Peter Brötzmann
Peter Brötzmann is a revered free jazz musician from West Germany whose over 50-year career has taken him from the interdisciplinary radicalism of the late 20th-century Fluxus art movement to extensive collaborative and solo recording and performance. Primarily a saxophonist and clarinetist, Brötzmann has worked with experimental greats such as Dutch drummer Han Bennink, British fellow saxophone powerhouse Evan Parker and Japanese sound artist Keiji Haino, exploring an avant-garde, largely improvisational style of free jazz with his signature rough timbre. His octet album Machine Gun remains a seminal free jazz album of the late ’60s, a genre-expanding work that aurally articulated the anxieties surrounding the Vietnam War and his country’s uncertain future. With over 100 releases to his name, including some with jazz supergroup Last Exit, Brötzmann’s creative passions have not diminished. In 2017 he released Live In Tel Aviv, a live album with trombonist Steve Swell and drummer Paal Nilssen-Love, and in 2018, his third studio collaboration with steel guitarist and singer/songwriter Heather Leigh, Sparrow Nights.
In his lecture at Red Bull Music Academy 2018 in Berlin, Brötzmann talked about learning from the ’60s avant-garde, why he doesn't believe in teaching jazz and how improvisation comes down to fitting or fighting.
Hosted by Hanna Bächer Please give a very warm welcome to Peter Brötzmann. [applause] In the intro, we’ve listened to a piece by Mauricio Kagel, “Ein Aufnahmezustand” which is from 1969. That was recorded in Cologne, and I figured it’s important to explain that there will be many cities that we’re going to mention in this talk and they’re all about 20 minutes away from each other, so just ignore the city names, it’s one big region. We might get specific about it, about Dusseldorf versus Cologne versus Wuppertal, but they’re literally 20 minutes away from each other. But you were born in Remscheid, to mention another one. Peter Brötzmann Yeah, I was born in Remscheid, a middle-sized industrial town at the border of the Ruhr Area, and in 1941 it was I think. And yeah, I grew up there, the usual school, high school and so on. My goal in the very early years was to be a painter, and I did that with quite some intensity, but music, and especially jazz music, was always on my side. We had at the high school, we had a swing/Dixieland band. There was a very good clarinet player. Hanna Bächer Who was that? Peter Brötzmann I forgot his name, I don’t know, but he was very good. But he had to leave school, and I grabbed his clarinet and started to play with my few records I had at that time. So I drove my parents and neighbors crazy. But the whole shit started in Remscheid because we had a swing/bebop band there already with some advanced students from the Folkwang school in Essen. And so I joined them from time to time with my clarinet, and they didn’t send me home. So I started to tour with them, and then, of course, one day they said, “OK Brötzmann, you need a saxophone. We need a saxophone in the band.” So I organized myself a tenor saxophone and started to play. But at that time, still, my goal was being a painter. I studied at the Werkkunstschule in Wuppertal, which is a kind of following thing of the Bauhaus schools for example. I started to study advertisement, graphics, paintings and so on. Hanna Bächer I would actually like to show a picture from the early ’60s that shows you, and it shows some other artists, and then maybe you can explain to... Peter Brötzmann You have some? Yeah? Hanna Bächer It’s not your artwork. Could we please look at picture number one. Peter Brötzmann Oh yes, this is... Hanna Bächer That’s actually you on the bottom left, right? Peter Brötzmann Yeah, it must be. Must be. I’ve changed a bit. Yeah, that is a photo from a Nam June Paik exhibition we did in ’61 in Wuppertal. Hanna Bächer ’63. Peter Brötzmann ’63 is that one? Yeah, OK. I just had finished my studies at the art school, and there was quite an avant-garde gallery in Wuppertal called Parnass, and this guy was really very active, inviting artists from all over the world, and one of them was very young Nam June Paik from Korea, and I was lucky to assist him for this exhibition and some following stuff in Holland, Amsterdam and so on. And he, I think, was the first really important person for me in my little art life. Via him, I learned to know Joseph Beuys, who started his activities in these years, in mainly Düsseldorf at the Akademie. Another important group of artists were the Fluxus group with George Maciunas as the leader of the administration and Emmett Williams and a lot of others. That was, looking back now, these 60 years, very important influence and influences just before I met some great guys from the jazz world. At the same time, early ’60s, Stockhausen opened his electronic studio in Cologne, he was running together with Mary Bauermeister a small theater in Cologne, and he invited people like [John] Cage and [David] Tudor, for example. That was, beside being busy with the jazz music, my other very important influence. Hanna Bächer I would like to just, sorry to interrupt you but, maybe so people get a bit more of an idea of what Nam June Paik did, whose assistant you were. The picture we saw earlier has a cut-off head of an actual ox in the entrance of an exhibition that I think was referred to as the first media art exhibition in the world. Peter Brötzmann I mean he explained it like that, that if they have a big festivity in Korea, they