Peter Brötzmann: Free-Jazz, Revolution and The Politics of Improvisation

A conversation with Daniel Spicer, author of the first English language biography of Peter Brötzmann

In June 2023, Peter Brötzmann passed away at the age of 82.

He was one of the towering figures of global free music.

Starting out in the mid-1960s, the self-taught reedist adapted and transformed the African-American “New Thing” into something uniquely European, shaped by his experience growing up in post-war Germany.

Mentored by globe-trotting free jazz icon Don Cherry, he’d go on to influence generations of musicians across scenes, from free improv to experimental rock to noise music, connecting people wherever he’d stay.

Earlier this year, music writer Daniel Spicer published the first English-language biography, Peter Brötzmann: Free-Jazz, Revolution and The Politics of Improvisation,

I caught up with Spicer to talk about Brötzmann’s music and life, the process of writing the book and why the iconic saxophonist used to pick pointless backstage fights.

Dan, I really love the book – and though I’ve been listening to Brötzmann’s music for a long time, I still learned so much from it.

Well, so did I while I was writing. The great thing about writing a book like this is that it doesn't feel like work, which is the universe's way of telling me this is my dharma, and I should be doing more of it. This is my favorite kind of writing – you get so deeply into the subject, you can go down as many rabbit holes as you like. Also, it’s exactly the kind of book I would read. It's about free jazz, alcohol and radical leftist politics. What's not to like?

Let’s start by providing some info on your background. You’ve been a music writer for a long time and you’re also an improvising musician.

Well, I've been writing about music for about 20 years. I’m also a poet, and yes, I do play a little. I'm currently in a trio called In Threads with a drummer and a cello player. I mainly play the piano, sometimes a bit of pocket trumpet and other things. It’s good fun. I live in Brighton, on the south coast of the UK, a very artistic town. There's a lot of opportunities to read your poetry, or improvise [music], so it's an easy place to be someone that dabbles.

This is not your first book. You’ve written one about Turkish psych before. But why did you want to write one about Brötzmann?

Same as with the Turkish book actually. I’ve been writing for The Wire for about 18 years now, and in both instances, they asked me to write a long piece they call a ‘primer’, where they take a subject or a genre or an artist, and tell the story by focusing in on important recordings. I did one for Turkish psych in 2011. I didn't know anything about the subject at all, I learned about it while writing the article. Then I was approached by a publisher who asked me if I was interested to write a book on this topic, and I said, “I’d love to.”

Very soon after that, I wrote a primer about Brötzmann, and even while I was still starting to work on the Turkish book, they got in touch again and said, “Oh, when you finish that one, write us a book about Brötzmann as well.” That's also why this book took over ten years, as I had another book to write first, and even after that, it was always on the back burner. I'm glad it took that long though, because if I'd written it straight away in a hurry, it wouldn't have been the whole story.

You say you didn’t know a thing about Turkish psych, but were you into Brötzmann’s music at all?

Yeah, I had seen him perform live many times before I took on this assignment. I very much enjoy going to see live free jazz and improv. It's probably the most exciting music there is to witness live. It’s energy music – it's about raising the energy in the room and the body and the soul. You can feel it at the top of your head. And Brötzmann was one of the best at that. Each time I went to see him I was just getting blown away.

How many of his concerts were you able to see?

I’m not sure exactly – definitely in double figures. I've been going to [East London venue] Cafe Oto since it first opened, because London is not too far from Brighton, and that’s a place Brötzmann played many times. He was one of the first big international stars who’d do a residency there, where he would play for two or three nights in a row. He was really good at choosing his collaborators. He kind of did the same thing every time you saw him play – he had his sound, his approach, but the thing was, who's he playing with? That would completely change everything. It was always exciting.

How often did you did you meet him and talk to him for the book?

Not that many times, but the meetings we had were long and detailed. He was very generous with his time. I could also email him specific questions, and he would always reply very promptly. The first time I met him, he came to Brighton to play a gig, and the organizer asked one of my bands to be support act on the night. We ended up playing after him for some reason, which was a terrible thing to have to do. But I'd already been commissioned to write the book, so I introduced myself and asked him if we could go for dinner the following night. That became our first interview, and I followed it up with three long telephone conversations from his home in Wuppertal. Again, he was very patient and candid, just a pleasure to talk to. Then I had two more meetings with him. One was in Cafe Oto in 2019. He and [pedal steel guitarist] Heather Leigh sat at the table with me. We had coffee and chatted for a word in the afternoon. The last time I talked to him was in a taxi on the way to Kongsberg Jazz Festival in Norway, not long before the end. That was almost by accident, we just got thrown together in a cab.

