# Remembering Peter Brötzmann – free-jazz saxophonist – One of our recent publications: Video, Photos

- Link: https://jazzblues.eu/2023/06/27/remembering-peter-brotzmann-free-jazz-saxophonist-one-of-our-recent-publications-video-photos/
- Published: 2023-06-27T00:02:00+01:00
- Author: https://JazzBlues.EU

**The veteran avant gardist has lost none of his intensity with two sets showcasing
the full light and shade of his fearsome improvisational playing.**.

The German saxophonist Peter Brötzmann has worked in dozens of different contexts
over the years, but his approach usually stays the same. Whether he’s collaborating
with Californian noise rockers, Portuguese psych bands, Glaswegian pedal steel guitarists
or any number of free-jazz luminaries, you’re likely to hear him play in a big, 
gruff, fruity honk, making splurges of sound in the mid-range of his tenor saxophone.
Tonight’s gig, with his Mental Shake quartet, revealed some unlikely tenderness 
in the tone of this fearsome avant gardist.

Now aged 81, hunched to the right of the stage, looking like a particularly hirsute
Mike Leigh, Brötzmann still plays with an extraordinary energy. He has long been
a fan of the vibraphone – he’s cited Lionel Hampton as an unlikely influence on 
his most famous LP, 1968’s pan-European free-jazz odyssey Machine Gun – and featuring
Chicago vibist Jason Adasiewicz in this band reveals hidden depths to Brötzmann’s
playing. Adasiewicz sometimes tries to match Brötzmann’s intensity – he hits his
instrument hard and percussively, plays dense, chromatic clusters of notes and sometimes
plays the role that Bobby Hutcherson performed on Eric Dolphy’s Out To Lunch. But
Adasiewicz can also play in a more relaxed four-mallet chordal style, as pioneered
by Gary Burton, using lots of pedal and playing sustained, unresolved, modal chords
that bring out Brötzmann’s more melodic instincts. In the second half, when Brötzmann
switches from alto and soprano to the tenor sax, he responds to Adasiewicz with 
a series of simple, vibrato-heavy blues riffs, as if playing a collage of random
three-note fragments from jazz standards.

These two 40-minute sets ebb and flow in roughly five-minute bursts: Brötzmann might
start by freaking out in the higher register while his British drums and bass pairing
Steve Noble and John Edwards rumble beneath him, but the players will reduce the
intensity, start to ruminate and slowly build up again to another climax. For whole
sections you’re amazed that this performance is entirely improvised – it sounds 
so well structured, so filled with light and shade, so reliant on alert listening,
that it could almost have been composed.

![Peter Brotzmann Quartet - Jazzfest Berlin'95 - YouTube](https://i0.wp.com/i.ytimg.
com/vi/MHTDPx8LpuQ/sddefault.jpg?resize=640%2C480&ssl=1)

### _Related_