put over the door the head of the animal which has been eaten for the later dinner. So I was sent to the slaughter house in Wuppertal and organized the head of this bull, and we nailed it over the door, and neighbors complained a couple of days later so we had to get rid of that again. Nam June Paik, at that time, he was about 30 or something like that. He was living in Cologne, and he came out of, let’s say, the Cage school in a way. He was working a lot with prepared piano stuff, and already in the early ’60s, he started what he got famous for in the later years, TV experiments. I was lucky to be a part of that very early development of his artistic life, and the good thing was that we stayed good friends until he died. At the same time, you could hear in Germany, a lot of jazz music. The bands were touring in Europe. I’ve heard all of Miles Davis’s bands. I’ve heard all [John] Coltrane Quartet, all Coltrane with Eric Dolphy, all Coltrane with [Cannonball] Adderley and whatever was there. All Sonny Rollins, all Art Blakey, it was all over the place. So we got a lot of very different information, and the good thing on my side was that I got the other side of it. That means the experience with Nam June Paik, with Joseph Beuys, and even early Stockhausen I liked very much, which told me and taught me I don’t have to take care. Paik always came when we played concerts in Wuppertal, he passed by and said... Nobody like my music, in these years, of course, just a handful of friends, but he always said, “Brötzmann, go ahead, do it. Do whatever you can.” So I learned very early not to take care about the rules, just to make my own rules, and that’s what I’m still trying to do. Hanna Bächer Do you feel like you learned about shock value from Paik? He did things like he put up this ox head, and I think he once attacked Cage and David Tudor and cut their clothes with scissors during one of his concerts. Did that influence you in a way that you knew you wanted to play extreme? Peter Brötzmann No, no. That was anyway there. I didn’t know any influence with that. But, of course, it encouraged me. I still have some letters from Beuys at home. He always said, Brötzmann, do your shit, do your thing.” I mean the press material I got out of these years, they all said, “That’s no music anymore. That’s no jazz, that’s no nothing.” So it was very, very helpful to have people like that on my side. I just didn’t have to care, I just developed my own stuff. Then, on the other hand, I got very early in touch with a lot of American musicians like Cecil Taylor in the middle of the ’60s, or Don Cherry who was living in these years in the south of Sweden but working a lot in German radio stations. Or Steve Lacy who was living in Paris, and Carla Bley who is a piano player. And I started to work with some of them, which was, for me, as a very young and foolish guy, very important, to establish my own things. Hanna Bächer On which level did you discuss politics with these people, because you just mentioned three American artists, Don Cherry and... Peter Brötzmann In general, the ’60s where quite violent times, and if you think back, what happened in the ’60s in the States, the riots in Washington DC, in Detroit, wherever in the South, people still were lynched in the South and disappeared, and Martin Luther King was killed, J.F. Kennedy was killed. On the other hand, our generation of the after-war guys, we wanted one thing. We wanted to get rid of all the remains of Nazi stuff. I mean the whole Adenauer government was still full of old Nazis. Hanna Bächer Adenauer was, just to explain, he was the first chancellor of Germany after the war from, I think, ’49 to ’63. Peter Brötzmann Yes. We didn’t get any answers from our parents, they didn’t want to talk about it, so I, or we, in general had to find answers for our questions somewhere else. My first connection, of course, it just was crossing the border, in two hours being in Amsterdam, and Holland was the first country I experienced a fresher air and a freer life. I, for example, had my first exhibitions I had in Holland, the first international music contacts were to some Dutch guys like Misha Mengelberg or Han Bennink or Willem Breuker. I worked with them. With Bennink, I’m still working with time to time. Holland was a very important place for me. I was setting out with some other colleagues, Nam June Paik’s exhibition in Amsterdam at the famous Gallery 47 and things like that. I even had a small place in Amsterdam for some years. It was a country of some kind of freedom in a way. At the same time, the first contacts developed to the British musicians like Derek Bailey, Tony Oxley, John Stevens, and a lot more. So, it was a time for really international contacts, and I must say, when I started to build up my own bands, I never had a German band. It was, from the very beginning, a very international scene with the Swedish drummer Sven-Åke Johansson, or with the Dutch friends like Bennink, Willem Breuker, and with the English guys, Evan Parker and so on. And now it happened in the middle of the ’60s I was invited to the first bigger festivals in Germany like, the Frankfurt festival, which was the biggest, at that time, in Western Europe I think. And so at least I got quite some attention. And because of those international connections I was able to set up bands like the Machine Gun band from ’68, which included two drummers, Sven-Åke Johansson and Han Bennink, a bunch of saxophone players, Evan Parker, Willem Breuker, myself, Gerd Dudek, and