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Peter Brotzmann Tentet

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Kalamazoo, MI
June 16, 2002

Not being a musician I can only surmise what musical challenges composing for and performing with a mid-sized jazz ensemble pose.
Everyone knows how Miles Davis dealt with some of those musical issues in the nonet as he, Gil Evans, John Lewis, Gerry Mulligan and the crew began tying together the Claude Thornhill band’s static harmonies and mysterious sonorities with the quick moving flow of Bird’s combo using highly prized improvisors familiar with the musical vocabulary and vision of the leader.
Not much has really changed today in terms of modus operandi, it’s just the sounds went through the 60’s social blender, starting a trajectory of improvisational language that is still developing in the Peter Brötzmann Chicago Tentet.
I don’t mean to jump directly from Miles Davis to the German saxophonist President Clinton told Oxford University he admired, Peter Brötzmann, without saying anything’s gone on between them: Sun Ra in various groups he led, or Cecil Taylor’s Unit Structures Ensembles, Ornette Coleman’s Prime Time, David Murray’s Octet, Henry Threadgill’s various ensembles, and Roscoe Mitchell’s nine piece Note Factory.

For their own reasons these artists chose instrumentation somewhere between a combo and big band, and faced down how to arrange the voices and colors and rhythms into a individual style while finding their own answers to the necessary writing such a group of improvisational leaders needs to cohere. But, as stated, I surmise. I don’t play.

In any case add to your list of ensembles in this configuration the Peter Brötzmann Chicago Tentet. They are full-throated musical terriers or little lost motes of sound floating apart in the cosmic dust One moment they sound as if all the people of Berlin and Chicago are talking simultaneously right at you, and the the next are burning jazz musicians focused on sustaining velocity through time.

This concert underscored how much jazz is a performance art and that sound recordings only tell part of the story: watching them interact, how the front line and rhythm section cue in and out of musical events, how people read in groups, how saxophones play drums parts and pocket trumpet and trombone can walk a bass line makes for another level of understanding.

Which is not intended to undermine Bruno Johnson’s two new releases by this amazing ensemble on his Okka Disk Records (www.okkadisk.com) “Short Visit To Nowhere” and “Broken English.”

For the record: Peter Brötzmann — tenor sax, tarogato, clarinet / Joe McPhee — trumpet, valve trombone / Jeb Bishop — trombone / Ken Vandermark — tenor sax, baritone sax, clarinet, bass clarinet / Mats Gustafsson — alto sax, tenor sax, baritone sax, fluteophone / Mars Williams — sopranino, soprano, alto, and tenor saxophones / Fred Lonberg-Holm — cello, as well as a type of hurdy gurdy instrument / Kent Kessler — bass / Michael Zerang — drums, conga / Hamid Drake drums, frame drum, hand drums.

Yes, hearing The Peter Brötzmann Chicago Tentet with about 150 folks at the Kraftbrau Brewery in Kalamazoo on Thursday May 13, 2002 was a special musical event, their last concert in a three-week tour. The next day they’d pull their funky purple retro bus out of the Kraftbrau’s gravel lot and return to Chicago for a weekend of concerts, two days of recording and then a week in Europe.

Kalamazoo was an entirely acoustic concert, 10 musicians on a 14'X 14' stage giving it the appearance of the display window in a used Selmer store. The group delivered five unrecorded compositions alive after three weeks on the road, music that’s becoming highly attuned, shaped and impassioned.

Moreover, after three weeks of concert and recital halls, excepting an appearance at “Tonic,” the ensemble seemed ready to pull back a few pints and relax into a last club date, a return to their spiritual roots, the tavern.

The casual atmosphere and suitable acoustics of the Kraftbrau excited them, it had what they needed. And the audience egged them on – it was a good crowd for listening. The talkers and smokers were outside on the patio, barely audible.

In other words, the band let it out, exploring confidently an incredible breadth of ensemble dynamics, textures, rhythmic compositional elements that encouraged creative and weird riffs, music built on individual improvising solo voices that begin with and embrace the on-going development in improvised music that is labeled the avant-garde. Yet post 1965 John Coltrane, the European scene since the 1960’s, and Chicago’s continuing commentary on the whole trip is only a part of what they’re doing now.

Perhaps most impressive was the Tentet’s ensemble directive. In a band of leaders to have everyone working towards the same ensemble vision was deliriously musical. It gave the performance a range of sounds approaching Sun Ra.

It’s hard to believe they played, in this order, Atlanta, Louisville, and now Kalamazoo in just three days because they produce such a supercharged music, overwhelming energy, egos focused on a total ensemble sound, and wild back grounds for each highly individualized improvisation, backgrounds full of empathetic vocabularies raising the bar for diversity in music.

Brötzmann in rehearsal advised the band, “We have to make our cuts more precise.” Their musical transitions came with speed and breadth: shifting in textures from whispering mists through mouthpieces to the full Brötzmann.

After rehearsal as the band lounged under patio umbrellas sitting on what was once an elevated railroad siding attached to the old building, eating, smoking cigars, comparing food and beer from across the world, signing autographs, talking about jazz, Ken Vandermark suggested to the band they compress the length of a certain composition. Someone asked now that that they’d figured out the form, and rehearsed the ensemble concept to satisfaction, who was it going to feature?

