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He is not well known outside his chosen music circle. Peter Brötzmann will never generate the attention he deserves even as more and more people tune into his achievements and appreciate his prodigious talent. Everyone knows that talent is not a prerequisite for getting attention. Suddenly all their impacts become profound, all eccentricities become astonishing talents. It is always easy to exaggerate the importance of a subject in an essay devoted to them. Or maybe just a convict’s running commentary, a film score to freedom. More like a call to arms or a battle cry. There is no continuous memory of what Die Like A Dog played that Sunday morning in a Frankfurt Museum.
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Yet like the escaped convict, he erases his tracks just as quickly as his feet hit the ground. And like the sensible dogs we are, we follow wherever it is he asks us to go. Peter Brötzmann, creator and character, also plots it for us from beginning to end. In every instance, a unique character leads plot around on a leash like an obedient dog. In every novel Dostoevsky wrote, he generated a plot that was never something that merely happened to a character. Peter Brötzmann is reminiscent of an escaped convict figure out of a Russian novel by Dostoevsky. With us, it can only be performed.’ He was hearing Brötzmann, Saxophonberserker. As George Gruntz, bandleader and entrepreneur, once said to his detractors: ‘With you music is made.
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His world of free improvisation is no place for running imaginary errands for the dead.
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Listening to him is like being caught in a tropical storm with all the doors and windows in every room in the house left open to the devious temper of the elements. Peter Brötzmann is a great modernist who attacks every reed instrument he can lay his hands on with an unflagging and inexhaustible commitment. Always ready to move on, to shoot an arrow at the horizon. It is the great privilege of the unsponsored to be free to push on towards the frontier unhindered, stretching the boundaries, energised by dislocation, travelling wherever work, inspiration and the cooperative challenge takes them. The musicians in Die Like A Dog are an unanchored tribe representing the great unsponsored. How many chemical reactions is Peter Brötzmann responsible for? On fire, he reinvigorates the idea of consumption by throwing it back at us as something resembling hope. He doesn’t waste much of it on talk, just sucks it in and blows it out at double the density. The fireworks on stage were incendiary, any perceptible shortage of oxygen not affecting the proceedings. Even the sky appeared to retreat, somehow further away with every blast of the horn. He didn’t commemorate the airlift as much as replay the bombing of Berlin. Wearing his own version of a beaten black and blue leather vest, Peter Brötzmann that morning recreated the sounds of a different liberation. Photos of big B-52 bombers line the foyer. Die Like A Dog is playing in the courtyard of a Frankfurt Museum concurrent with an exhibition celebrating the 50 th anniversary of the Berlin Airlift. In an abrasive exploration of saxophone texture, one of the loudest and most fearsome players of the European avant-garde is on fire on a cool, blustery Sunday morning in Frankfurt. Peter Brötzmann may have been invented to bring us closer to both. The vibrator was invented in the 19th Century so that doctors could bring women to orgasm more quickly as part of a treatment for hysteria. Photo: Pete Gershon by Steve Kulak (Sept 1999)