PETER BROTZMANN - NO ARTIFICIAL INGREDIENTS
Published: The Age, A2, May 1, 2010.
In his playing as in his art, saxophonist and visual artist Peter Brotzmann is cutting through the claptrap, writes Dan Rule.
Peter Brötzmann has an uncomplicated, perhaps even uncompromising, way with words. He speaks unhurriedly, directly, openly. He frames the making of music and art as a means “survival”; he recounts his time employment as a graphic designer for German advertising firms in the 60s as “working for the enemy”; he emits a deep, slow, rumbling laugh.
“I was never a friend of anything nice and clean,” he says. “Not in music and not in my artwork.”
“Through all our life we have enough of this nice and clean bullshit surrounding us,” he continues, tonight chatting on the phone from the offices of Chicago gallery Corbett vs. Dempsey, which shows his paintings and sculptural objects in the US. “I always felt that I had to break away from that and do something different, something real.”
In a career that has spanned the best part of half a century and appearances on upwards of 100 records, the legendary saxophonist, composer, visual artist and graphic designer has generated an almost endless catalogue of work that does just that. Widely regarded as one of the key, innovatory protagonists of European free jazz and improvised music, 69-year-old’s raw, violently powerful timbre and deft melodic sensitivity have resulted in some of the idiom’s defining moments.
For Brötzmann, music has been a both life’s work and a life’s reflection. “Music isn’t just the expression of playing something nice,” he says. “It goes far beyond that, like a kind of social example you can prove. That is, in a way, the rules of jazz music. It doesn’t come from aesthetic feelings or theory; it comes out of the society.”
The brutal, tumultuous sonic attack that is Machine Gun – his 1968 recording with the Peter Brötzmann Octet – is still celebrated as a signpost release of European jazz. His list of collaborators, meanwhile, is one of the most diverse in music, having played alongside artists of the ilk of drummer Han Bennink, pianist Fred van Hove, trumpeter Don Cherry, iconic Japanese free noise guitarist Keiji Haino, and with Bill Laswell, Sony Sharrock and Ronald Shannon Jackson in noise/metal/free jazz ensemble Last Exit among countless others.
But there’s more to Brötzmann’s artistic influence than music alone. His album and poster art for the iconic German independent label FMP (Free Music Production) – much of which will be on show as part of a retrospective exhibition of Brötzmann’s graphic work opening Wednesday night at The Narrows, in addition to a suite of performances and discussions as part of the Melbourne International Jazz Festival – fashioned a striking, typically gritty visual identity that came to characterise the movement.
Brötzmann, however, takes a pragmatic view of the design material’s relationship to his musical practice. “When we started all that we didn’t think so much about the work coalescing or connecting in some way,” he says.
“I’ve always tried to draw a line between my music and my painting and graphic work. But of course, for our FMP organization it was useful to have a guy like me who could do all these things and, of course, I was able to develop a certain style with the lettering and composing things and putting them together. So I guess I would say that it has my kind of handwriting on it; it’s definitely got my kind of stamp.”
Tellingly, Brötzmann’s early musical outings were largely informed by visual art. Born in the small city of Remscheid (near Düsseldorf) in the shadow of the Second World War, he went onto study painting and advertising art at the Werkkunstschule in nearby Wuppertal.
Though he had taught himself saxophone as a schoolboy and played in a handful of amateur ensembles as a hobbyist, art was his initial focus.
“My goal at the time was definitely to be a painter,” he says. “On the other hand, music was always on the side and I was playing in some amateur and some semi-professional bands, which was quite helpful.”
“I liked to be onstage and I liked the audience and all of that was quite fascinating for me.”
By the time he’d come to exhibit his own visual work, something about the art scene struck a raw nerve. “As much as I liked to see my work on some good walls, I didn’t like the people so much,” he laughs. “The art business just disturbed me a lot and I much rathered the people I saw in my music audience.”
Brötzmann’s exposure to the 1960s Fluxus movement, whilst working as an assistant to famed Korean artist Nam June Paik, had a decisive effect on his approach to music. Where the Fluxus artists incorporated artefacts, found objects, junk and expanded notions of material to their work, Brötzmann realised he too could augment his sound with such sonic “junk” as noise and dissonance.
“Looking back, it was a very important time for me, working with Paik,” he recalls. “This was a time where, one night, you could see John Coltrane or Miles Davis, then the next night you could go see John Cage or Stockhausen… There were the first ESP records with music of Albert Ayler and Byard Lancaster and all these guys came over and toured on the back of that.”
“I met some of the Fluxus guys and performed with them a couple of times. I was setting up Paik’s exhibitions in Amsterdam and meeting all these different people and it was a very informative time. You really got information from all sides and those guys really helped me open my mind to that.”
It’s this freedom of influence – this holistic approach to music – that has come to define the veteran artist’s body of work.
“A lot of the younger people I see coming out of the conservatories or the music schools, they see music as a kind of aesthetic game or as a way of making money,” he says. “Both might have a little place in the whole thing, but if that is the main reason then it’s not enough. Not in my eyes or ears.”
Indeed, for Brötzmann, music and art transcend the vestiges of form and aesthetic. They are irrevocably entwined in the stuff of life itself.
“People are always asking ‘Why are you still doing it?’ and ‘Why do you still play with such a force?’” he says. “The only very simple explanation is that in a world where we are surrounded in all this artificial shit, I need something else.”
“So I play my stuff,” he pauses. “The horn sounds and the music flows and, for me, it’s kind of a recipe for survival.”
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Peter Brötzmann: Graphic Work (1968–2010) shows at The Narrows from May 5–29; thenarrows.org
Brötzman will play solo at BMW Edge, Federation Sqaure on Tuesday, May 4 and as part of the Overground concert at the Melbourne Town Hall tomorrow.
He will give a masterclass with Han Bennink at BMW edge on Tuesday, May 4 and take part in Conversations on the Underground at the Wheeler Centre on Monday, May 3.
Visit melbournejazz.com for all event and ticketing details.
