Brotzmann's joyous honks show love for free jazz
January 14, 2005
BY JOHN LITWEILER
Was William Blake right? Does the road of excess lead to the palace of wisdom? Virtually everything about Peter Brotzmann's music is extreme. He honks and screams through his saxophones, creating a sound that is huge and violent enough to crack concrete. The super-fast, wild, freewheeling lines he plays are far outside mainstream jazz conventions, in no standard keys, scales or chords. His music is usually fiercely ecstatic, and this German expressionist is not a man to hide his emotions.
Back in the 1960s, as a new music was emerging from Chicago's black free-jazz artists, new kinds of homegrown jazz were also appearing in Europe. Brotzmann became an important force on the European scene before he began making frequent Chicago appearances in the 1980s.
This week, on a stormy Wednesday night, he blew up a storm inside the Empty Bottle, joined by Hamid Drake and Kent Kessler, two-thirds of the DKV Trio. Drake is probably Chicago's most popular jazz drummer, full of colorful rhythms, while the virtuoso Kessler is among the few bassists who can match Brotzmann's and Drake's thunder. All three thrive on free improvisation, and Wednesday's show was all free improvisation -- a wholly spontaneous leap into the unknown, with no set themes, rhythms or harmonies.
It wasn't quite Brotzmann at his transcendent best, but it demonstrated that there's more to his music than shock value. He opened with a rousing, repeated tenor sax cry that launched a whirlwind of sound, and soon his solo evolved into long, hoarse, split tones -- several notes at once -- and then high screams at the very top of his horn. On clarinet he began with a low, rumbling accompaniment to Kessler that bloomed into a faintly Claude Debussy-like ballad, then rose to exasperated squawks. His alto sax work was most dramatic of all, almost entirely in hoarse hollers.
The show was mostly in tempos faster than a speeding bullet, though the group slowed drastically for a few passages in which Brotzmann played somber melodies like adagios from gloomy symphonies.
His style and his narrow emotional range certainly recalled his original idol, the tragic American innovator Albert Ayler. For the most part he invented fast, many-noted phrases that, like Ayler's, seemed to last as long as the breath in his lungs would allow. If it were possible to slow down such high-energy blowing, a simple, rough-hewn lyricism at the root of his style might become evident. But Brotzmann without the explosive extremes would not be Brotzmann anymore.
Chicago's own Ken Vandermark, the third member of the DKV Trio, joined in the second set, offering a long baritone sax solo notable for its ingenious structure and imaginative contrasts of ideas. He spent most of his time accompanying Brotzmann, though, with simple riffs on the bari and on bass clarinet.
For the most part Kessler and Drake responded to the horns with quick ears and bright imaginations, yet there also were a few routines in which they lapsed into thudding, singsong patterns. Do these otherwise fine musicians play together too often?
John Litweiler is author of The Freedom Principle: Jazz After 1958 (Da Capo Books).
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