For the public eye this art was initially used to support his designs, you see sculptures, collages, later also watercolors etc. It was there before he became “Machine Gun”. Unexpectedly, so does sometime saxophonist and former US president Bill Clinton – who heralded Brötzmann's work when asked to name a musician people would be surprised to learn he liked.“The art that Brötzmann produces was always there, it was there before the beginning of time. Swedish saxophonist Mats Gustafsson (who will be appearing at London's Vortex alongside Norwegian artists Ingebrigt Håker Flaten and Paal Nilssen-Love with the Thing trio on 29-30 November) has a direct line to this tradition, as does John Zorn, and a raft of thrash-metal outfits in jazz and alt-rock. But as perceptions changed, the bass clarinet/percussion battles between Breuker and Bennink, the explicit eloquence of a young Evan Parker, the emergence of themes with free-jazz, South African and R&B connections, and the many other fast-shifting conversations between the performers, have come to be recognised in all their influential diversity. Just 300 copies of the album were originally pressed for Brötzmann's own BRO label, before the FMP company (one of several European indies documenting new music in this period, of which ECM became the most famous) and later Atavistic took over distribution and eventually brought together live and studio versions.Īt the time, many thought this it was simply a wall of noise.
#Peter brötzmann series#
I'm pleased to see that inclusion of this landmark event in the Great Moments series was anticipated by the comment of Abahachi on my last blog – many of the free-jazz and improv developments we've heard over the decades are rooted in these remarkable sessions. And earlier in that explosive year, a group of improvisers including the painter and saxophonist Peter Brötzmann, Dutch radicals Willem Breuker, Fred Van Hove and Han Bennink, and British saxophonist Evan Parker, collaborated on the furious, flamethrowing proto-thrash-jazz sessions in Frankfurt and Bremen that went out under the title Machine Gun, inspired by Ornette Coleman trumpet-partner Don Cherry's nickname for the earsplittingly intense and impassioned Brötzmann. Germany's leading experimental musicians, and guests from other countries, met to share and advance free-improvising ideas that had already been broached in the US by innovators including Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Cecil Taylor and George Russell. The Berlin Jazz Days festival was challenged that year by a radical alternative: the Total Music Meeting. The Vietnam war, strikes and student protests that almost brought down the French government, and a fast-changing moral climate inevitably exerted an influence on the music. Of course, the seeds of these changes in the perception of jazz were not planted in any one year, nor blown by any single wind, but 1968 was a significant year for jazz in Europe, as it was across culture, politics and the arts.
The festival's closing weekend might have been dominated by Sonny Rollins – a surviving colossus from a circle that included Charlie Parker, Coleman Hawkins, Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis – but it also included South African free-jazz percussionist Louis Moholo-Moholo, deconstructionist trio the Bad Plus, young British thrash-guitar blasters trioVD, former punk guitarist Billy Jenkins, sometime John Zorn trumpeter Dave Douglas, and jazz-savvy producer Matthew Herbert working with the London Sinfonietta.Īudiences increasingly attend these shows without wondering whether or not they fit a written-in-stone definition of jazz – or, for that matter, whether they follow the dictates of the tempered scale, a 4/4 swing pulse, or even a narrative shape with an explicit beginning, middle and end. As this year's London Jazz festival drew to an end yesterday (21 November), my thoughts turned to how vehemently the event's diversity would have been resisted not so many years ago.
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