two bass players, Buschi Niebergall and Peter Kowald, just to name some. Hanna Bächer I would like to play a bit of that... Peter Brötzmann Yeah. Hanna Bächer ... It’s one of your most famous pieces. But before we play that, I would like to understand more, or have you explain more, how it felt to make art in a place where everyone who’s older than 40, or older than 45, 50 at the end of the ’60s was technically part of, well, a nation of mass murderers. How do you deal with that? How do you get up in the morning when you’re 19 and you want to make art, knowing that that is the generation of your parents? Peter Brötzmann The trauma of my generation was what our fathers had done to the rest of the world. And so we said, “Never again.” And that was the whole impetus through all of my life, and still is. Looking back to 60 years of making music and then seeing at the moment, coming up, the brown nationalistic source and poisoning the groundwater everywhere in the world, it’s quite a sad moment I must say. But that was our thing, “Never again.” Never nationalism again, never all that what our fathers had done. That was, luckily, the same mood with most of the Europeans I had the chance to work with. It was not only the Dutch and the English, a little later came the Danish and the Swedish and the Norwegian guys. So it was really a big community, and the good thing was that not only all the artists were in the boxes, “Oh, he is a musician, he is a theater man, he is a writer, he is a painter,” we all had to do something together, and it was really a time of a large community, Europe-wide. And that’s what I’m missing nowadays, of course, but that was a very important thing for us. Hanna Bächer To cross the borders and work together, where just 20 years before, you literally would’ve had to cross the border at the front of a war. Peter Brötzmann Right, yes. Yes. Hanna Bächer You might hate me for that, but I want to play one video that just explains a bit more, shows a bit more, what Germany was like in the year that Machine Gun came out, which was in ’68. Peter Brötzmann ’68, just 50 years ago. Hanna Bächer We’re only going to make it through 53 seconds of it, but this was number one in Germany in 1968. Please play video number four. (video: Heintje – “Heidschi Bumbeidschi”)
Can we have the next one really loud please? (music: The Peter Brötzmann Octet – “Machine Gun”) Peter Brötzmann [applause] You can imagine, that, for the audience, was quite a challenge. Hanna Bächer I just want to say which track it was so everyone... This was “Machine Gun,” with your original octet. So the original recording of “Machine Gun,” I think recorded in a club in Bremen and before we saw video of Heintje, he sings that surrounded by older people in Germany with all the connotations that we mentioned before and it’s literally a lullaby that is saying “Let us forget about the pain in the world,” and that same year you made this recording. Peter Brötzmann Yeah, and the funny thing is, Heintje was, of course, a Dutch guy, and you know, going to Holland in these early years right after the war, it was, for a German, not so easy. I remember when I got my first friends in Amsterdam and I rented this little space and I was going around. That was in the old Jewish part of Amsterdam. At the Kalkmarkt. I was going around buying rolls and pieces of cheese. And, of course, people realize “Oh, he is German.” I didn’t get served, so my friends took me on their hand, showed me around, “This is a good one.” So by the next day I got my cheese and rolls. But it was not so easy. Besides that, of course, collaboration between the musicians was very, very successful in a way. But you can imagine playing this piece of music at German jazz festival in ’68, where mostly people liked to listen to let’s say Dave Brubeck or Modern Jazz Quartet, it was quite something else for them. So the reaction of the press were like that, but on the other hand I started to set up my own record label in ’66. I produced the first record then and Machine Gun was the second one. At the same time, the Dutch friends and the English comrades, they founded their first record labels like ICP in Holland and Incus in England. And so it was really a good collaboration going on. And the interest for the music was growing, slowly, slowly, but it was growing. Yeah, especially the contacts to the Americans were growing bigger and bigger so I went... My first visit to the States was in the early ’70s, but I had played already in Europe with Carla Bley’s European quintet and with a lot of Steve Lacy’s band. Don Cherry invited me for his band playing in Paris for a week. And so on. Hanna Bächer Maybe we should play another video from 1970 with Globe Unity Orchestra so you can get a bit of an idea. That was mostly European people I believe. Peter Brötzmann Yes, yes. That’s right. Hanna Bächer Can we watch video number one please? (video: Globe Unity Orchestra – “Drunken In The Morning Sunrise” (live)) Hanna Bächer This was “Drunken In The Morning Sunrise.” Your composition. It’s a long time ago, 48 years, with the Globe Unity Orchestra. Peter Brötzmann I mean the Globe Unity Orchestra was founded, more or less, by Alexander Von Schlippenbach, the piano player, and we had the band together in the mid-’60s. A composition for the Berlin jazz fest, which was called Globe Unity. And then we revived it in the ’70s with quite a... Sometimes 20-piece band, with all the English guys, with the Dutch and Belgian guys. And with American guests like Anthony Braxton, Steve