Peter Brötzmann, the saxophonist whose muscular and emancipated style of performance made him a central figure in European jazz, has died at 82.
The news was confirmed by his label, Trost, and his collaborator Heather Leigh, who said that he died peacefully in his sleep at home in Wuppertal, Germany, on Tuesday night.
Born in Remscheid, Germany, in 1941, Brötzmann studied visual art and started out as a painter; he worked as an assistant for Nam June Paik and was influenced by the Fluxus movement. He began making music, self-taught on saxophone and clarinet, inspired by the US greats who toured Germany, including Miles Davis and John Coltrane.
By the mid-60s, he was playing in a trio with Peter Kowald and the Swedish drummer Sven-Åke Johansson and crossed paths with bold musicians including Carla Bley and Cecil Taylor. He rejected standard rhythmic and melodic modes to explore free jazz, inspired in part by a desire to express something new after the second world war. “The trauma of my generation was what our fathers had done to the rest of the world. And so we said: ‘Never again … Never nationalism again,” he explained in 2018.
His first release, For Adolphe Sax, was self-released in 1967 – “from Karl Marx we had learned that the worker shouldn’t give the tool and product out of his hand and so I started my own company”, he later said – and was followed in 1968 by one of the landmark albums of 20th-century free jazz, Machine Gun.
Recorded in an octet, its title a nickname given to Brötzmann by the jazz star Don Cherry to describe his violent style, the album features paint-strippingly strident and beautiful playing from Brötzmann. The canonical Penguin Guide to Jazz describes it as “one of the most significant documents of the European free-jazz underground”.
He would record again with members of this octet, such as the British saxophonist Evan Parker. Brötzmann and Machine Gun’s drummer, Han Bennink, recorded another cherished LP, 1977’s Schwarzwaldfahrt, in the Black Forest. It features Brötzmann techniques such as duetting with birds and playing his saxophone submerged in a river.
Although he also played plenty of softer and more lyrical music, his reputation for ferocity made him a natural partner in Last Exit, a 1980s jazz supergroup with Sonny Sharrock, Ronald Shannon Jackson and Bill Laswell that played punk, funk and noise rock.
Brötzmann recorded more than 50 albums under his name – many featuring artwork he painted or created himself – and collaborated with key free-jazz musicians, including Derek Bailey and Anthony Braxton, plus avant-garde figures such as Keiji Haino.
He became an admired collaborator for generations of European and American free-jazz players; a five-star review in the Guardian of 2010 recordings by his monumental Peter Brötzmann Chicago Tentet described them as “a virtuosic field day for free-jazz admirers with strong nerves”.
His fans included the fellow saxophonist and former US president Bill Clinton, who described Brötzmann as “one of the greatest”.