It sounds as if he was quite appreciative of this book being written though.

He knew I was writing the book, and he knew it was taking a long time. He didn't seem to mind that. In Norway, he did a live Q&A session with some journalists. They asked him, “How do you feel about Daniel Spicer writing your biography?” I wasn’t there, but apparently he said, “He's a professional. I trust him.” It is sad that he didn't get to see the finished book. Though purely from an aesthetic point of view, it makes the book more of a satisfying whole, because I’ve got to tell his whole story with full closure, right up to the very end.

Daniel Spicer

Did his passing actually speed up the process?

Kind of. I was working on the book on and off, mostly off, for a long time – ten years. My publisher had been very patient. Then finally in 2023, they gave me a deadline. As you know, writers respond well to deadlines. It was quite tight, six months or so, and I still had more than half of the book to write. Of course, all the research was done and the skeleton of how I wanted to write it was there. So I started working on it again, and quite soon after that, he passed. Although I wasn't under any extra pressure from the publisher, I felt that I wanted to tell his story more urgently than before. It crystallized the whole project and somehow made it easier to work on.

Brötzmann was not just a central figure of German free jazz, but hugely important to the whole European improv scene. How was his music appreciated in the UK?

He was far ahead of the game and enormously inspiring to people like [British saxophonist] Evan Parker. Parker talks in the book about how Brötzmann was already doing all the things that he wanted to be doing – the music was advanced, and he was making his own records, putting them out. The Dutch improvisers felt the same. Wherever he went, he seemed to energize things. There was something about his uncompromising commitment that never failed to impress people and made them lift their game. And he was always making connections, introducing people to other people, across different scenes, being a bridge. He built the neurons of the improv brain.

“Wherever he went, he seemed to energize things. There was something about his uncompromising commitment that never failed to impress people and made them lift their game.”

(Daniel Spicer on Peter Brötzmann)

I've recently read Phil Freeman's great biography of Cecil Taylor. I see some similarities in the style, how those two books are written, mostly in terms of the focus, which is clearly on the music, not details of the artists’ lives. You do mention Brötzmann’s drinking habits though.

Exactly, because it affected the art to some degree. [Other than that,] I don't talk much about his private life. I mention his children fleetingly, just Caspar a little, because he’s a musician as well. It's a book about Brötzmann’s art and the underpinning political feelings. Another important thing to do, which I think Phil does as well, is describe the music – which a lot of biographies of musicians don't, and I always find this peculiar. Why would you write about music and not describe how it makes you feel? Now, maybe some writers don't have the words for that. I'm lucky that I've been writing about music for 20 years, so that comes naturally to me. It's a place where you can be a little poetic as well. You can try and bring the music to life.

There’s actually a third similarity, which is that both Freeman and you spend time talking about your respective subjects’ key collaborators and include critical biographical information on them.

Well, it's about context and community, isn’t it? A key aspect of improvised music was about proposing new models of cooperation, as an alternative to a capitalist society of competition. Collaboration is about people working together, so it's important to have these people in there and say a little about who they are. The secret hero of the book is Don Cherry. He was such an important character in terms of bringing people together, much like Brötzmann. And if you trace Brötzmann’s career from the mid-1960s to the 2020s, he was always keen to play with new musicians and younger talent. It starts off, he's playing with people born in the 1940s, like himself – at the end of the book, he's playing with people born in the 1990s.

Community was important to Brötzmann, but there was also a lingering animosity between him and the jazz establishment. Especially at the beginning of his career, many players, critics, bookers and managers rejected his music. He reacted by setting up his own festival and founding his own label, driven by Marxist ideals.

He was very punk, very DIY. Part of it was just that energy of free jazz, which was a reaction from African-American intellectuals against white straight society, the way that jazz had been commodified by whites. The music was intense and angry, and Brötzmann and his generation of German musicians really related to that, because of all of the hideous shit that their parents had done [in the Third Reich]. They were like, “We don't want anything to do with anything you did. We want to start all over, do something new.” The same with the rock musicians. I'm fascinated by this period in Germany. The youth that came of age in the 1960s had so much to react against. It's no surprise that the creative energy was crazy.

