Last update - 00:00 14/05/2007
A musical machine gun
By Ben Shalev
A machine gun. An erupting volcano. An avalanche. A saw cutting through steel. A herd of elephants fleeing from a fire, only three times as noisy. There are hardly any images jazz fans and journalists have not used to describe the astoundingly powerful music of Peter Brotzmann, who will be performing in Israel tomorrow and Wednesday.
Why does he play so loud? "The best answer I can give is that I just like to, I need to," says Brotzmann, 67, in a telephone interview from Germany. He immediately recalls the first performance he saw as a child, at the start of the 1950s, a concert by jazz pioneer Sidney Bechet, who played "as loud as he could, and this made a huge impression on me. Ever since then I get great enjoyment from the physical effect of music, from its effect on the body. This dimension has to be present in my music. I especially love when the music overwhelms me, exhausts me. I love the moment when the music makes me lose myself."
This is not just an aesthetic preference. Twenty years ago, when Brotzmann was asked why he plays so loudly, he replied: "How can I play quietly when people are dying of hunger in Ethiopia?"
"I don't believe in art that is based on purely aesthetic motives," he says now. "Music is always the reflection of a worldview, of a way of life, of thoughts about politics, about society, about community. This doesn't mean that if I am angry at a certain American politician, or if I'm worried about what is happening in the Middle East, my feelings will be expressed directly in how I improvise. This is a much more subtle, complex and indirect process at the end of which the way I think, experience and feel gets channeled into music."
My German problem
When Brotzmann first burst onto the stage at the end of the 1960s, the translation of his feelings into music was more direct. This is why his saxophone shouted and wailed so loudly. "I was born in Germany in 1941. Need I say more?" he says. "I grew up after the war and I had a lot of questions for my father, but I never got answers. Therefore, like my whole generation, I obsessively sought a bit of truth. I have never felt guilty about what happened but until the end of my life I will be ashamed. This is my German problem, and in a strange way, as I get older, I feel that it is seeping into my music more and more." In his youth Brotzmann played in swing and Dixieland bands. "I started out as a 'normal' instrumentalist," he laughs, "and I think I was pretty bad at it." Does his transition to free music derive from exposure to the pioneers of American free jazz? "Not so much," he says, a surprising answer for someone labeled the successor to free jazz saxophonist Albert Ayler. "When those albums came to Germany I was already in the midst of an entirely natural process of finding my own voice. I'm a bit old-fashioned and the most important influences on me were saxophonists like Coleman Hawkins and Sonny Rollins. I was also influenced by free jazz musicians, but mostly by those I met personally as a young man: saxophonist Steve Lacey and trumpet-player Don Cherry, with whom I became friends when they came to perform in Germany."
Another crucial influence on Brotzmann was his plastic art studies, which included a work experience with video art pioneer Nam June Paik. "In the 1960s we believed with all our hearts that music can make the world a better place," he says, "but maybe we were completely wrong. I still believe that music can sometimes change a person's way of thinking. Not everyone's. I've encountered a lot of hostile reactions to my music. I've been cursed, I've been shouted at, I've had bottles and tomatoes thrown at me. It has been a very hard struggle, an excellent school for life. But alongside those reactions lots of people come up to me after performances and say they were astonished by the music's emotional power. Many of them, incidentally, are people who are being exposed to free music for the first time." More than any of his other albums, his second album, Machine Gun (1968), established Brotzmann's image as a musical machine gun. "Ever since then I have had to deal with the image of the heavy man who shouts all the time. I think that even if I were to play only ballads until the end of my life, this image would not fade. But I've learned to live with it, even though it leads people to miss other aspects of my music. Not long ago I listened to Machine Gun and I was surprised about its many lyrical and poetic parts."
Carnal playing
But the complexity in Brotzmann's playing is not lost on everyone. "At first you perceive this tremendous volume as violence, but gradually you feel that there is a lot of compassion, a lot of pain within in," says saxophonist Ariel Shibolet. "This is completely carnal playing, primordial, but there is also a lot of feeling in it."
And Yossi Acchoti of The Third Ear, the company that initiated Brotzmann's visit as part of the store's 20th anniversary celebrations, emphasizes the saxophonist's ability "to create a fascinating contrast between melodic, warm playing and broken playing." In his performances in Israel, Brotzmann will be joined by American saxophonist Joe McPhee, who is also one of the jazz greats of the past 40 years. "Since the visit of pianist Cecil Taylor and percussionist Andrew Cyril in Israel more than 20 years ago, no other duo of avant-garde jazz musicians of this stature has visited here," says Acchoti. Brotzmann and McPhee (along with bass player Kent Kessler and drummer Michael Zerang) will appear at the Levontin 7 Club in Tel Aviv tomorrow and Wednesday. Tomorrow evening a solo performance by McPhee will precede their quartet performance and on Wednesday there will be a solo performance by Brotzmann. Both evenings will start with a warm-up performance by Israeli clarinetist Harold Rubin and by Shibolet on the second evening.
What, according to Brotzmann, is special about his quartet with McPhee? "Joe is a black man from upstate New York and I am talking to you from Germany's Midwest, but in a way we are coming from the same place. We listened to the same music, we experienced the shake up of the 1960s, our spirit is the same spirit. We still haven't thought about what exactly we'll play in Tel Aviv, but since Joe is one of the most poetic musicians I know, I'm assuming that the music will be less hardcore relative to other combos of mine." Let there be no misunderstandings: This will be stormy, burning, energetic and dissonant music but it could be that from time to time, Brotzmann will show that his machine gun can also wail softly.