PETER BROTZMANN TRIO
At times I too have been seduced by this unabashedly romantic fantasy. But if you think about it, it’s a bit problematic. To say that jazz emanates from some place outside civilized, “sophisticated” musical conventions and therefore to associate it with primal expression and emotions (rather than intellect) implicitly denigrates the music whether that’s what the utterer intends or not. In fact these comments are characteristic of both early racist dismissals of jazz and their “opposite,” exoticist embraces. David Meltzer describes this way of thinking in his brilliantly disquieting collection of essays and snippets of essays Reading Jazz: “Jazz as a route of sensational tourism, going ‘native,’ allowing the inner savage to escape into a world of dark strangers exuding carefree primitivism, a space to let one’s ‘hair down,’ be uncivilized, revel in nightclub wonderlands of prelapsarian and essential being.”
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Whatever, the audience was treated to music in the throes of birth, musicians challenging themselves to play way beyond what they already know. Brotzmann especially seemed off on his own, at times swimming upstream, against the music’s basic flow. He cut off the other players midstatement and made brash, aggressive interjections that changed a developing organic swell into trio blurts with silence in between. Elsewhere he stretched delicate, long tarogato tones over a scalding rhythm section. Tempting as it might be to see this as primal, prehistoric music, Brotzmann’s ragged Sunday-evening provocations were music as contemporary as can be. That’s how free jazz grows, how it stays out of the jazz museum–by keeping abreast of its own current events, avoiding the stale and lifeless. This doesn’t always work, but when it does, free jazz becomes much more than the inarticulate speech of the soul–it’s a sophisticated, intelligent music that hits as hard at the head as at the heart.
