This two-CD set chronicles Brötzmann’s solo and Trio Roma concerts at 2011’s FIMAV on the approach of his seventieth birthday, a momentous occasion for an artist whose work combines titanic stamina and anarchic expressionism.
The solo concert might stage existence, a musical performance as naked as a late Beckett play, Brötzmann roaring, braying, wailing, and shouting through his saxophones and tárogató (a Hungarian woodwind), all of his work a hymn to the pain, promise, and deception of life itself. After an hour of extended improvisations, he turns to some of the songs that define the African-American lyric tradition, first roaring through the ancient I Surrender, Dear, a favourite of Coleman Hawkins, the virtual father of the tenor saxophone in jazz, and then Ornette Coleman’s Lonely Woman, the archetypal free-jazz dirge.
The Trio Roma adds two younger musicians to fuel Brötzmann’s fire. Norwegian drummer Paal Nilssen-Love brings great energy and a restless creativity to this music, whether setting patterns against the rest of the band or thrashing out a complex web of polyrhythms. Italian bassist Massimo Popillo melds cool electronics and furious plucking; creating a wall of sound that is at once pipe organ, gong, and factory. The three play a single piece for nearly seventy minutes: brief pauses arise; there are short drum and bass solos; then the group reassembles around a new motif. Traditional notions of structure may not apply, but there’s an essential form in place, a ritual of sacrifice and benediction, a kind of miracle of testifying that takes on a transformative power.
Stuart Broomer has written extensively on music, mostly improvised, for both general and specialist publications, and his liner essays have appeared on CDs by musicians from some 20 countries. The author of Time and Anthony Braxton (Mercury, 2009), he is currently writing a fantasia on the life of Memphis disc jockey Dewey Phillips. He has been intermittently active as an improvising musician since 1965; his composition Found Theme for the Age of Reason appeared in Musicworks 112. He lives in Toronto.