"When those albums came to Germany I was already in the midst of an entirely natural process of finding my own voice.
#MACHINE GUN BY PETER BROTZMANN FREE#
"I started out as a 'normal' instrumentalist," he laughs, "and I think I was pretty bad at it." Does his transition to free music derive from exposure to the pioneers of American free jazz? "Not so much," he says, a surprising answer for someone labeled the successor to free jazz saxophonist Albert Ayler. This is my German problem, and in a strange way, as I get older, I feel that it is seeping into my music more and more." In his youth Brotzmann played in swing and Dixieland bands. I have never felt guilty about what happened but until the end of my life I will be ashamed. Therefore, like my whole generation, I obsessively sought a bit of truth. "I grew up after the war and I had a lot of questions for my father, but I never got answers. This is why his saxophone shouted and wailed so loudly. When Brotzmann first burst onto the stage at the end of the 1960s, the translation of his feelings into music was more direct. This is a much more subtle, complex and indirect process at the end of which the way I think, experience and feel gets channeled into music."
This doesn't mean that if I am angry at a certain American politician, or if I'm worried about what is happening in the Middle East, my feelings will be expressed directly in how I improvise. "Music is always the reflection of a worldview, of a way of life, of thoughts about politics, about society, about community. "I don't believe in art that is based on purely aesthetic motives," he says now. Twenty years ago, when Brotzmann was asked why he plays so loudly, he replied: "How can I play quietly when people are dying of hunger in Ethiopia?"
This is not just an aesthetic preference. I love the moment when the music makes me lose myself." I especially love when the music overwhelms me, exhausts me. This dimension has to be present in my music. Ever since then I get great enjoyment from the physical effect of music, from its effect on the body. He immediately recalls the first performance he saw as a child, at the start of the 1950s, a concert by jazz pioneer Sidney Bechet, who played "as loud as he could, and this made a huge impression on me. Why does he play so loud? "The best answer I can give is that I just like to, I need to," says Brotzmann, 67, in a telephone interview from Germany. There are hardly any images jazz fans and journalists have not used to describe the astoundingly powerful music of Peter Brotzmann, who will be performing in Israel tomorrow and Wednesday. A herd of elephants fleeing from a fire, only three times as noisy.