Although the media label of “the loudest, heaviest free-jazz player of them all” pursued the saxophonist Peter Brötzmann, who has died aged 82, for much of his career, his music and his thinking about his art amounted to a great deal more than pyrotechnics.
For an artist who spent the best part of six decades spurning what music-lovers of many genres might consider a catchy hook, Brötzmann drew a remarkably devoted international audience into his personal soundworld.
From the mid-1960s onwards, Brötzmann’s sound had a seismic influence on the evolution and international spread of European free-improvised jazz (typically the art of performance with no written scores, songlist, or any notion of who might play what first) and its crossovers into avant-rock, electronics and global folk. His skills as a visual artist and printmaker flourished simultaneously, and many of his album covers featured his own artwork.
I recall my awestruck first impressions of the saxophonist onstage at the 100 Club in London in 1980 – a barrel-chested, walrus-moustachioed firebrand then fronting the South African bass and drums partnership of Harry Miller and Louis Moholo-Moholo, and igniting a hair-raisingly exhilarating sound-flow I described in the Guardian at the time as like “being caught in violent weather”.
But Brötzmann’s violent energies were tempered by subtler sensibilities and emotional depth. In the 80s, he would blend reflective empathy and firepower in Derek Bailey’s Company improv events, or pump up the rock-volume ferocity alongside the guitarist Sonny Sharrock and the bassist/producer Bill Laswell in the punk-jazz quartet Last Exit.
Brötzmann played in Berlin with the piano revolutionary Cecil Taylor in 1986, and in the 1990s his Die Like a Dog tribute album to the short life of the free-sax pioneer Albert Ayler featured him with the trumpeter Toshinori Kondo and the rhythm partnership of the bassist William Parker and the drummer Hamid Drake. Even the former US president Bill Clinton became one of Brötzmann’s fans. In a 2001 interview, in which he was asked which musician people might be most surprised to find he liked, Clinton replied: “Brötzmann, the tenor sax player. One of the greatest alive.”
Even after a diagnosis of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in the early 2000s, a wind-player’s nightmare, Brötzmann pushed on with demanding musical experimentation and tireless travel, playing festival and studio gigs with old friends and more recent admirers from across the German, Dutch, British, Japanese and US improv scenes.
Brötzmann was born in Remscheid, a small city in the north Rhineland. His family’s musical tastes were classical, but as a teenager he cultivated a surreptitious hobby of listening to as much jazz as he could on the American Armed Forces Radio network late at night. However, visual art was Brötzmann’s primary focus then, and on leaving school he moved to Wuppertal to study art. By the early 60s, he was teaching himself clarinet and saxophone and frequenting the local jazz scene. He became an assistant in Wuppertal to the pioneering video artist Naim June Paik, and a keen recruit to the ideas of the Fluxus movement.
By 1965, he had formed a free-jazz group with the bassist Peter Kowald and the drummer Sven-Åke Johansson. He toured Europe the following year with the avant-garde composers Carla Bley and Mike Mantler, and become a founder member of the pianist Alex von Schlippenbach’s Globe Unity Orchestra.
In 1967 he self-produced his debut album, For Adolphe Sax, with Kowald and Johansson, and in 1968 he recorded the no-holds-barred album Machine Gun, a landmark in European free-music (the title borrowing the trumpeter Don Cherry’s nickname for Brötzmann), with a European octet including three twentysomething saxophone revolutionaries - himself, Willem Breuker and Evan Parker. When I asked Parker what his recollections of that landmark session had been, he simply said: ‘I was clinging on, just trying to make sense of playing at that level. What mouthpiece it needed, what reed, what my lungs could do. Brötzmann was someone who rode the waves of nature all his life, and defied the laws of it too.”
Likeminded young musicians in Germany, the Netherlands and the UK began to bond on common contrarian agendas, and form nation-bridging bands. In the late 60s, Brötzmann became a co-founder of the indie label FMP (Free Music Productions), and, alongside the pianist Fred van Hove and the drummer Han Bennink, he also helped form a trio influential in both idiomatic range and theatrical appeal – which Cherry, the trombonist Albert Mangelsdorff and the pianist Misha Mengelberg periodically joined.
Brötzmann performed with Taylor in 1986 and 1988, with Last Exit from 1986 to 1994, and recorded with the drummer Ginger Baker in 1987. A virtuoso on reed instruments from the clarinet to the entire saxophone range and the oboe-like Hungarian tarogato, Brötzmann developed unaccompanied solo shows, and duos with his son Caspar, a guitarist, and with the Japanese singer-songwriter Keiji Haino.
His big-format Chicago Octet/Tentet, launched in the US in 1997, was reconvened in Oslo in 2009, and in the same year he recorded again with Kondo, and with the Norwegian drummer Paal Nilssen-Love.
In 2012, Bernard Josse’s movie documentary Peter Brötzmann: Soldier of the Road was released. The ensuing decade included a fine album with the veteran Japanese pianist Masahiko Satoh (Yatagarasu), and the 2014 release of a live 1987 duo performance by Brötzmann and Sharrock - entitled Whatthefuckdoyouwant, after the normally amiable Sharrock’s enquiry to an irritating manager. A contrastingly lyrical and even nostalgic late-life solo album was the standards-based I Surrender Dear, made in 2019. Brötzmann’s last recording was a vivacious unrehearsed performance caught live at the Berlin jazz festival in 2022.
His final interview was published in the German newspaper Die Zeit the day after his death and included a revealing recollection of his accidental preparedness for encountering the pathfinding jazz of John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Charles Mingus in the 1960s. “My advantage was probably that I came from painting, the fine arts,” he said. “There were no materials there that were not allowed to be used. I came into contact with the people from the Fluxus movement, something like that shapes you, you get a feeling for experimenting. I worked a lot with the American Naim June Paik, who was both a visual artist and a composer. He always said, ‘Hey Brötzmann, just do it!’”
Brötzmann’s wife, Krista Bolland, predeceased him. He is survived by their son, Caspar, and daughter, Wendela.
• Peter Brötzmann, jazz saxophonist, born 6 March 1941; died 22 June 2023