Lacey, and a lot more. Hanna Bächer I wanted to play that because it shows you on stage, and you had mentioned earlier that there were a lot disciplines that influenced you. And you were still working as a painter, but why did you prefer expressing yourself through music and stopped the art? Peter Brötzmann Yeah, that’s a good question. I don’t know exactly. I mean, I continued doing the painting stuff and so on, but for some reason the music took more and more over. And I think, looking back, it was always the experience to work on the same thing with a bunch of guys. I mean, it’s a nice feeling if you’re in you studio and come to a point where you can say “OK, this, let’s say, painting, is finished and it looks all right,” or you throw it in the oven or whatever, but to work on a thing with a group of people and create something together, it’s another feeling and it’s a much more intense feeling in a way. And besides that I like travel. I like seeing other countries, other people. That the music combines, and still does. I’m still very curious about a lot of countries I haven’t been. So I’m always looking forward. Hanna Bächer I want to play a bit of a piece again that we had already listened to in the intro. (music: Mauricio Kagel – “Ein Aufnahmezustand”)
So this is a piece by a composer called Mauricio Kagel who lived and worked in Cologne at that moment, and he recorded you, he recorded quite a few people, he recorded you saying in that part saying that you’re not a good clarinet player. And Mauricio Kagel was working a lot with the ideas of theater in creating music, so he put you in studios and secretly recorded you and then used all the bits that you said in between the performances that you thought you had come in for. I’m curious, you being exposed... This is from ’69... You having been exposed to that at that time, this very conceptual art. How, and if at all, that went into your performances as a sax player? Peter Brötzmann Yeah, I mean this recording situation was really very special. I had met Kagel, I don’t remember where, but then he invited me for a couple of days to the studio in Cologne. I brought my horns with me and he had me play certain things, and besides that we were talking. There was this, [Christoph] Caskel was his name, the drummer for contemporary music at that time. And we talked, and at the end I think he didn’t use any of my saxophone playing, I think he just used our talks. And the good thing with Kagel was that he had a great sense of humor and he understood what jazz music is about. Maybe for him as an Argentinian it was a bit easier than for a stupid German. And yeah, I just liked the guy and I liked him because he was inventing all the time very special staged situations. He’d build up really fantastic stages. Build up his own instruments or instrument machines played by two people, really big constructions. It was always fun to be with him. Hanna Bächer And this humor you’re describing that he had is something that can be found in many of your recordings of that time. Much later you played with Keiji Haino. I can only think of two people coming up with track titles of that sort of level of absurdity, and that’s Keiji Haino and it’s Han Bennink who you played a lot with in the ’70s. So was that also a way to deal with the still quite desperate situation in Germany or the desperate memory? Peter Brötzmann I wouldn’t go so far. No, I mean, to deal with the situation you don’t like and you want to change, humor is quite a good way to work with that, and Bennink of course did it in his own way. And I started to work with Keiji Haino about 30 years ago and Keiji is one of the guys... He can touch everything, every instrument or whatever and make something out of it and that’s a very special gift. Hanna Bächer Maybe I should illustrate Bennink’s humor by playing just the last 30 seconds of a track that is named after your name and it sounds like he’s trying to pronounce it. (music: Brötzmann / Mengelberg / Bennink – “Brötzmann”)
That’s just Han Bennink saying your name. Not really saying it. Peter Brötzmann Yeah. I mean, he still is a funny guy after all these years. Yes, I mean, what to say? It was just fun to do and to react on sometimes not so easy situations. Hanna Bächer So you started touring a lot in the ’70s, but still had the graphic design business and a family by that point at home in Wuppertal... Peter Brötzmann I dropped the advertisement business. I had to do it because I had to feed the family somehow, but I dropped that in the late ’60s already. And then the kids were old enough, my wife could go to work and I could travel around and play some music. I must say, without my wife I wouldn’t have made it. Hanna Bächer Because she let you play and provided a stable income. Peter Brötzmann Yeah, most of the girls say “Oh, you better stay home and do a decent job,” but she always encouraged me, “Do your thing,” and I did. Hanna Bächer How was on your side, as a musician, the funding situation at that point in Europe, in Germany, and which role did radio stations play in providing a stable income? Peter Brötzmann Yeah, compared to nowadays the radio stations were really great help. I mean we always complained, of course, but if I look back, radio stations like the small station in Bremen, the big station in Hamburg. Even the conservative station in Cologne and the Südwestfunk in Baden-Baden, they all provided us with some work from time to time, or we could use the studio, or they did some studio concerts, or they had