I'd first thought about doing a post on the Eight By Three album - all the B's: Braxton with Borah Bergman and Peter Brötzmann - back in early May, when I was first trying to lay out a sort of schedule for myself; I had just written about John Shiurba's 5x5 1.2=A, and it struck me that (5 x 5) -1 = 8 x 3, something I found pleasing enough to get me thinking about doing some sort of informal "countdown series", along with all the other lines of enquiry I am currently pursuing. It took me a few weeks then to get round to listening to the album - yet another recording which I hadn't heard in years - and when I did, my initial thoughts were that it's not very easy to write about, and that my main angle in writing about it here would inescapably be that of the considerable difficulty for B. in tessellating his sound with Brötzmann's.
I made notes, flagged it for imminent return, and shelved it while I wrote some other posts...
... and then, of course, Brötzmann died. Some of the things which I might have said now seemed completely inappropriate (or at best ill-timed). I was glad at least that I hadn't got past the planning stage with this one. The guy was an absolute monster of free music, his name synonymous with the European Free Improvisation movement, and it was clearly important in the first instance simply to mark his passing with respect. I let McC handle that one: he, after all, had seen and heard PB in concert, something I never did (though there were a couple of near misses over the years).
I never intended to shelve this permanently, however. It just might need to be approached carefully, from a slightly different angle.
I'd amassed quite a lot of Brötzmann's recordings - including most of the really significant ones - during the Golden Age of Music Blogging. It had been quite a while since I had listened to any of these. In the week after news spread of his passing, I did revisit some of them - and was reminded of things I had allowed myself to forget. PB was not just a human foghorn, a one-man weaponised woodwind; he possessed variety in his utterances, and considerable humour. I'm genuinely not sure how many of these "other traits" he retained in later life, mind you; but then again, I have heard relatively little of his later music and so I could never be the best judge. As far as I could remember, at the time of his death, he had collaborated with B. only once, on the aforementioned Eight By Three album, recorded in 1996 and released the following year*; but a mail from one of my regular correspondents reminded me of a duo performance between the horn players in Brötzmann's home city of Wuppertal, in 1985. I had to check my lists to see if I had this, but it turned out that I did**. Hence, before writing anything at all, I was able to listen to both of these recordings.
Eight By Three probably "should" be quite an exhilarating listen, but in practice I did just find it very frustrating. Bergman, an enigmatic pianist who was renowned for his ability to play equally fast and complex lines with either hand - or both hands at once - could very easily have been a natural playing partner for B., who himself has routinely demonstrated for decades his extraordinary skill at playing extremely fast and with complete control over articulation. The first few tracks on the album - it's so tempting to consider the album to have been recorded in the same order as the finished track list (even though there is no reason whatsoever to assume that will have been the case) - appear to show B. feeling his way into a musical partnership with the pianist; on the very first track, "Falconets***", B. starts out on flute but switches to alto fairly quickly, then plays so fast in his efforts to keep up with Bergman that I'm irresistibly reminded of Eric Dolphy's "G.W." (which includes an alto solo played so rapidly that B. thought it was a violin when he first heard it) - but as Brötzmann begins to sound more like his familiar self, he dominates the soundspace and B. seems lost to know how to contribute in the face of this.
This pattern is basically repeated over most of the rest of the album: in several cases, B. opens proceedings with Bergman, and the question seems to be: how will Brötzmann fit in with the two more "cultured", precise players now? But of course the answer, every time, is that PB just comes in as himself, blowing as hard as he can, and it's invariably B. who finds himself edged out as a result, either unable to compete with Brötzmann for airspace or (more likely) unwilling to attempt such a thing. We know that B. is as capable of anyone of employing all manner of timbral distortions, having long since factored these into his encyclopaedic improvising vocabulary; but he prefers to use such strategies sparingly, for greater effect, rather than just trying to strip the metal off his horn with every attack. Brötzmann, here at least, seems hell-bent on doing just that - and it must be said, this doesn't appear to bother Bergman in the slightest: he simply continues on his way regardless. (Make of this what you will: Bergman and Brötzmann played together on multiple occasions during the '90s, twice with the addition of tenorist Thomas Borgmann; B. never played with the pianist again.)
By the end of the album - again I'm succumbing to the temptation to assume that the pieces were recorded in the same order in which they are presented, because that seems to make sense - B. sounds as if he's figured out a way to mesh his sound with Brötzmann's, even if it temporarily means sounding less like himself and more like a "power player". This does come across as an attempt at bridge-building rather than a weird sort of ad hoc sonic camouflage - over the course of the final two tracks, it appears that some sympathy has been reached, although whether this actually leads to anything very constructive is another matter. The impression I got on this occasion is that "Webology" - the title given to the eight-and-a-half-minute seventh track - doesn't necessarily go anywhere especially interesting, and that only the closing "Three Rivers" (less than half the length, and preceded by a gravelly voice declaring "let's keep going, I'm enjoying this!"#) really showcases any sort of meaningful exchange of ideas. It's taken the course of the album for this to be
achieved, and B. has had to compromise quite a lot in order to get there.
***
Yet the 1985 duo concert is a real delight, and I'm very glad to have been reminded about it. There's not even a hint of competitiveness here: with just the two of them onstage, and with Brötzmann playing host to his overseas guest, the event is all about friendly collaboration. Beginning with a four-note ascending phrase which (when played in a loop) sounds appropriately like an alarm or siren of some sort, the two men find all sorts of ways over the course of twenty-one minutes, and a five-minute encore, to meet in the middle and create plenty of live magic for a very appreciative audience. There is plenty of space left between ideas, and Brötzmann even varies his dynamics, which of course makes it very easy for B. to stay with him, happy as he is to play harsh and distorted sounds - so long as he isn't expected to play like that all the time. There's lots of variety, spontaneity, humour and genuine interaction, with the two players frequently timing their attacks perfectly to match each other. Basically it's a short performance full of all the things I don't find in the studio date from eleven years later; but with only the two of them present, this one was never going to be a blast-fest.
Brötzmann was always capable of variety and even subtlety, then. And in listening to some of his great recordings from the '70s and '80s, I've been (belatedly) reminded of both his creative and expressive range, and of just how good he sounded when he was really on it. I do think that he must have been a difficult playing partner, for a saxophonist at least; no trouble at all for a bassist or drummer, or a pianist for that matter, you'd just give him plenty of fuel and let him burn. And in larger groupings, such as those assembled for Machine Gun (with Willem Breuker and Evan Parker) or Alarm (with Breuker and Frank Wright) - or the Chicago Octet/Tentet later - the emphasis was always really on making as much noise as possible, and that was never going to be a problem. But of course this is the sort of context in which B. does come across as - dare I say it - a "cerebral" player by comparison: he is always looking to create something, not just to channel pure power and anguish...
... whereas the latter seemed to be Brötzmann's self-allotted remit. But perhaps he felt that somebody had to do it - and perhaps he was right. Like many of the free music visionaries, Brötzmann believed that music must have some social purpose, not just artistic content: or to put it another way, his view of art was itself inseparable from social awareness and engagement##. Growing up in postwar (West) Germany - something he never stopped thinking about - he lived through times of terrible division and suffering, as well as some times of optimism (however misplaced that optimism may now appear to have been), and with so many people focused at all times on looking the other way, distracting themselves with meaningless trifles, it falls to a small minority to express the suffering of the world. If after a while all Brötzmann seemed to do was scream, again and again, maybe that was because so few people had shown themselves willing to express their share of the earth's pain. He never shied away from it; and his true value may never be fully understood. His legacy, however, will endure as long as free music exists.
* Mixtery, the label which released this album, is so obscure that it's now beyond my detective skills to find out much about it at all. This would appear to have been the first release on the label, and it was very nearly also the last. It does look, though, as if the name really belongs to the studio where the date was recorded, in Trumbull, Connecticut...and even then, there are not many recording credits cross-referenced against it.
** B. played two concerts on that occasion, being 4th May 1985 at the Festival Grenzüberschreitungen in Wuppertal: there is a collage set by the quartet - this being the quartet with Lindberg, who was not fired until the following month - and then the short duo concert as described. (I have no idea which came first, not that it particularly matters.)
*** The eight tracks are all given colourful titles, as if they are compositions, but in fact they are all group improvisations and they are all credited to "collective".
# The presence of this brief comment at the beginning of the last track does lend some credence to the idea that the whole thing may have been set down on record exactly as it was performed, in that order. But unless B. happens to remember, and somebody manages to ask him in time, we will probably never know...
## The italics here indicate that the word used comes from French, not from English. (The concept in French of being engagé(e)(s) requires an awkward gloss in English.)
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