Chicagoan John Corbett, gallerist, music critic, and occasional Reader contributor, has been working on a biography on the German saxophonist Peter Brötzmann for several years now, and I eagerly await its completion. Corbett knows both Brötzmann’s music and the free-jazz icon’s history inside and out, and he’s one of few writers able to properly and meaningfully situate Brötzmann’s work within a global context. Knowing that his biography is in the works, I was a little surprised to get a copy of a new book called Peter Brötzmann: We Thought We Could Change the World (Wolke Verlag), a stunning collection of his conversations with the respected French jazz critic Gerard Rouy. The interviews featured in the volume were conducted by Rouy between November 2008 and August 2009 for the Bernard Josse documentary Soldier of the Road. In his introduction Rouy writes that after seeing the final result, which he enjoyed, “I immediately felt frustrated about the fantastic amount of information that Brötzmann gave us about the history of this music that [could not] be used in that 90 minutes long film.”
Today’s playlist:
