppenwolf company, the following albums by Tom Waits are nontheless interesting.

Bone Machine (Island, 1992) is Tom Waits’ album most dominated by strange and dangerous to play (in Waits’ own words, see Tom Waits On Tom Waits: Interviews and Encounters, 2011, Chicago Review Press) percussions such as the self-built “conundrum” which dominates pieces like All Stripped Down and Such a Scream. The ghost of Harry Partch, an U.S. composer who built his own instruments (and the scales to play them over) dominates the album, possibly another gift from Waits’ wife Brennan who is clearly present as a co-writer through Ireland-influenced melodies like I Don’t Wanna Grow Up, a song covered subsequently by the punk band The Ramones.

And finally, last but not less interesting, The Black Rider (Island, 1993) is the album, co-written by Waits and Brennan with the Beat writer William S. Burroughs, which signs the beginning of the collaboration between the Pomona songwriter and the dramatist Robert Wilson. The story is similar to Carl Maria Von Weber’s (1786-1826) Der Freischutz and it narrates about a hunter who fall in love with a girl promised to a richer hunter. 

In order to gain her love, he will use on a competition some magic bullets given to him by the devil himself (“some of these bullets are for you and some are for me” the devil will proclamate) but one of the bullets will kill the young girl, and the hunter will get mad and lonely. Obviously influenced by the relationship Burroughs had with heroin and its being a double-face substance, The Black Rider was put on scene during the 1990s with a discreet success of public and critics, and it will be Waits’ last release with Blackwell’s label.

After almost a decade, Waits will sign with Anti-, a label created by Brett Gurewitz as a companion to Epitaph, more keen on experimental music than the latter devoted to punk rock, and his career will gain new peaks thanks to albums like Mule Variations (Anti-, 1999) and the collection of rarities Orphans (Anti-, 2006). But this is another story, and we will narrate it when new reissues will be released. 

Swordfishtrombones, Rain Dogs and Franks Wild Years will be issued on September 1^st, 2023, on vynil and CD, while Bone Machine and The Black Rider on October 6, 2023. 

 

 

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.