From initially playing a European version of free jazz in the 1960s, his music morphed to abstract free improv in the 1970s and then into some sort of extreme noise jazz-punk in the 1980s.

Brötzmann was an inspiration to the noise scene, partly because the music is so intense, obviously. Noise is about energy, and I think Brötzmann really typifies that feel, but also the DIY thing, which prefigures punk. If you think about Last Exit, his main band in the 1980s [with guitarist Sonny Sharrock, drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson and bassist Bill Laswell], it found a lot of fans in the punk and hardcore scene. You’d have actual skinheads – not the racist ones, but the hardcore punk skinheads – turning up to gigs, and Brötzmann loved it. He loved that it pissed off the jazz guys. He liked to do the thing which people wouldn't expect him to do.

He was a bit of a contrarian, wasn't he?

Not as bad as [Dutch drummer/percussionist and early Brötzmann collaborator] Han Bennink though, who’s a total contrarian. It was fun to interview him, because anything I’d suggest to him, he’d say the complete opposite. I don't know if contrarian is the right word for Brötzmann. He was somebody who wouldn't take things for granted, who would need to find things out for himself. If there was something that society or culture was telling him about the way things were, he would need to find out how he really felt about it.

Peter Brötzmann

In the book, he laughs with me about the fact that he didn't really play jazz. He couldn't play bebop. He identified free jazz as a means of expression, which suited his artistic impulse to create. I think he was an artist first and a musician second – an artist who happened to express himself through music. He was a visual artist as well, which was important to him, and became more important as he became older. He’d been a visual artist first when he was a teenager, and that was his intention, then he got distracted by music and realized that he enjoyed the immediacy and the social side of it – so he devoted his life to it.

You’ve described him as kind and candid in your encounters. There must have been a different, darker side to his personality too – some have described him as gruff and crude, even threatening.

By the time I met him, he was an old man, sober for many years, very reflective and gentle. When he was younger, he was a heavy drinker, and I think he could behave quite badly when he was drunk. Had I met him in the 1980s, I would’ve probably been very scared of him. His whole image with the buzz cut and the leather coat, that ‘man in black’ energy, was very alpha male, and he loved that, it was good fun for him, but there was also an element of pantomime about it. To give him the benefit of doubt, maybe some of his reputation for being argumentative was in the service of the art. He’d sometimes deliberately pick a fight backstage just before the show, because it would create an energy which would come through in the performance and make for interesting music.

If you had to pick a few important records for people to start familiarizing themselves with Peter Brötzmann’s oeuvre, which ones would that be?

Well, you'd have to listen to Machine Gun. That's the famous one where most of his reputation comes from. It's the spirit of ‘68, a revolutionary statement, a shout of rage and anger. When you first hear it, you think of it as terrifying, but when you go back, you can pull out the themes, and there are quieter moments as well, just like John Coltrane's Ascension – the first time you hear that, you're like “My god, what's going on there?”, and then you go back to it years later and [you notice] it’s kind of swinging.

Conceptually, the stuff he was doing with [drummer Han] Bennink and [pianist Fred] Van Hove is fascinating. In the 1970s, they were breaking all the rules and just making this completely fresh and funny music that wasn't jazz at all. Listen to that amazing record when [Brötzmann and Bennink] went into the woods [Schwarzwaldfahrt, 1977] – an incredible piece of not even music, it's conceptual site-specific art.

From a purely musical standpoint, I’d rather listen to something he did with that incredible rhythm section of [bassist William] Parker and [drummer Hamid] Drake though. They bring so much soul and swing and groove, and Brötzmann just slots in. That trio worked extremely well. There’s that amazing double album called Never Too Late But Always Too Early – a live date recorded in 2001, a phenomenal bit of pure energy, just off the chart.

And then his last ever recordings have just come out, that amazing quartet with [drummer] Steve Noble, [bassist] John Edwards and [vibraphonist] Jason Adasiewicz. These are Brötzmann’s final gigs, his last two nights that he ever performed at Cafe Oto. It's truly astonishing if we consider the fact that he played those gigs, then basically went home and died. It’s almost as if he knew that he didn't have that much more to give. Ever since COVID, he knew that it was nearly over. His health wasn’t good, his lungs weren't cooperating. But he went to those gigs and literally gave everything he had. These are astonishing documents of his complete and utter commitment to his art. He really went out playing.

Full disclosure: In my day job, I’m a commissioning editor for the online record store Everything Jazz. Daniel Spicer is a regular contributor to that site.