A while later, seemingly out of the blue, Brötzmann decided and Joe McPhee’s pocket trumpet feature on that number included a circular breathing solo that spit and whispered molecule sized notes, quieting the crowd to silence, completely. I believe that solo occurred during the Mars Williams composition “Ultra Man Vs. Alien Neutron” which was otherwise highlighted by a round robin section of raging saxophone solos and quirky, irregular unison saxophone section sounds. I believe that ended with a Hendrix-like break for the cello. Of course there’s a caveat here: I wasn’t on the job, it was a night off and the Hefe Weizen with lemon washed away the dust of everyday life all night long. McPhee’s bit may have fit into the second number. So take this with a grain of whatever you need.

Lonberg-Holm scratched away with his bow at a zillion stringed lap instrument, improvising an introduction to the second piece, Mats Gustafsson’s “Bird Notes.” He just began when a freight train lumbered up to within a few feet of the building and blasted its triple air horn. Blasting the air horn again as it crawled through the street intersection outside, the sound of the slow train was deafening in the room. The squeaking of the train wheels matched frequencies with Lonberg-Holm’s uninterrupted weirdness and people laughed.

The first set ended with Peter Brötzmann’s “Signs,” conducted by Jeb Bishop who made hand signs for certain unison sounds the composition called for, then indicated when to begin by raising his trombone, cutting them off with a loop of his slide, all the while playing along. This went on during a blistering sopranino solo from Mars Williams. Most of that was all in time, just burning – Elvin Jones tempo.

At first I thought Williams played a soprano solo, he corrected me. “Ah, e-flat,” I said. He laughed, said, “I wish I could do this everynight” and recalled a point on tour where they featured Mats and Ken on baritone saxophones, Peter on alto and Mars on sopranino: all e-flat.

The second set began with a lengthy group improv, chattering, murmuring, breathy mouth piece sounds as the drummers waived brushes in the air, sudden outbursts of muted brass slowly developing into a kind of driving modern concerto for Ken Vandermark on clarinet. Peter Brötzmann’s “Images.” The place went crazy.

The concert ended with Ken Vandermark’s “All Things Being Equal” which included a section for Mats Gustafsson’s baritone saxophone-as-drum concept — all that reed popping, slap tonguing, and those unpredictable glisses — a point in the music where the saxophone and two drummer’s interacted at length, coming out of it in a racing tempo. Jeb Bishop’s riveting trombone solo and finally Brötzmann’s hard charging, Post-Albert Ayler tenor saxophone solo brought a sustained roar from the crowd. Hearing 150 people yell at the top of their lungs in a small space qualifies as a roar.

Brötzmann introduced the band, said, “Kalamazoo. I like the sound of that. I should write a piece with that name.” Everyone cheered. Unlike waitresses at the Village Vanguard in the 1960’s, who quit rather than work while the John Coltrane Quartet played, the waitresses at the Kraftbrau copped autographs from Brötzmann, telling him that in all of the shows they’d heard there this was the best. He smiled.

Hours before, warming up, Brötzmann’s air column through the tenor is voluminous, full and loud as hell. His sound reflects off the 25-foot high wood ceilings of this yellow brick most likely former agricultural building and buzzes my ears into ringing.

After the concert, when I mentioned his sound, Brötzmann says, “Well I told you about Coleman Hawkins.” Earlier, talking casually on the deck, he admitted the American influence in his music began early, that as a boy he’d sneak downstairs at night to eavesdrop on his father enjoying the Voice of America radio broadcasts. Even before playing as a young man in Europe with visiting Americans Anthony Braxton, Roscoe Mitchell and Albert Ayler he had come upon his own special, individual aspect. But I didn’t recall the Coleman Hawkins allusion.

“I saw him, when I was much younger, in Germany with Bud Powell,” said Brötzmann.

“In Essen? 1960?”

“Yes, that was one of the last times for Oscar Pettiford, too. They had to wheel Bud Powell out on stage in a chair. But hearing Coleman Hawkins that night changed my life.”

Listen to him, that huge sound, and it makes complete sense. He said back in the sixties they would call it, Free Jazz, and then said the music was never free, and was never so modern as to loose touch with jazz roots. During the tour while on the bus Brötzmann and Mars Williams agreed that Louis Armstrong’s “Hot Five” recordings contain the germ of many ideas used in this Chicago Tentet. Talking to this amazing musician I felt I was hearing the grail of jazz: a unified theory. It’s not all splintered styles. At it’s best jazz comes from the same creative impulses and is carried down through generations, despite what the monopoly builders would have us believe.

Again, in the end this needs to be a casual review because I enjoyed the hell out of the Kraftbrau’s Hefe Weizen with lemon and didn’t write anything down. There may be errors, and certainly not enough about each musician or various solos played that night. Thanks to Ken Vandermark for leaving the composition titles on the answering machine. Congratulations to concert producer Matt Dorbin of Black Jack Productions for hosting an intoxicating night of music.

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