Peter Brötzmann, The Book

Daniel Spicer's biography is vivid and fascinating

Saxophonist and visual artist Peter Brötzmann was a larger-than-life figure, a one-man art movement who proved what was possible. I can’t remember how I first heard of him, but I know exactly when I first saw him perform: at the literally subterranean Manhattan venue the Cooler, on January 21, 1997, in a group with fellow saxophonist Thomas Borgmann, bassist William Parker, and drummer Charles Downs (then known as Rashid Bakr). I know this because the show was recorded, and released as The Cooler Suite on the GROB label in 2003. (It sometimes seemed like every time Brötzmann brought the horn’s mouthpiece to his lips, someone was rolling tape — his discography was vast, and continues to grow.) I saw him again a few years later, leading his Die Like A Dog quartet with trumpeter Toshinori Kondo, Parker, and drummer Hamid Drake at Tonic. And I interviewed him once, in 2019, when he released the solo album I Surrender Dear, a shockingly tender and mellow collection of standards and blues tunes.

That’s the thing about Brötzmann: Although he had a reputation as a human flamethrower, he was in fact an astonishingly sensitive and thoughtful musician whose work could be romantic, abstract, reserved, traditional, and/or lyrical, depending on the needs of the moment… and, when necessary, he could sand your face off with air-raid siren cries and gale-force bluster. I once told Lemmy that he should put together a compilation called Motörhead Songs That Don’t Sound Like Motörhead, encompassing the mournful ballads, acoustic numbers, rockabilly knockoffs, and other surprises that littered their deep catalog. One could just as easily put together a playlist of Brötzmann performances that journey far from the high-intensity, post-Ayler free jazz for which he’s best known.

Daniel Spicer, a veteran music journalist (like me, he contributes regularly to The Wire), has written a vivid biography, Peter Brötzmann: Free-Jazz, Revolution and the Politics of Improvisation, that attempts to grapple with all of his subject’s various sides. In the preface, he describes Brötzmann as “one of the key artistic figures to have emerged from the socio-cultural tumult of the 1960s”, and that’s true, but one of the strengths of the book is how Spicer shows him to have been much more than a Sixties holdover still miraculously out there blowing (at least until his death in summer 2023). Because Brötzmann was such a thoroughly independent artist and creative spirit, his work was both timeless and utterly of-the-moment, always.

Spicer also says “my emphasis throughout [the book] is on his art rather than his personal life”, and that’s an approach I can respect — it’s the one I took in my own recent book, In The Brewing Luminous: The Life & Music of Cecil Taylor. Through the work, I was able to learn and expose much about the man, and the same is true here. Would I have liked Spicer to have interviewed Brötzmann’s widow or his children (his son Caspar is a terrific guitarist; I don’t know anything about his daughter) about what their lives were like while Dad was traveling the world, horn in hand? Absolutely, but what we do learn from him and his collaborators is every bit as revelatory, in its own way.

If you want to know more about Brötzmann’s childhood and the conditions under which he grew up (he was born in 1941 and fled Germany with his mother and sister, returning some years later; his father was a soldier, and a prisoner of war), read Christoph Dallasch’s Neu Klang: The Definitive History of Krautrock. He, pianist Alexander Von Schlippenbach, and rock musicians of their generation talk about the postwar years and their “shame” (Brötzmann’s word) at being German and being the children of Nazis. That’s crucial context for the particular style of free jazz that emerged from Germany in the 1960s and afterward. Spicer doesn’t ignore that context, but there’s much more information available in Neu Klang and in Harald Kisiedu’s European Echoes: Jazz Experimentalism in Germany 1950-1975.

The bulk of Spicer’s book is devoted to what he sees as Brötzmann’s key albums and projects. These include his early ’70s trio with pianist Fred Van Hove and drummer Han Bennink, occasionally augmented by trombonist Albert Mangelsdorff; his late ’70s collaboration with two South African musicians, bassist Harry Miller and drummer Louis Moholo-Moholo; the late ’80s free jazz/metal/noise/funk “supergroup” Last Exit, which teamed him with guitarist Sonny Sharrock, bassist Bill Laswell, and drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson; Die Like A Dog, his ’90s quartet with trumpeter Toshinori Kondo, bassist William Parker, and drummer Hamid Drake; the Chicago Tentet and its various expansions and variations; and maybe his loudest, heaviest group, Full Blast, a trio with bassist Marino Pliakas and drummer Michael Wertmüller. (I interviewed Pliakas and Wertmüller about that group in 2018.) And of course there’s plenty on classic early albums like his debut, For Adolphe Sax, and 1968’s Machine Gun.

The reader will also learn a fair amount about the broader cultural environment from which Brötzmann arose, working with visual/conceptual artists like Nam June Paik, Joseph Beuys, and Fluxus. There’s also some valuable insight into how the legendary Free Music Production organization, which Brötzmann co-founded with Jost Gebers and others, came to be, though again you can get a much deeper dive into all that in Kisiedu’s European Echoes or Markus Müller’s FMP — The Living Music. (Both those books were published by Wolke, which also put out In The Brewing Luminous, and Müller wrote an introduction to my book.)

Naturally, not everything Brötzmann did is covered here, and any serious fan will likely wish the book was longer. His encounters with Cecil Taylor, documented on Alms/Tiergarten (Spree) from the In Berlin ’88 box, and Olu Iwa, are not discussed, nor is the album he recorded with the Portuguese stoner metal trio Black Bombaim in 2016 (get it on Bandcamp; it rules), or his collaboration with Fushitsusha from 1996. Those are just a few of the omissions, and/but I mention them only because they’re some of my favorite Brötzmann recordings.

Because Brötzmann was such an inveterate collaborator, someone who genuinely wanted to hear something new and be challenged on the bandstand, Spicer broadens his scope frequently to talk about other musicians and other scenes. The reader will learn about the Japanese avant-garde (read Teruto Soejima’s Free Jazz In Japan: A Personal History for more), about the Lower East Side scene that gave rise to the annual Vision Festival, about London’s Café OTO, and other times and places, too. You get short portraits of many of his major collaborators, from Fred Van Hove and Han Bennink to William Parker, Hamid Drake, pedal steel guitarist Heather Leigh and others. There are plenty of perceptive and interesting interview quotes, old and new, from Brötzmann himself and his friends and peers. The prose is clear and fast-moving; Spicer rarely resorts to the clichés of music journalism, or lets adjectives and metaphors pile up in place of analysis. He describes the music in ways that make you want to hear it (except maybe for Last Exit, a group I think I like a lot more than he does).

This is an important and necessary book. Peter Brötzmann was one of the most important musicians of the second half of the 20th century, and was doing vital work until the end of his life. Daniel Spicer has done right by him with this biography. Buy it.

That’s it for now. See you next week (or Friday, if you’re a paying subscriber)!