Machine gun

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Machine gun
Live album by Peter Brötzmann

Publication
(s)

1968

Label (s) FMP , Atavistic Records

Format (s)

LP, CD

Genre (s)

Free jazz

Title (number)

3 (LP) / 5 (CD 1990) / 6 (CD 2007)

occupation

production

Peter Brötzmann

Studio (s)

Bremen

chronology
For Adolphe Sax
(1967) 		Machine gun Nipples
(1969)
Template: Info box music album / maintenance / parameter error

Machine Gun is a jazz album by the Peter Brötzmann Octet, which was recorded in May 1968 in the Lila Eule in Bremen . It was initially self-published and was re-released in 1972 by Free Music Production . Today, the album is considered a milestone in European free jazz, the intensity of which is collective outbursts that “assaults the listener like a gunfire.” ( Jazz Podium ).

The album and its history

Machine Gun was Brötzmann's second album after For Adolphe Sax from 1967, which was recorded “under the simplest technical conditions” with Peter Kowald , Sven-Åke Johansson and Fred Van Hove . Like the previous album, it appeared as an in-house production, "because a record company that was interested in this music was not in sight at the time." In 1968, Peter Brötzmann, who had previously performed in a trio and in 1967 in a quartet, gathered "the top of the European free- Jazz avant-garde around, “besides the named ones, these were Evan Parker , Willem Breuker , Buschi Niebergall and Han Bennink .

As Brötzmann found in retrospect, 1968 was “the year of the great orchestras, where we met among friends to play like crazy.” He was supported by the concert organizer Fritz Rau . With this octet he appeared several times during the year at festivals, including at the Essener Songtagen at the end of September 1968, and on March 24, 1968 at the German Jazz Festival in Frankfurt am Main with Gerd Dudek ; The following week the octet played with Manfred Schoof at Jazz Ost-West in Nuremberg and, reinforced by Schoof and Paul Rutherford in November 1968, at the Total Music Meeting , which was organized as a counter-event to the Berlin Jazz Festival, among others by Brötzmann (the one from the Berlin Jazz Festival at the time was unloaded because he did not want to appear in a suit) was initiated.

During a guest performance by the Brötzmann Octet in May 1968 at the Lila Eule in Bremen , where Brötzmann had previously played frequently, recordings were also made for Radio Bremen , which Manfred Miller was in charge of as the jazz editor in charge and which was then published by Brötzmann on the Machine Gun record . The sound engineers from Radio Bremen had to cover the microphones with borrowed blankets from the Bremen theater fund in order to dampen the volume level and make a recording possible. With his uncompromising music, Brötzmann saw himself as part of the 1968 movement : “A brutal society that allows Biafra and Vietnam naturally provokes brutal music.” In an interview with Siegfried Schmidt-Joos in the Jazz Podium in April 1968, however, he said when asked whether he wants to shock with his music: “Not that. The music comes from within ourselves as it is and we do not intend in any way to shock anyone. On the other hand, you have to know what time you are living in, you have to know that many things have to be changed. ”In a panel discussion at WDR in May 1967, he responded to a question from Siegfried Loch as the essential difference between free jazz and traditional jazz (for example one Klaus Doldinger ) the “responsibility for oneself and society”.

The trained graphic artist Brötzmann also created the cover of the album with a GI behind a machine gun. Back then, his house in Wuppertal was the contact point for GI’s deserting before the Vietnam War . The title of the album alluded to a nickname for Brötzmann that Don Cherry had given him in Paris in 1966 .

The music of the album

In the assessment of Ekkehard Jost , the music of Machine Gun " lives from its emotional heat and its downright breathtaking intensity." Nevertheless, it overcomes the free and unplanned way of playing freeform jazz : "It is an extremely intense, often noisy music, a play process primarily aimed at collective energy production, which is given a certain formal structure through the rudimentary compositional specifications of Brötzmann, Van Hove and Breuker and which - unlike Adolphe Sax - in the planned sequence of collectives , solos and thematic inserts something like a dramaturgy of the process. ”Despite the different structural specifications of the individual pieces, the panel is essentially“ monochrome ”, ie not very diverse.

According to Jost's description, the piece Machine Gun initially has an “ introduction staccato in tone repetitions ” that is reminiscent of “drum fire” because it is based on a “quasi percussive” style of playing. The other two compositions do not quite reach the intensity of this piece. With Responsible , Van Hove commemorates the late drummer Jan Van den Ven, who formed a trio with him and Kris Wanders ; it ends with a kwela theme. Breuker's title Music for Han Bennink is based on a simple riff that is repeated and increased in the process. At the end of the pieces, "the players found themselves in quirky rock or samba derivatives," which were humorously quoted.

