BACH BEETHOVEN BROTZMANN

by Anthony Medici in Concert Reviews, Opinion Posts, Reviews

It was the second day of a business trip to Phoenix, in the never-more-aptly named “Valley of the Sun,” where the temperature hovered around 100* and the sun and heat felt like a hair dryer blowing in your face.  I had used my post-business “happy hour” scouting some local record stores (a story for another post).  Heat-struck and foot-worn, I was consoling myself with a pizza and beer, when my cell phone signaled a text message.  It was a ten second clip of German free jazz avatar Peter Brotzmann  performing that night at D.C club Velvet Lounge, sent by a friend to offer a small degree of consolation for having missed the performance.  Opening that little video clip in the desert night was like a visitation from another world, as if an old Norse god, perhaps Wotan himself,  decided to offer a glimpse of an unseen world for just a fleeting moment; unlike the place I inhabited at the moment, this one was dark, mysterious, loud, seemingly violent and stormy , yet compelling.  It lifted my spirit and increased my expectation for Brotzmann’s next performance at Wind Up Space in Baltimore, this past Saturday. 

Wind Up Space consists of a long bar on the right as you enter, a stage at the back left of the room, and plenty of tables and seating in the large floor area fronting the stage.  Contemporary art lines the walls.  It’s a cool, clean space for performance.  We got there early.  Brotzmann was tuning up each of the instruments he was play that night:  tenor, alto, and soprano saxes, and clarinet.  Brotzmann does not merely play these instruments; he plays through them to achieve music and sound effects that one would typically think were beyond the range of these instruments.    A warm-up was never so engrossing.

The first performance of the evening was by the duo of John Dierker on clarinet and the fantastic-looking bass clarinet, and Will Redman on drums.   Dierker really started cooking when he moved to the bass clarinet.  Redman has a precise, sharp technique that still has something of the conservatory to it.  The compositions and improvisation reflected a Braxton influence.    

Next was Brotzmann.  Dressed in clothing materials not encountered outside the Iron Curtain– tough canvas and corduroy– suitable for the Gdansk shipyards or a logging foray into the Black Forest–Brotzmann worked through his collection of reeds, from clarinet to tenor to alto to soprano.  He played with vigor and imagination, strength and craft.   On occasion, he referenced Albert Ayler, and reminded us what a potent influence Ayler has been for post-war German jazz.   As he probed ever deeper into the music, amassing tremendous physical and spiritual force, he was Wotan:   mind and body, war and battle and death, but also creation, poetry and vision.  If Bach refracted the currents of the Reformation, and Beethoven the forces of classicism and Romanticism, so too has Brotzmann refracted the tortured German legacy of world war and Holocaust.  Make no mistake:  Brotzmann is in the deepest tradition of German music, a successor to Bach, Beethoven, Wagner and Strauss.  He encompasses Bach’s fascination with structure, even while deconstructing structures.  He carries Beethoven’s force and power, Strauss’ modernism, and Wagner’s  sense of theater .  Brotzmann is “in the tradition” even as he challenges and extends that tradition into the post-modern era. 

Following Brotzmann, the Dierker-Redman duo reformulated into a quartet under the name of Mikrokingdom, with Dave Ballou on trumpet and Mark Miller in electric guitar.  Clearly inspired by Brotzmann, the group ripped through a couple of strong numbers, with Dierker blowing on clarinet and saxophone.  Brotzmann then joined the group. Everyone went for broke, and everyone seemed to be having one heck of a time, including Brotzmann.   Even Miller, whom I have faulted before for a tendency to disappear into the background when the group gets cooking, held his own in this musical crucible.   Indeed, the set ended with Miller and Brotzmann engaging in a glorious, loud, fast  duet, Brotz on sax, Miller wailing and pumping the effects pedal on his electric guitar, both finding room beyond when it looked like there was nowhere else to go.  It was likely the highlight of the evening.  With crowd and band pumped, an encore was in order.   The set ended after midnight.  The weather was cool, windy and cloudy, far different than the heat of Phoenix.  But the glimpse of musical Nirvana vouchsafed me in that desert night was made good on this night in Baltimore.