I'm very much okay with.īrötzmann is one of those periodically recurring jags for me. I tend to know what puts me there (in this case, it was Destination Out's posting of a fine Brötzmann solo album, 14 Love Poems, preceded by a flat-out incredible Brötzmann/Andrew Cyrille duo album), and to not know what'll get me out. (The new Strokes album, which I'm really digging, is an exception-review in TONY next week.) I wrote here about a Tony Malaby/Paul Motian listening jag, and about how I often find myself thusly stuck, happily, in this or that groove. I've been listening to little other than Peter Brötzmann lately. This all brings up an interesting point, though: Aside from the obvious early triumphs-Machine Gun, e.g.-what are the great Peter Brötzmann studio sessions? Please advise, as I'm clearly not to be trusted on the subject! For that matter, what are the great free-jazz studio sessions? (Again not counting the ’60s, since many of that period's key statements (from Spiritual Unity to Interstellar Space) were studio documents.) I think of things like Cecil Taylor's New World records from ’78, where the fidelity is just marvelous and a real contrast to the live stuff from around the same time.] The important thing to note is that these records rule, and I would recommend them to any Brötzmann fan, or novice, for that matter. At any rate, I apologize for the misinformation. You do your best to square the sound with the story, or something. Maybe this is also an interesting illustration of how foreknowledge (even faulty foreknowledge) of recording circumstances can really color the way you listen.
In any case, I think some of the points below are of general interest-e.g., that free jazz should sometimes be documented in the studio, not just on stage-so I'm going to let the post stand. I'm not sure where I got this erroneous impression-maybe it was from the fact that the recordings sound so damn great!-but I regret not verifying the info. [After-the-fact note: In the post below, I mistakenly ID'd two recent Peter Brötzmann records on Smalltown Superjazz, Sweetsweat and Wood Cuts, as studio records it turns out that they are very much in-concert albums.