Track list

Peter Brötzmann, mœrs festival 2010

LP edition

  • Peter Brötzmann: Machine Gun. (BRÖ 2, 1968; FMP 0090, 1972)
  1. Machine Gun (Brötzmann) 17:19
  2. Responsible (Van Hove) 8:20
  3. Music for Han Bennink (Breuker) 11:29

CD edition 1990

  • Peter Brötzmann: Machine Gun. (FMP CD 24, 1990)
  1. Machine Gun (Second Take) (Brötzmann) 14:57
  2. Machine Gun (Third Take) (Brötzmann) 17:13
  3. Responsible (For Jan Van den Ven) (First Take) (Van Hove) 10:00
  4. Responsible (For Jan Van den Ven) (Second Take) (Van Hove) 8:12
  5. Music for Han Bennink (Breuker) 11:22

The Complete Machine Gun Sessions

  • The Peter Brötzmann Octet - The Complete Machine Gun Sessions. (Atavistic - Unheard Music Series ALP262CD)
  1. Machine Gun (Brötzmann) 17:19
  2. Responsible / For Jan Van de Ven (Van Hove) 8:20
  3. Music for Han Bennink (Breuker) 11:29
  4. Machine Gun (Second Take) (Brötzmann) 15:01 Alternate take
  5. Responsible / For Jan Van de Ven (First Take) (Van Hove) 10:08 Alternate Take
  6. Machine Gun (Brötzmann) 17:40

Edition history

Machine Gun initially appeared in an edition of 300 copies on the private BRÖ label and was re-released in 1972 by Free Music Production, which Brötzmann co-founded . It was one of the best-selling albums in their catalog. In 1990 it was released as a compact disc by FMP , supplemented by two previously unreleased alternate takes . In 2007, the Chicago label Atavistic Records, which specializes in free jazz, released the CD The Complete Machine Gun Sessions , which also contained an earlier version of the title track, which was recorded in March 1968 at the German Jazz Festival in Frankfurt and in which saxophonist Gerd Dudek also participated . In 2011 Slowboy Records released a vinyl edition of the original album in a limited edition of 500 copies, the cover of which was produced using a three-color screen-printing process.

Reception and awards

Machine Gun caused a sensation "in professional circles" and was "very controversial". In 1968 Der Spiegel reported rather amused about the “destructive acoustics” of the record with the “most radical jazz rejection of euphoria”. At the time, other contemporary critics saw parallels with the music of Albert Ayler , albeit unlike the American models shaped by the experiences of the political history of Europe (according to Barry Miles in the review of the album in the London International Times , No. 39, 1968) the FAZ critic Ulrich Olshausen called Brötzmann "as Germany's Albert Ayler, an imitation of deceptive similarity". In the aftermath of Machine Gun , Brötzmann became “one of the chiefs of European free jazz” and recorded numerous other albums, initially for FMP. At the beginning of 1969, Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser wrote that Machine Gun was one of the records he had heard most in 1968, "because Brötzmann and the people just don't wear the festival suit they want."

For Steve Lake , whose contribution was printed as liner notes for the CD edition for The Wire magazine , Machine Gun was the first authentic jazz record in Europe because, in his view, the musicians didn't care what the Americans said; musicians from five European nations who belonged to the musical avant-garde were also involved in the album. For Ekkehard Jost, too, it was “the first truly European record production in jazz history”. With their "Powerplay" Machine Gun "continued with more expansive sound means ... what was started in Adolphe Sax ". For Colin Larkin , it is "perhaps the wildest and most brutal album in jazz history , a landmark of the European avant-garde." By encompassing the unbearable, it contains a sense of both emotional and technical extremes, which is strangely addictive, if not draining Experience.

While Ronald Atkins sees Brötzmann's octet recording as “Europe's answer to Coltrane's Ascension ”, for David Borgo Machine Gun - the first album that brought together many of the first generation of European free jazz musicians - the need to understand is so much to tear down as much as possible to the limits in favor of musical expressions. For Max Harrison , Eric Thacker and Stuart Nicholson , too , the album is an important testimony to the pan-European free jazz movement of the late 1960s, as it heralded a musical approach that was extremely different from the American approach and later Kowald "Kaputtspiele" was called. It is an album that pushes, pushes, and pushes again.

For Thurston Moore , the album is a “shattering, booming wonderland of noise .” Ralf Dombrowski, on the other hand, states that only in retrospect can one understand what the musicians might have meant by the remark that Machine Gun actually contains humorous music. “Compared to Afro-American free recordings by Albert Ayler, John Coltrane or Pharoah Sanders , for example , which always followed either a political or spiritual impetus, the sessions from Bremen's» Lila Eule «were just cheeky.” Dombrowski is of the opinion that the musicians had not set themselves an aesthetic goal, but rather went on rioting “with the same naivety”, “as Communards were photographed in natural beauty elsewhere.” He emphasizes the “power” with which the octet played: instead of dynamic nuances could be heard "salvos from the overblown saxophone, thunderbolt drums , piano clusters and bass drums". "What is certain is that this album has blown away a lot of what previously claimed artistic freedom in semi-silky free improvisations ."

