Peter Brötzmann passed 😢

 

A true lion, a music terrorist passed…

Peter Brötzmann, could and knew how to inspire fear. Or be decidedly abrupt and determined in his human relationships.

In any case, when you were with him you had the sensation of being in the presence of a great little legend of free jazz and improvised music. 

A veteran and a precious first-hand witness. One of those who had created the autonomous way to a radical European jazz, from nothing, gradually freeing themselves from the Afro-American main road, taking the sound message and the scream of Ayler, Shepp, Trane, Dolphy, Taylor to extremes.

Or else Peter could also be, on the contrary, an amiable drinking and conversation companion, always very sincere and clear-cut in his opinions and generous in his storytelling. One of the last times we met him, having a bite to eat in the middle of the night after one of his solo concerts, he wanted to give us the story of when, in the sad and poor provincial Germany of the devastated post-war period, he fell in love with that new music that came from America and that emanated a pleasant and irresistible aroma of FREEDOM. 

The first concerts as a spectator, intercepting the great soloists passing through German clubs, from Dexter to Don Byas, from Ben Webster to Sidney Bechet, sometimes heard from outside the club because he didn't have the money for the ticket. Then the slap of free jazz, which comes to change the cards on the table and is the turning point and the viaticum to find a new independent road for European jazz, ahead of the times and making school with albums like Machine Gun, For Adolphe Sax or Nipples , which Brotzmann recorded at the end of the sixties.

When he came to tell how, as a young art student, poor and penniless, he had come to sell his bicycle and have to walk in order to be able to buy his first saxophone, I must tell the truth: I was moved.

(Thanks to Enrico Romero)

… his music was so unique and no-compromising 🥇