a little money that I could invite some guests. And that, of course, is all gone, that is not happening anymore. But in those years it was a big help to survive. Hanna Bächer Even though you didn’t really work in advertisement anymore, you made all the record covers for... Well, most of the record covers for your own recordings and record covers for a few other people. Can we please look at picture number five? This is a recording by the Brötzmann Group in 1970. A record called Fuck De Boere. Dedicated to Johnny Dyani. It also has by the way a version of “Machine Gun” on it. And I wanted to ask you about this particular artwork and also obviously the title and the dedication of the record. Peter Brötzmann Maybe first of all to Johnny Dyani. Johnny Dyani was a bass player coming with a bunch of guys from South Africa. They were able to escape and they first stranded in Switzerland but then were able to move to England and, of course, whenever we were together, that was Johnny Dyani, Louis Moholo, Dudu Pukwana, and Chris McGregor and other guys, of course we talked about their experience in South Africa and whenever it came to these white South Africans, Johnny Dyani was shouting “Fuck de boere!” which means, you understand, “Fuck these guys.” So I dedicated this piece to him. And the artwork in the back, what was it? At that time I... From early ’60s I think, I was working with a lot of collage things and yeah, nothing special to say about it. Hanna Bächer Don’t be that humble. Peter Brötzmann It just a kind of mummy under some blankets. Hanna Bächer It’s not related to the title of the record in any way? Peter Brötzmann You can draw a line if you want, but originally it was not connected with the title, no. Hanna Bächer So you were aware of things going on in the whole world basically. And there’s one track... Actually someone asked me that before this talk, but the question that came up was how much you were aware of another track also called “Machine Gun” by a guitar player called Jimi Hendrix that came out two years after yours. And if you knew how that sort of connected to politics in the U.S.? Peter Brötzmann I mean the title “Machine Gun” is always leading to some wrong conclusions. It was a nickname Don Cherry gave me because of my playing, but of course it was happening in ’68 it had straight connection to the war in Vietnam and things like that. Yeah, I know Hendrix used the title a couple of years later. Hanna Bächer But there was never a possible meeting of the two of you on any sort of connection? Peter Brötzmann No, no. Hanna Bächer Because he actually uses drums that are machine gun like. I don’t know. Should I play it? People know it, right? Peter Brötzmann Yeah. Hanna Bächer Maybe I play just a tiny bit in the middle. (music: Jimi Hendrix – “Machine Gun”)
Jimi Hendrix with “Machine Gun” obviously. I just really wanted to play these drums because he particularly aims at recreating that sound. There are a few of your recordings coming in the ’70s that also have field recording bits, or actually concrete sounds, such as for example the stuff you did with Bennink on Schwarzwaldfahrt. So can I imagine you, at one point, getting a recorder and making that a part of your music, or was it other people bringing that in? Peter Brötzmann I didn’t get your question. I’m sorry. Hanna Bächer I'm sorry. That’s definitely the fault of my question and my cold. I used it as a segue because Jimi Hendrix has his drummer play the drums as a machine gun, and then in some of your recordings that came later, in the ’70s for example, such as Schwarzwaldfahrt, there are actual recordings of concrete sounds that you or the other musicians are bringing in, such as of birds, etc. Peter Brötzmann Yeah but that was just a situation where we recorded Schwarzwaldfahrt in the Black Forest. Hanna Bächer So there’s no layering of any sounds in that? It’s not like you got into tape slicing at that point? Peter Brötzmann No. We went by car, it was quite winter time still. We had the allowance to drive through the Black Forest and we got some very simple recording equipment from the Südwestfunk, and we recorded wherever we liked to stay. We unpacked instruments or we used the lakes and the water and the trees and whatever we found, and were making noise with drums and saxophones and clarinets. It was, yeah, it was a very nice trip I must say. Hanna Bächer And you were still mostly playing woodwind instruments. There was no branching out into recording techniques on your side? Peter Brötzmann No, no. It was just pure, as it is, yeah. (music: Brötzmann / Bennink – “Schwarzwaldfahrt Nr. 12”) Hanna Bächer [applause] You and Han Bennink, who has been mentioned several times by now, a Dutch multi-instrumentalist, mostly a drummer, who you went to a forest in Germany with, called the Schwarzwald, and made this really experimental recording... Or in a different way experimental than your massive jazz bands. Peter Brötzmann Bennink and I, we always enjoyed nature, and we had something to do at the radio in Baden-Baden. At that time, quite an important guy was running the jazz department there, Joachim-Ernst Berendt. We talked to him, “Hey man, what about going to the nature and do some field recordings?” And he made that possible, and so we had a week of driving around different places. It was very cold still, and very unpleasant weather. But we enjoyed that very much, so it’s quite a unique document of that time, I would say. Hanna Bächer You had still, until this day, have never seen a