Review by Chris Searle of the above book, by Daniel Spicer (Repeater Books)
As soon as I began to read this riveting biography of the German saxophonist Peter Brotzmann (1941 – 2023), I went straight to his first blistering annunciation of March, 1968, ‘Machine Gun’, recorded at the same Frankfurt music festival as ‘Fuck de Boere’. Here were German musicians performing alongside fellow British and Dutch iconoclastic horns Evan Parker and Willem Breuker, blasting out their solidarity with the people of Vietnam and South Africa in complete and scorning rejection of the nazism of previous German generations. At their centre was the unprecedented raucous and uniquely scorching saxophone-song of the sonic arch-rebel Brotzmann.
Spicer’s biography is also a history of European free improvisation, of which Brotzmann was hierophant and instigator. I deliberately don’t use the word ‘leader’ because such a hierarchical concept was anathema. In the words of Spicer, this was ‘a music without leaders,, in which every participant was engaged in a collective, communal endeavour.’ It is what is heard almost every night at London venues like Dalston’s Cafe Oto: the pursuit of musical excellence and freedom in an entirely cooperative setting, where siblings of improvisation aim never to play the same sound constructs and inventive sequences twice.
Brotzmann was born when fascism and resistance to it were rampant across Europe. His infancy was spent when his country’s government was murdering millions across the continent. It was a measure of his audacity in a postwar Germany, that he devised a sound that was a signal of the Sixties, when young people were rising up across Europe and the new imperialist behemoth – the U.S.A.- in rebellion against wars in Africa, Asia and the Americas. For a section of them in Europe, Brotzmann’s rasping saxophone became their heartsong, as part of the relatively little-known sound of the music he and his world-travelling free improvising musicians created at the very edge of blasting sound.
The Sixties were an era when the word ‘freedom’ meant many things. I remember hearing the extraordinary Texas voice of Janis Joplin singing at the Carousel Ballroom in San Francisco in the summer of 1968, at the same time that Brotzmann created his ‘Machine Gun’ in Frankfurt. She sang with something of a similar cyclonic timbre as Brotzmann’s volcanic horn, but her message was very different. ‘Freedom is another word for nothing else to lose!’ she chorused, Brotzmann’s interpretation of freedom was ‘Never again! Never again! Never again!’
Not only would his musical, improvising soul ever allow him to play exactly the same eruption of notes again; they stood anthemically as a lifetime’s defiance that would never allow fascism to despoil our lives again, not in his own country nor anywhere else where he played. Although as he got older, he lost his close links with the revolutionary left, his music continued with its utmost insurgency, never compromising. But his was not only a continuous blast of freedom (one of his most successful bands was called ‘Full Blast’) – he could play with a tenderness that would very often be born from some of his most outrageous solos. I remember hearing one of his latter-day sessions at Cafe Oto, playing with Brooklyn bassist William Parker and the Louisiana drummer Hamid Drake – two of the nonpareils of U.S. free music. After a jaw-breaking volley of caustic and rampaging overblown sound, he played a sequence of such gentleness that seemed almost lullaby-like in its mollifying beauty. In their session a German played his riposte to the crimes of Nazism, and every note of two black Americans defied centuries of slavery and racism. As a trio, they too were calling out their freedom songs with their defining message: ‘Never again!’
One of the strengths of Spicer’s book is the way in which he sees Brotzmann’s life in music as the creative protagonist who inspired those who played with him, from the Americans in the Chicago Tentet, to Scandinavians and English free virtuosi like bassist John Edwards and drummer Steve Noble. He would play everywhere and with everyone carrying his freedom message. I’ve got an album of him playing in San’aa, Yemen with Yemeni classical musicians who had never heard anything close to his like before. As a musical revolutionary he was a profoundly committed internationalist, there were no barriers of genre, nation or tradition that would obstruct the untrammelled liberation of his sound.
Secondly, Spicer knew Brotzmann as a person as well as a musician, and his book is full of his words, letters and moments of personal closeness. But his love of Brotzmann’s music becomes explicit in many evocative and powerful descriptions of his live sessions and those of his compadres with whom he played: drummer Han Bennink, bassist Peter Kowald, pianist Fred van Hove and many others. His eloquent words and vivid pile-ups of adjectives make their music come alive on the page, as well as in the ears. His book is a true and memorable testimony to Brotzmann’s dissonant, cacophonic genius, a sound of rampant beauty still throbbing through all his recordings, but one we will never hear live in our ears again. Get hold of his albums, and keep Spicer’s book close at hand while you listen to them.