In contrast, Ekkehard Jost rates Machine Gun as “an energy-driven, free collective improvisation that radically questions the rules and sound ideals of traditional modern jazz .” Jost examines what the album has to do with the political events of May 1968 and comes to the conclusion that it is a symbolic date, the roots of which are far earlier. Similarly, the album is "a symbolic record production that - like hardly any other - seems to mark the stylistic upheaval in European jazz of the late 1960s." The title of the recording also played a significant role: "Which jazz musician had already played up to then titled one of his pieces with machine gun ? ”In a conversation with Bert Noglik at the end of the 1970s, Brötzmann explicitly resisted misunderstanding the album politically. “Neither the title nor all of the music were meant to be programmatic in a superficial sense. Everything that was written about it is nonsensical. ”Even if Brötzmann himself pointed out that the title had nothing to do with politics, but was of a private nature and reminded us that Don Cherry called it that because of his staccato style of playing, he conveyed Title “no doubt political associations. After all, a soldier is looking at us from the cover of the record behind his machine gun. "

The album was added to the list of 100 Jazz Albums That Shook the World (# 60) in 2006; Duncan Heining wrote:

Political statement, samizdat reflection on events or Janovian primal scream  ? Surely one of the most extreme albums ever recorded it's a musical manifesto from the European free jazz underground, an answering call to like-minds across the Atlantic and rallying cry for those at home. The title track features “solos” by the three horn players and pianist Van Hove, each as ferocious as the other. 'Responsible', for all its atonal howling, ends with a fabulous latin vamp while 'Music For Han Bennink' squeals and yelps with joy. Machine gun leaves you shaken to the core.

Even Ian Carr raised in Jazz - Rough Guide the album as one of the most important in Brötzmann's discography and wrote, the meeting of leading free jazz musicians turn the recording studio "in a combustion chamber with a massive free-for-all". It is amazing that after this freaking out everyone still had enough energy to record two alternate takes, which makes the album “a fascinating document of this exciting time”. Scott Yanow also highlights the album; It is not just one of the few albums where Brötzmann does not dominate his teammates, but is consistently equal to ESP's Freeform albums , but recorded with three times the intensity.

Richard Cook and Brian Morton award the album in The Penguin Guide to Jazz with the highest grade of four stars and the additional crown (a special token of merit) . While Brötzmann's first album still had similarities with American models such as Albert Ayler's Spiritual Unity , "a raw, cruel, three-sided attack", this is surpassed by Machine Gun , which Cook / Morton is also one of the "most important documents in Europe Free jazz underground ”count. “The three saxophonists fire an endless round of explosive devices, overblown noises that build on the continued crescendo that Bennink and Johansson create,” the authors say, “and as chaotic as it sounds, the music is characterized by firm intention and control . Even if the recording is unprocessed, the grainy timbre fits this music. "The two alternate takes of the CD version from 1990 correspond to the original versions in" their terrible power. "

