# Peter Brötzmann, the heart and lungs of European free jazz, dead at 82: Video, Photo

- Link: https://jazzblues.eu/2023/06/28/brotzmann-the-heart-and-lungs-of-european-free-jazz-dead-at-82-video-photo/
- Published: 2023-06-28T00:02:54+01:00
- Author: https://JazzBlues.EU

**Peter Brötzmann, a German saxophonist whose brash, tempestuous outpourings set
an imposing standard for free improvisation, and helped define the terms for a postwar
European avant-garde, died at his home in Wuppertal, Germany, on Thursday. He was
82.**His death was confirmed in statements from TROST Records and FMP-Publishing,
which both released his music.Brötzmann’s sound could be gruff and garrulous, or
knifelike and squalling, always with a ferocious commitment to the moment at hand.
Few figures in free jazz ever sustained a voice so unsparingly intense, over so 
long a tenure. “His medium is screaming energy music with a deliberately manic edge,”
wrote the American critic John Litweiler in his book _The Freedom Principle: Jazz
After 1958. _That pronouncement was made nearly 40 years ago; remarkably, Brötzmann
only kept expanding that legacy, keeping a working pace as prodigious as his style.

He began his recording career in 1967 with a steely provocation: _For Adolphe Sax,_
named after the inventor of the saxophone, and featuring a trio with German bassist
Peter Kowald and Swedish drummer Sven-Åke Johansson. Brötzmann self-released that
album on his own label, Brö, signaling rugged independence from the start.

His second album on the label had a seismic impact; he called it _Machine Gun_, 
and its release in 1968, coupled with the hair-raising bluster of the playing, resonated
with worldwide protest against the Vietnam War. “In general, the ’60s were quite
violent times,” Brötzmann explained in [a 2018 conversation](https://youtu.be/ywtHnhDqZsU)
with the Red Bull Music Academy, alluding not only to Vietnam but also political
violence and assassinations in the United States and beyond.

“On the other hand, our generation of the after-war guys, we wanted one thing: we
wanted to get rid of old remains of Nazi stuff,” he added. “We didn’t get any answers
from our parents. They didn’t want to talk about it. So we had to find answers for
our questions somewhere else.”

Brötzmann was literally born into wartime, on March 6, 1941, in the western German
town of Remscheid. He started out not as a musician but rather a visual artist: 
he studied painting, and fell in with the radical, anti-establishment Fluxus movement.

He was musically inspired by American jazz artists who passed through — not only
the New Orleans saxophone pioneer Sidney Bechet, but also vanguardists like multi-
reedist Eric Dolphy. Brötzmann later recalled that he found his own freedom of musical
expression after traveling to Amsterdam, where he met free-thinking Dutch musicians
like drummer Han Bennink and pianist Misha Mengelberg. For a time, he was a member
of their Instant Composers Pool, which typically worked as a 10-piece orchestra.

For a taste of Brötzmann in full fury, you could do worse than this concert clip
from 1974 in Warsaw, Poland, featuring Alexander von Schlippenbach on piano, Peter
Kowald on bass and Paul Lovens on drums.

While his main instruments were tenor and alto saxophones, Brötzmann also played
soprano and baritone, along with various clarinets and the tárogató, a reed instrument
heard in Hungarian folk music. And he collaborated not only with multiple generations
of European improvisers but also with many Americans — notably in the experimental
scene in Chicago, where he had a devoted disciple and champion in the multi-reedist
Ken Vandermark.

Brötzmann also recorded with titans like pianist Cecil Taylor, drummer Andrew Cyrille
and guitarist Sonny Sharrock; a 1987 duo summit with Sharrock saw release roughly
a decade ago, under a typically unprintable title. (The two also worked together
in Last Exit, alongside bassist Bill Laswell and drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson.)
For more than a decade, Brötzmann led an international free-jazz supergroup called
the Die Like a Dog Quartet, featuring Toshinori Kondo on trumpet, William Parker
on bass, and Hamid Drake on drums.

In recent years, Brötzmann had struggled openly with health issues, occasionally
fighting through them onstage. Critic Peter Margasak, who formed a relationship 
with his music in Chicago and now lives in Berlin, recalls a few of these recent
performances in an homage on his Substack newsletter, Nowhere Street. One such performance
was at Jazzfest Berlin last fall, with Drake on percussion and Majid Bekkas on Moroccan
guembri; it has been released on the ACT Music label as Catching Ghosts. “It was
profoundly moving,” Margasak writes, “and Brötzmann had summoned some divine power,
pushing the music over the top into something remarkable.”

![Peter Brötzmann, photographer in Buffalo, N.Y., in 2010.](https://npr.brightspotcdn.
com/dims4/default/4a866cb/2147483647/strip/true/crop/3389x1906+0+0/resize/880x495!/
quality/90/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fmedia.npr.org%2Fassets%2Fimg%2F2023%2F06%2F23%2Fpeter_br-
tzmann_dsc0011_wide-ab34ca8297a2fcf690ad9dd5d36d1a28cbbe7bf9.jpg)

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