(Free Jazz) Peter Brotzmann - Solo + Trio Roma (2CD) - 2012, FLAC (tracks+.cue), lossless

Recorded at the 27th Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville on 21 and 22 May 2011.

This two-CD set chronicles Brötzmann’s solo and Trio Roma concerts at 2011’s FIMAV on the approach of his seventieth birthday, a momentous occasion for an artist whose work combines titanic stamina and anarchic expressionism. The solo concert might stage existence, a musical performance as naked as a late Beckett play, Brötzmann roaring, braying, wailing, and shouting through his saxophones and tárogató (a Hungarian woodwind), all of his work a hymn to the pain, promise, and deception of life itself. After an hour of extended improvisations, he turns to some of the songs that define the African-American lyric tradition, first roaring through the ancient I Surrender, Dear, a favourite of Coleman Hawkins, the virtual father of the tenor saxophone in jazz, and then Ornette Coleman’s Lonely Woman, the archetypal free-jazz dirge. The Trio Roma adds two younger musicians to fuel Brötzmann’s fire. Norwegian drummer Paal Nilssen-Love brings great energy and a restless creativity to this music, whether setting patterns against the rest of the band or thrashing out a complex web of polyrhythms. Italian bassist Massimo Popillo melds cool electronics and furious plucking; creating a wall of sound that is at once pipe organ, gong, and factory. The three play a single piece for nearly seventy minutes: brief pauses arise; there are short drum and bass solos; then the group reassembles around a new motif. Traditional notions of structure may not apply, but there’s an essential form in place, a ritual of sacrifice and benediction, a kind of miracle of testifying that takes on a transformative power. ~ stuart broomer, musicworks.ca
In 2011 the Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville celebrated Peter Brötzmann's 70th anniversary with two concerts – the first one a solo performance and the second one a trio with Massimo Pupillo (electric bass) and Paal Nilssen-Love (drums). Brötzmann has had a long tradition of solo albums (from his first one “Solo” – also known as “Wolke in Hosen” - in 1976 over seminal ones like “No Nothing” or “Right as Rain” to “Lost and Found” in 2006) and he is one of the few who is able to maintain the tension over a full record (like Steve Lacy and Evan Parker). What is relatively new here is the fact that he plays two pieces he has recorded before: “Never too late but always too early”, a track from the 2003 trio album with Hamid Drake and William Parker and Ornette Coleman’s classic “Lonely Woman”, which he has recorded in 1984 on “14 Love Poems”, another splendid solo album. While the first ones have almost nothing in common except the title, the Coleman cover here is clearly faster and shorter and therefore closer to the original than the 1984 version, which is more tender and fragile, even sort of shy, but with a harsh outbreak in the middle of the track. The highlight of the solo performance on this CD is “Shunkeln* to Dark Blues”, which features Brötzmann on b-flat clarinet playing a really dark, sad blues, a side of Brötzmann you hardly get the chance to listen to in such a consequence. Trio Roma shows Brötzmann’s other side, the wild and brutal one. The CD consists of a 70-minute-whirlwind called “Music Marries Room to Room” and a short encore (“The Turning Glory”). The band is Hairy Bones minus Toshinori Kondo and I could just repeat what I wrote above. Again we have the trio acting in full speed and we have trios and solos but this here is even more a group improvisation and there is a greater focus on Massimo Pupillo. He is the real sensation of this recording, he does not play his bass in a conventional way, he rather strums chords in boisterous attacks, in fact it seems as if Motörhead’s Lemmy has joined a free jazz group. Thus, his bass guitar sounds like a lawnmower, an airplane turbine, a buzz saw, a shredder, like bombs detonating - you can literally feel the bass tones in your stomach. The rhythm section is thunderous in general with Nilssen-Love providing polyrhythmic barrage fire to Brötzmann’s assaults. It is a vortex of sounds – some shrieking, others almost torn, spat, even puked – owing credits both to hardcore and to Dadaistic sound poems, sharing their free rhythms, their devoted declamation and their rejection of conventional form and content. Trio Roma is a supremely passionate and committed group. * ”s(c)hunkeln” is something especially Germans like to do sitting on plank benches in beer tents, they link arms with each other and then swing to the sound of brass bands. It does not work when a band plays a blues. ~ martin schray, freejazzblog.org
In May of 2011, the Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville celebrated saxophonist Peter Brötzmann's 70th birthday with two concerts, one solo, one with his Trio Roma featuring electric bassist Massimo Pupillo and drummer Paal Nilssen-Love. Both are included in this double-disc set on Victo. Disc two includes the nearly 70-minute improvisation "Music Marries Room to Room," followed by the five-minute closer "The Turning Glory." As one would expect, these are scorched-earth musical powerhouses. Brötzmann remains athletic and aggressive as ever; there are no signs of age in his playing. If anything, he's more interesting as a soloist here: his athleticism is extended by a more adventurous use of texture and more percussive phrasing. Pupillo's bass is laden with effects that multiply his range; he plays it like anyone else would play lead guitar. Add to this Nilssen-Love's physicality and imagination as a drummer; he finds powerful rhythms and even polyrhythms inside the chaos, and carves small semi-spacious corners that the other players react to with something approaching melody. Pull that all together and you have a perfectly balanced machine. The effect of this is free jazz as skronk & roll (which approaches the dynamism of Last Exit at their best). The most attractive element in the package, however, if the first disc. This is where Brötzmann gets to show his other side. While it would be inaccurate to call what he does here "gentle," it does possess a pronounced lyricism that is not usually associated with him. There are moments of great balladry alongside monumental tenor blasts; pregnant pauses that are answered by pure mellifluous flow, especially on tonal and breath sketches such as the lengthy "Shukeln to Dark Blues," "Frames of Motion," and the almost tender reading of Ornette Coleman's "Lonely Woman." For Brötzmann fans, this set is awe-inspiring, and therefore essential. ~ thom jurek, allmusic.com

Peter Brötzmann - tenor saxophone, alto saxophone, tárogató, clarinet (b-flat)
Paal Nilssen-Love - drums (tracks: 2-1, 2-2)
Massimo Pupillo - electric bass (tracks: 2-1, 2-2)