teacher, right? So there is this level of experimentation that your... Different levels of experimentation on all these records from this time. Did you reach points where you felt like, “I envy other people playing their saxophones,” or being able to play their instrument in a way that you just can’t, despite having all these ideas? Peter Brötzmann I mean, look at all the guys coming out now from the music schools and conservatories, they can play much better saxophone than I can do, but that’s not about music. Music is about finding out what’s happening with you, finding out what’s your voice, what is your ability to produce, create something. And I grew up with blues music, and if you listen to the very early blues... I mean, these guys could play with one string on the guitar box, but they could play music. So it’s not about technique, or technique is just the thing you develop for your own. And if you need to know some more, you work as hard as the point you reach it, and then the next case shows up. In the case of jazz music, I don’t believe in teaching. I mean, it’s always good to learn, it’s good to learn about composition, to learn about counterpoint, to learn even about the instruments up and downs the scales and so on. But if you don’t know what to do with it, then you better sell the horns. I’m very skeptical about all these conservatories and I don’t think that’s a good solution for the music. And if it goes on like that, jazz music comes back to a kind of academic exercise, and, for sure, I don’t need that. Hanna Bächer I would like to, before we, very soon I think, open this up to questions, show a video with one of your frequent later... But that means the last 30, instead of the last 60 years, later collaborators, Keiji Haino, Haino Keiji. Video number five, please. (video: Peter Brötzmann & Keiji Haino – Live at SuperDeluxe, Tokyo)
[applause] That was an excerpt of a show of yours in SuperDeluxe in 2008, a club in Tokyo. How does this collaboration work? How has it evolved over the last 30 years? And most importantly, how do you and Keiji Haino communicate about music? Peter Brötzmann Yeah, that’s a funny thing. My first longer trip to Japan was in 1980, and I was with my drummer comrade Bennink. And since that time I started to love that country, and I went nearly every year. And, you know, you have to have a kind of management over there, and the management we had was the same who was, at that time, busy with Keiji Haino too. And Keiji was a kind of uprising star in the rock scene in Japan, and so we decided, “OK, let’s do something together,” and one of the following years we did three weeks tour, just Keiji and myself. And communication was difficult, because at that time he didn’t speak any English, or he didn’t want to speak any English. And so we were sitting in the car for three weeks touring, driving, playing, with nearly not speaking to each other. I mean, we had our guy, our driver and agent, he was translating, more or less, the most necessary things, but there was not really a personal thing possible. And at that time, I had the feeling he even didn’t want it. But we did our weeks, we did our concerts, and for some reason we stayed in touch, and over all the decades we worked and we developed, and year by year his English was getting better, and nowadays we just finished a short tour at the US West Coast. I would say we are quite good friends, which is not so easy to say with a Japanese comrade. But I... Hanna Bächer Because you wouldn’t understand each other? Peter Brötzmann No, Japanese people... It’s not so easy. It’s always a certain distance. I know some of the guys really very long, and it’s still a distance. But nowadays I would... Hanna Bächer May I disagree with that? But still, I’m curious about how... How do you actually communicate? Or did you communicate when it came to playing together? With someone like Keiji Haino, what is the communication that is happening during improvisation with him? Peter Brötzmann I mean, what is improvisation about? You have what you have, what you can do yourself. You have the partner, who’s there, who brings in his own stuff. And then you try, you try to fit, or you try to fight. But it’s a kind of personal feeling that you know it works. And if it wouldn’t have worked from the very beginning, we wouldn’t have proceeded with it. As I said, after all these years, we are really good friends, and I learned to know him as a very sweet guy with a lot of humor, and a lot of fun with him, so... But if it comes to stage, we still are at point zero, and we start again. And... Hanna Bächer I once spoke to someone else, who, coincidentally, you made a record cover for, Wadada Leo Smith, and he said to me that the most important thing in improvisation on stage, is that you know when it’s over, so that you know when you’ve reached a point where a track has to end. What would you say is the one thing that you need to know as an improviser? Peter Brötzmann I think the start of every concert is very, very important, as well as the end, too. And to find the right ending is really a thing you learn by long experience. And a bad sign, if I’m working with younger people or not so experienced people, if they think they haven’t played enough, they have to put on one more piece, one more thing, until the music really gets boring. No, it’s very important that you have the ears for, “OK, that’s it.” And for example, the guy I’m working longest with is Han Bennink, and we still see each other from time to time. Just recently we played a couple of duo things together. And I mean, that’s what we know, to make the right ending. And the same it is with Keiji. Hanna Bächer Can we just briefly look at picture number nine, please? I just wanted to show you this, because this is how Han Bennink looks like nowadays, who’s Peter’s longest collaborator. I would like to, before we open this up to questions, play a very new release of you and someone you’ve toured with a lot recently, in the last, I think, two, three years, and that’s Heather Leigh. And there’s a new record called Sparrow Nights, we’re going to listen to the title track. (music: Brötzmann / Leigh – “Sparrow Nights”)
