Opening with a staccato horn riff and stabbing percussive ostinato, the band sounds less like an acoustic jazz group than a feverishly overdriven machine, pistons shrieking, gears rattling. Still suffering from less than optimal audio, pianist Fred Van Hove and bassists Peter Kowald and Buschi Niebergall are barely audible in the chaotic mix, but emerge fully during unaccompanied solo sections ripe with squalling arco harmonics and pounding tone clusters. Recorded in a concrete basement studio and independently released on Brötzmann's own BRO imprint, the album became an underground classic. The Vietnam War, the American Civil Rights movement, Martin Luther King's assassination and the Paris student riots of 1968 all are subconsciously mirrored in the album's chaotic fury.
Peter brotzmann octet machine gun rym free#
More calamitous, violent and willfully discordant than Ornette Coleman's Free Jazz (Atlantic, 1960), John Coltrane's Ascension (Impulse!, 1965) or the contemporaneous work of Albert Ayler and Cecil Taylor, Brötzmann's uproarious testament was a sign of the times.Įmbroiled in revolution and protest, 1968 was a tumultuous time, and a fitting year for such a document to emerge. Brötzmann's assaultive 1968 octet recording set a precedent for all extreme improvised music that followed in its wake.
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The first major document of European free improvisation, Atavistic's Unheard Music Series reissue supplements the legendary session by bolstering the original album with two alternate takes and the only documented live performance of the furious title track.Įnvisioned and organized by infamous German tenor saxophonist Peter Brötzmann (nicknamed Machine Gun by trumpeter Don Cherry), Machine Gun provided a blueprint for such riotous ensembles as Last Exit, Naked City and Massacre. An essential recording, Machine Gun's rightful place in the pantheon of seminal free jazz recordings is uncontested.