The sweetest melodies

Now that was amazing. Brilliant. If awesome would still mean anything, that would be the word. I’m sitting here pointing at something that is too great for words, making funny noises. I’m still in shock.

This was one of the side events, therefore unfortunately unstreamed, a trio of Peter Brötzmann, Mats Gustafsson, and Ken Vandermark at the protestant church here. Let me get this straight, if I saw Vandermark as a weak link yesterday with the tentet, here he was every bit as good as his cohorts. He gave us beats and crazy double arpeggios (don’t ask me how you do that, some kind of overblowing involved), he often seemed like a complete backing band, circularly breathing textures, while Gustafsson went in search for the deepest growl hidden in his baritone, and like yesterday, there were plenty of ghost harmonies under the vaults.

Brötzmann started out on something that looked like a clarinet but sounded like an alto in need of some cough syrup. This must have been his fabled tarogato, and I’m glad he used it, because there are two things you simply have to mention whenever you write about Brötz today, and that is the tarogato and the fact that the old firebrand has become surprisingly … wait! It’s actually true. I don’t know what it was, maybe the stompbox built into his instrument broke down, but I swear he did his best Johnny Hodges emulation. When he was filing at his reed during the first track, I thought he would be roughening up his sound, but no, he played the sweetest melodies. Intermittently that is, then he tore up his sax in mid-flight.

Gustaffson probably didn’t play a single lick or line during the whole concert, he went for deep, cavernous sound, grounding the whole thing. His bari sounded so big they would have to build an extra aisle or two to make it comfortable. Plus he must have a whole jungle of ferocious beasts hidden somwhere in the bell of the instrument.

More than in the tentet, they were free to create spontaneous structures. Such intelligence, and freedom, and wildness, and tenderness. I’ve already written too much, I will now go back to pointing at the thing in amazement, stammering.

Floored, Lutz