[applause] Do you have a rough idea which number in your overall discography this would have been, this recording? Peter Brötzmann No, I... Hanna Bächer An estimate? Peter Brötzmann I don’t count. I have no idea. It must be over 200 nowadays, I think. But it’s the last one, yes. And... Hanna Bächer The newest one? Peter Brötzmann The newest one, not the last one, no. There’s more coming. And yeah, I work with Heather Leigh now for three years, and she’s playing a very funny instrument, a pedal steel guitar, which usually is an instrument used in country and bluegrass music. But she found a way to play it really very different. And you know, all my life long I was together with bass and drums, and I know all about it. And this instrument, and especially Heather playing it, that is for me quite a new challenge and she is a very strong woman, she knows what she wants, and so it’s quite a fight going on, which I, of course, like. Yeah. Hanna Bächer One of very few women that you’ve worked with. You worked with her, you worked with Carla Bley, but that’s many years ago. Peter Brötzmann Yeah, there were some women in between, but the thing ... They all disappeared after a while. It’s a hard life, and I mean nowadays you see a lot of women playing saxophones, or... Yeah, it’s coming more and more. And I like woman, I have nothing against. I like good players, and if they are good I don’t care if they’re female or male, or whatever. So let’s see how long people last. Music is a long term thing, it’s a thing of continuity, and so you have to be patient. Hanna Bächer There’s a record you did with Han Bennink called Still Quite Popular After All These Years, and with these words, I’d like to say thank you, Peter Brötzmann for coming. Peter Brötzmann [applause] Thank you. Thank you very much. Hanna Bächer And of course, you know the game by now. We’ve got a microphone in the room. And yeah, all these people can ask you questions. I think it’s always nice to say your name and where you’re from, because you all know by now, but Peter doesn’t. Audience Member Hello, my name’s Quinn, I’m from London. Hi. Here. Peter Brötzmann There he is. Audience Member Here I am. Yeah, thank you so much. I’m also a saxophonist, and it’s been really interesting to hear that. It’s a very different talk to what we’ve had this week, so it’s really nice to hear. I was just wondering, because I saw your show last night, and you were speaking just now about fitting and fighting. And I was wondering if you would be able to talk about how... If that’s something that you consciously discuss as a group beforehand. And in the case of last night, was there some sort of plan in terms of who’s going to take what role and if you’re going to fit or fight, or... Yeah, just anything about that. Peter Brötzmann I mean, yesterday... I mean, I must say, it was not the right place to present the music. And the strongest fight I had yesterday was with the f---ing sound engineer. [laughter] That was really... He wasn’t worth his money. So that’s one side. But when we go on stage, for example, as a duo with Heather or with our friend Sabu, no, we don’t discuss what we do before. We just know what we have, what we can do, what we are able to do, and we listen and we see how things develop. And, of course, you don’t invent every night something new. I’m now 77, I have my language, I have even, you can call it repertoire. I use certain things every night, maybe, the same. But I use them always in a different context. I play them different. It’s just the kind of material which is there, what improvising means. You use what you have. And you have to put that in the context to the guys you’re working with. And I know Sabu now for 40 years, for example, and I know what an excellent drummer he is, but sometimes he surprised me with something new. So I have to react, I can go with him, I can go against him. But being on stage is not a friendly business. Being on stage is a fight, even if you stay there with the best friend. But you have to fight. And maybe that’s my very personal meaning, but it’s like that. And you need tension, you need challenges, you need a new situation, you have to react. And that makes the music alive, I think. Audience Member Hi, my name is Marie. I really agree with what you said. What about if you’re alone? You’re playing alone. And yes, maybe you will have tension with the sound engineer, or the sound guy. What if you don’t? Is there a fight anyways? Peter Brötzmann Yeah, it’s a fight with yourself. Of course, I do quite a bit of solo playing, solo performances. And it’s a fight then with yourself and with the surrounding. And usually the solo concerts are taking place in smaller venues, so luckily I don’t need a sound engineer. No, it’s a fight with yourself, and it’s the challenge to keep these guys sitting there, to keep a kind of tension going on. And I