Peter Brötzmann: 06/03/41 – 22/06/23

In 2013, I asked Peter Brötzmann if he would ever stop playing. His answer was an emphatic no. He would, he said, carry on “as long as my body keeps me going and my brain works somehow.” It’s emblematic of his total commitment to an all-consuming, life-long artistic calling that he has been true to his word. News of his death comes just four months after his final performances in February this year.

Born in Remscheid, west Germany, Brötzmann first came to jazz aged 13, after witnessing a life-changing concert by clarinettist Sidney Bechet. Teaching himself clarinet and then saxophone, he began gigging in local Dixieland and swing bands. He was also an aspiring visual artist and, aged 18, he moved to the city of Wuppertal – his home ever since – to study graphic design, painting and sculpture, and worked as assistant to Korean Fluxus artist Nam Jun Paik. His interest in visual arts never left him – and he continued to design album covers, posters and flyers throughout his career – but, influenced by the new free-jazz he heard emanating from the US, he had, by the early 60s, fully committed to music.    

After releasing his debut album, 1967’s For Adolphe Sax, he burst into the public consciousness the following year with the epochal Machine Gun (titled after a nickname bestowed on him by Don Cherry). Recorded while students manned the barricades in Paris, Machine Gun plugged into the youthful, countercultural spirit of May ’68, presenting a snarling barrage of fierce, refusenik energy, and made him an instant star. It was also revolutionary in its proposal of a distinctly European form of free music – an idea he developed further with his ground-breaking trio with Belgian pianist Fred Van Hove and Dutch drummer Han Bennink between 1970 and 1975, and subsequent duo with Bennink. The albums they made stand as defining documents of European free improvisation, echoes of which can still be heard in the practices of contemporary artists.      

Throughout the 80s and 90s, Brötzmann worked in a variety of uncompromising international settings, from his short-lived trio with South Africans, bassist Harry Miller and drummer Louis Moholo, to the crashing excess of Last Exit, his free-jazz supergroup with bassist Bill Laswell, guitarist Sonny Sharrock and drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson – an outfit that attracted younger fans of noise-rock with its ferocious volume and velocity. He also formed the Die Like A Dog Quartet with trumpeter Toshinori Kondo, bassist William Parker and drummer Hamid Drake, laying the foundations for his enduring trio with Parker and Drake. Between 1997 and 2012, he led the Chicago Tentet, a free-wheeling juggernaut that brought together younger American and Scandinavian players such as saxophonists Ken Vandermark and Mats Gustafsson, as well as veteran trumpeter/saxophonist Joe McPhee.

In his later years, Brötzmann continued to tour and record at an astonishing rate, collaborating widely with an inquisitive generosity of spirit and a firm belief in the democratic and liberating models of human interaction suggested by musical cooperation. He was, by the end, a global jazz superstar, revered for his huge, raw tone and superhuman power. But he struggled with the lung condition COPD, which, exacerbated by a bout of pneumonia during the COVID pandemic, greatly reduced his legendary capacity for blowing. When he emerged from lockdown, it was with a more meditative style, employing shorter phrases and less reliance on pyrotechnics – a sound that fully revealed a firm basis in the blues and an aching lyricism that had been there all along, lurking under the gruff, tough-guy exterior. He is remembered as a pioneering trailblazer, a total artist and a true original.