Peter Brötzmann

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Peter Brötzmann (Die Röhre, Moers , 2006)
Peter Brötzmann, mœrs festival 2010

Peter Brötzmann (born March 6, 1941 in Remscheid , Germany ) is a German jazz musician who has had a great influence on European free jazz . “Of all jazz innovators, he is the one who has broken most radically with all traditions - not just of jazz, but of making music in general.” Coming from the Fluxus movement , he is an experimental saxophonist who occasionally plays the clarinet and tárogató . In particular, the bass saxophone - an otherwise rarely used instrument - was given new attention in jazz by Brötzmann. For Brötzmann's distinctive and energetic way of playing, the term "brötzen" was created in free jazz circles.

Live and act

Brötzmann learned the clarinet when he was nine years old. At the age of seventeen he began a four-year art course at the Werkkunstschule in Wuppertal. He also worked as a graphic artist, played the clarinet and tenor saxophone in various bands and began to be interested in free jazz in the early 1960s. In 1961 he founded a trio with Peter Kowald and Dietrich Rauschtenberger . Brötzmann played at the relevant festivals, worked in Paris in 1966 with Michael Mantler , Carla Bley and Aldo Romano (with whom he also went on tour). He was a founding member of the Globe Unity Orchestra . His 1968 record Machine Gun , recorded with an octet , is considered one of the most provocative works in modern European jazz history. Since the late 1960s he worked for several years in a trio with Fred Van Hove and Han Bennink .

Brötzmann is one of the founders of the Free Music Production record label in Berlin. Until the 1980s he appeared regularly at the Total Music Meeting , in 1973, 1979, 1980 and 1984 but also at the official Berlin Jazz Days . In collaboration with Harry Miller and Louis Moholo , “rhythmic energy as the central driving force” gained “preponderance over the theatrical performance practice pervaded by Dadaist episodes” of the 1970s.

Brötzmann was regularly present in the USA and Japan since the beginning of the 1980s, in changing trios and larger line-ups, but often also in duo constellations. Since 1981 he has also worked sporadically with Bernd Klötzer . In 1986, he was next to Sonny Sharrock and Ronald Shannon Jackson Member of Bill Laswells Jazz Noise group Last Exit with which he recorded several albums. Since that time, especially in the 1990s, Brötzmann gained surprisingly great popularity in the USA.

With Ken Vandermark (sax, cl) from Chicago and the Swede Mats Gustafsson (sax) as the core group of his Chicago tentet , he has been playing in the cross-generational Trio Sonore since 2002 . In 2004 Brötzmann formed the trio Full Blast with Michael Wertmüller (dr) and Marino Pliakas (b) . Since 2016 he has been playing in a duo with the American pedal steel guitarist Heather Leigh (in 2017 the trumpeter Toshinori Kondō was added to the trio ).

Artwork by Brötzmann

Peter Brötzmann's son, Caspar Brötzmann , is also a musician. As part of a live recording of the Peter Brötzmann Tentet 1992 in Wuppertal, Caspar took part as one tenth of the line-up. Father and son recorded the album Last Home together . Brötzmann curated the 25th edition of the Unlimited Festival in Wels in November 2011 and performed there on four days with a wide variety of line-ups, with musicians from the Chicago and New York scenes, but also with Japanese such as Masahiko Sato and Michiyo Yagi . The festival was sold out months before and was documented with the 5-CD box Long Story Short .

His publication I Surrender Dear in 2020 caused a sensation , because “... the wildest man in German jazz plays evergreens . Like here: Nice work if you can get it from the Gershwin brothers. Ella Fitzgerald once played it gracefully, Tony Bennett crowned it with relish , together with the super cool Diana Krall - and Peter Brötzmann? He's roasting it. This verb really exists, it was coined on him. But it expresses a lot more nuances than one might think. It begins with "br" like brutal - but here an almost tender melancholy often arises. "

In addition to his career as a musician, he also worked as a painter, graphic artist, designer and object artist with exhibitions in Germany (including the Akademie der Künste Berlin 1979 with Han Bennink), Sweden, the USA (including Chicago), Austria, the Netherlands and Australia. In the early 1960s he was Nam June Paik's assistant in Wuppertal and Amsterdam for his early installations and took part in Fluxus campaigns in Germany and Amsterdam.

Honors

In 2005 he was awarded the Von der Heydt Culture Prize of the city of Wuppertal, after he had already received the sponsorship prize of this culture prize in 1971.

He received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the New York Vision Festival 2011 . In the same year he was awarded the German Jazz Prize for his life's work .

Discography (selection)

Filmography (selection)

  • Rage! , Director: Bernard Josse (F 2011)
  • Brötzmann. Film production Siegersbusch, directors: René Jeuckens, Thomas Mau and Grischa Windus (cinema, DVD, D / UK 2011)

Fonts

  • Christoph J. Bauer, Peter Brötzmann: Brötzmann. Conversations. With an essay by Christoph J. Bauer. Posth Verlag, Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-944298-00-9 .
  • Peter Brötzmann: We Thought We Could Change the World . Conversations with Gérard Rouy. Wolke Verlag, Hofheim 2014, ISBN 978-3-95593-047-9 .
  • Peter Brötzmann: Brötzmann. Graphic Works 1959-2016 . Wolke Verlag, Hofheim 2016, ISBN 978-3-95593-075-2 .

Lexigraphic entries

Web links

Commons : Peter Brötzmann  - album with pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ E. Dieter Fränzel , Jazz AGe Wuppertal (ed.): Sounds Like Whoopataal. Wuppertal in the world of jazz. Essen 2006, p. 168.
  2. ↑ See Sounds Like Whoopataal. Wuppertal in the world of jazz. Essen 2006, p. 172f.
  3. ^ Ekkehard Jost: Europe's jazz. 1960-1980 . Fischer, Frankfurt a. M. 1987, p. 133.
  4. ↑ Roland Spiegel: Peter Brötzmann: I surrender dear on www.br-klassik.de (accessed on February 25, 2020)
  5. ↑ Peter Brotzmann Honored With Lifetime Achievement Award at Vision Festival (accessed June 13, 2011)
  6. ↑ Albert Mangelsdorff Prize 2011 for Peter Brötzmann on nmz.de, accessed on September 18, 2011.
personal data
SURNAME Brötzmann, Peter
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German jazz musician
DATE OF BIRTH March 6, 1941
PLACE OF BIRTH Remscheid , Germany