mean, if you’re on stage, if you’re in a good mood, in a bad mood, if your body is fucked up, or if you don’t feel like... But you have to work. You have to do what you can. And these minutes on stage, you give everything. Nothing can be hidden, or so. You just open up yourself. And that’s it with all the bad and hopefully some good things. So that’s a challenge with playing the solo. Sometimes I wish while playing solo it would be nice to have a drummer on my side just to get a little bit support, but solo playing is a different thing and it needs a certain dramaturgy. You know, in earlier times, when I started to play solo concerts, I made a kind of concept, or I wrote down certain things I wanted to do and it never worked. I threw the paper away and I learned that very fast. You’re just there and you open up and you play your arse off. That’s all you can do. Yeah. Audience Member Hi, I’m Philip, I’m from Köln. Peter Brötzmann A little louder please. Audience Member Ah. Hi, I’m Philip, I’m from Köln, Cologne. And I was really interested in what you were talking about in regards to the sort of academia-zation of music, and especially jazz music, and I wanted to ask you if you ever had to go up against people who didn’t see what you were doing as valuable because you don’t have the classical training background and if this was an issue. Peter Brötzmann I’m doing that all my life. Still after all these years I got that, but that was always fun. [laughs] I didn’t care about... No, no. Music is something different. No, no. Just do your things. That’s all you can do. Audience Member Thank you. Audience Member Hello, I’m Laura, I’m from Istanbul. When it’s time to improvise with a person who is totally new at this, how would you direct that person? What would be your first words to that person to introduce the improvisation? Peter Brötzmann I don’t think there is a recipe for that. I mean, if you have your senses together and if you’re able to listen and to feel, then that’s enough. No, there is no recipe to say, “Do it that way, or do it that way, or this is important.” No, you have to feel it. I mean, I play a lot of places, yeah, you can say all over the world, and a lot of times people come to me and say, “Man, I’ve never heard that kind of shit before,” but I’m so touched. Or if some young girls coming to you after the concert and crying because they couldn’t take it, then I think, that’s a good sign that you can reach somebody. I think, of course, we as performers, as musicians, we need, of course, open people in the audience, the audience is half of the thing. I think you don’t need to know anything about it. You have to feel, that’s the main important thing. And if you don’t feel anything, that’s fine too. You feel something else with other things, so it’s not a big deal. Hanna Bächer I just thought of something with Marie’s question earlier. Because you talked about your body sometimes not feeling up to playing, and you have traveled a lot. Not only a lot, you have basically traveled playing for the last 55 years I guess. Specifically when it comes to sleeping and when it comes to drinking alcohol, what are your takeaways on how to maintain your sanity? Peter Brötzmann Yeah. I mean, in a way I had two lives. I was drinking from my very young years. Being together with always older musicians, and that was a time in the ’50s or so, drinking was the main drug you could have. At the end, I was drinking for three lives, I would say. But then you have to listen to the body, and then one night the body said, “No man, that’s it.” And so I stopped. That was exactly 2000. And I must say if I wouldn’t have done that, I wouldn’t sit here. I would be dead for a long time. So it’s a question of... I mean, there are a lot of other drugs nowadays around, and I must say, inside the field of musicians, it’s not used very much anymore. Most of the guys are very disciplined. Here and there a whisky or something, but inside the musicians’ world it’s not the drugs, at least in my part of musicians’ world. It’s not an issue nowadays. But I mean this way of life, touring, hotels for a couple of hours, getting up. Alcohol was always a kind of medicine to keep me going. I thought so, and it was like that. I don’t regret anything, but then when the body tells you, if you can’t move on stage the way you want to move, then you better look a little bit what’s going on with you. And so that’s why I stopped. And I must say I feel quite all right with that. It’s much easier to get a bit stoned or drunk through the world, and through security and all that daily bullshit you have to do. But on the other hand, if it comes to the work, I like to have a sober mind, in a way. Yeah, yeah. Hanna Bächer Is there anyone else wanting to ask a question here? I don’t think there is. Yeah, there is. Audience Member Hi, I’m Juan from Barcelona, and I was wondering what kind of music do you listen at home? Peter Brötzmann Yeah, that’s a nice question. A lot of Duke Ellington, a lot of old jazz, or old whatever. A lot of Ellington, Monk and old blues. I have a big library of blues recordings. And on the other end, to tell you the truth, if I come from a tour and throw the horns in the corner, I’m glad to hear nothing. Yeah. Audience Member Thank you. Hanna Bächer I guess it’s time to say thank you to all of you for listening, and to Peter Brötzmann for visiting us. Thank you. [applause] Peter Brötzmann No, I have to thank you for your interest, and I hope it wasn’t too boring. So thank you very much. [applause]