Rolling Stone magazine selected the album in 2013 in its list The 100 best jazz albums in 33rd place. In 2018, a memorial event lasting several days was held in Bremen under the motto 50 years of Peter Brötzmann Machine Gun .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Reiner Kobe, Jazz Podium 11/2007; quoted from FMP on the album, with liner notes by Steve Lake and reviews
  2. ^ Ekkhard Jost: Europe's jazz. 1960-80 . Frankfurt am Main 1987, p. 86.
  3. ↑ a b c E. Dieter Fränzel , Jazz AGe Wuppertal (ed.): Sounds Like Whoopataal. Wuppertal in the world of jazz. Essen 2006, p. 114.
  4. ^ E. Jost: Europe's jazz. 1960-80. P. 112f.
  5. ↑ Kisieldu, see literature
  6. ↑ Information from Peter Losin
  7. ↑ Information from Peter Losin
  8. ^ FMP, on Total Music Meeting 1968 in Berlin
  9. ↑ Sounds No. 8, 1968 . Brötzmann turned down a compromise proposal from Berendt to appear in Don Cherry's band
  10. ↑ a b Review of Machine Gun : Siegfried Schmidt-Joos Wohlklang no , Der Spiegel, No. 39, 1968, (online)
  11. ↑ A then legendary music club, which, according to the then CDU parliamentary group leader in the Bremen citizenship, Hans-Hermann Sieling, was a place that sensitized young people to the revolution , according to Schmidt-Joos Wohlklang no , Der Spiegel No. 39, 1968.
  12. ^ Noglik: Jazz Werkstatt International. rororo, p. 207 (interview)
  13. ↑ The mirror. No. 39, 1968.
  14. ↑ A quote from Brötzmann from 1968, Michael Thiem: The search for alternatives. 1968.
  15. ↑ Quoted from Kisiedu in Albert Mangelsdorff. Wolke Verlag, 2010, see literature
  16. ^ Pop Jazz- Free Jazz. WDR, May 12, 1967, quoted from Kisieldu, see literature
  17. ↑ Julian Weber: They call it Machine Gun. In: TAZ. February 5, 2011.
  18. ↑ cf. Bert Noglik: Jazz Workshop International. Berlin (GDR) 1981, p. 199.
  19. ^ A b E. Jost: European Jazz 1960–80. P. 118.
  20. ^ E. Jost: European Jazz 1960–80. P. 119.
  21. ^ E. Jost: European Jazz 1960–80. P. 118f.
  22. ^ E. Jost: European Jazz 1960–80. P. 89.
  23. ↑ a b Max Harrison et al. a .: The Essential Jazz Records. P. 509.
  24. ^ A b Clifford Allen: Peter Brötzmann: The Complete Machine Gun Sessions.  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: All About Jazz .@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.allaboutjazz.com  
  25. ^ A b R. Dombrowski: Basis Diskothek Jazz. P. 31.
  26. ↑ Recording from March 24, 1968, live from the Frankfurt Jazz Festival; Cast as above, plus Gerd Dudek.
  27. ↑ Steve Lake (1985), in: Brötzmann: Machine Gun. FMP CD 024
  28. ↑ FMP archive
  29. ↑ The Peter Brötzmann Octet - The Complete Machine Gun Sessions at Discogs
  30. ↑ Peter Brötzmann Octet - Machine Gun at Discogs
  31. ↑ cit. n. Kisiedu in Albert Mangelsdorff , Wolke Verlag 2010, see literature
  32. ^ Todd S. Jenkins: Free Jazz and Free Improvisation. To Encyclopedia. Vol. 1 Westport (CT), London: Greenwood Press 2004; P. 63.
  33. ↑ Sounds No. 10 (1969), p. 19. ( Memento of the original from June 20, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.sounds-archiv.at
  34. ↑ Lake points out that although Schlippenbach's album Globe Unity had already been recorded at that time, this orchestra could be understood more as "German plus" and not as pan-European.
  35. ^ Colin Larkin: All Times Top 1000 Albums . Guinness Publishing, 1994. Original: perhaps the most savage and brutal recording in jazz history. Machine Gun is a landmark in the European avant garde. [...] Bordering on the unbearable, there is a sense of both the emotional and technical extreme that is a curiously addictive, if draining, experience .
  36. ^ Ronald Atkins: All That Jazz: The Illustrated Story of Jazz Music . Smithmark, 1996, p. 92.
  37. ^ David Borgo: Sync or Swarm: Improvising Music in a Complex Age. P. 87.
  38. ↑ see Max Harrison, et al. a. The Essential Jazz Records. , P. 508 f .; E. Jost sees it similarly ( The European Jazz Avantgarde of the Late 1960s and Early 1970s Where Did Emancipation Lead? In: Luca Cerchiari, Laurent Cugny and Franz Kerschbaumer Eurojazzland: Jazz and European Sources, Dynamics, and Contexts Boston 2012, p. 281f.), Who sees similarities in this game intention with the large-format bands by Schlippenbach and Schoof from this period.
  39. ↑ cit. n. Atavistic
  40. ↑ E. Jost jazz stories from Europe. P. 241.
  41. ↑ a b c E. Jost Jazz stories from Europe. P. 242.
  42. ↑ cit. n.Bert Noglik Jazz Werkstatt International Berlin (GDR) 1981, p. 198.
  43. ↑ The 100 Jazz Albums That Shook the World ( Memento of the original from July 11, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.jazzwisemagazine.com
  44. ^ Ian Carr: Peter Brötzmann . In: Ian Carr, Brian Priestley , Digby Fairweather (Eds.): Rough Guide Jazz , ISBN 1-85828-137-7 , p. 78.
  45. ↑ See Scott Yanow Jazz On Records. The First Sixty Years . San Francisco 2003, p. 810.
  46. ^ Richard Cook, Brian Morton: The Penguin Guide to Jazz. 6th edition. London 2003, p. 199.
  47. ↑ Rolling Stone: The 100 Best Jazz Albums . Retrieved November 16, 2016.
  48. ↑ Bremen 50 Years of Machine Gun ( Jazz thing ). Accessed May 30, 2018.