Heffley on Brtzmann: Charmed like a Snake in a Trance only to find himself standing in Wuppertal, on the bergrunewalderstrae, at Peter Brtzmann's

s door, listening to footsteps approach from within. The weather was much the same autumn balm as in Berlin the day before; the neighborhood, though blissfully, quiet-residential rather than noisy-urban. It was almost twenty-four hours later, he knew, and in a flicker of panic he mentally scurried to review the time he had just lost (this was not the first time this had happened to him in this "field," and he didn't expect it to be the last). The memories flashed by like a dream fading in a wake: Dagmar, Gerlinde, and delighted surprise!Lady Europa, the woman he'd seen on the train, making her own way, so it chanced, to meet Gerlinde, whom she'd called through the national car-pooling service that connected people driving with people needing rides; some coffee and snacks with the three women around Dagmar's table, departure from Berlin by car his second time out at length on the autobahn, sights of mostly farms and their fields, some factories (the autobahn doesn't dip through cities, like American freeways) some talk with the women, mostly about his impressions of something deeper and more human in gender identities and relations here than in America, something integrated with a larger Europeanness that bore the Ami-corporate-pop-political culture like an old building bore ivysomething he felt (after reading Watson 1992, especially the chapter [155-98] on the German business culture's more socially responsible, management/labor/government non-inter-adversarial style of capitalism) would prevail, in the end, like Russia prevailed over communism in spite of, as much as because of, capitalism (of courseEros as social, historical, cultural glue as much as superficial sexual spark, per Van Nortwick [1998: 118]) mostly silence in the back seat with his thoughts and the sights of the middle and western states rolling through his virgin eyes for the first time especially Hessen, which he grew up hearing about as the land of his ancestors, brought (bought, mostly against their will, often enough from Hessian prisons) by the British to fight the

rebellious American colonists just another stretch of rolling green hills and plains, at dusk, no time to stop maybe someday before the summer ended, maybe in Frankfurt, to interview Albert Mangelsdorff, then a day or two extra to see the sights, scour the phone books for names like Heffley (Hflich? Hfling?), to feel like a prodigal son's greatgreat-grandson come home The Muses, who lived around Mount Olympus in Northern Greece, were the guardians of study, memory, and song. They inspired the heroes Amphion and Orpheus to conquer life and death by the power of music. Such a myth supported the ritual magic aspects of music common to most primitive and ancient peoples. The Mycanean settlers on the coast of Asia Minor preserved the ancient heritage of the Greek mainland and also incoporated into their culture the many philosophical, poetic, scientific, and musical systems that abounded east and west of the Aegean. But a total integration never occurred, so that certain differences in taste, character, and musical practices persisted in Greek life. Scholl and White (1970: 10-11) The ending of the "dream" lingered even less as Brtzmann crossed (apparently) a long passageway and was about to open the door: arrival at Peter Kowald's house in the middle of the night, his friendly greeting, a night in a loft bed in the studio where his Greek artist wife made her paintings ("Charles Gayle, the saxophonist from New York, slept here for several months not too long ago," Kowald said ), a shower, clean-sheet, nice-bed bliss, up, out, and "Hallo, Mike," Brtzmann said, extending his hand. Just around the corner from Kowald, his place was (like Kowald's) a townhouse of two or three floors, his own flat at ground level. Heffley's temporal disorientation was swept away by the pull of the moment, and the professional habits ingrained over years of interviewing public personalities. The entrance hall, then, re-oriented him, as Brtzmann led the way through it to the inner rooms opening onto the courtyard where they would sit and talk, to this thought: "How many times in Germany have I joined someone in their home after what seems like taking a trip through a little cave tunnel? Both of Dagmar's places, Panajota's, this one

all designed to pull you into their space like the earth back into its womb (the courtyard), all folded in with "backs" (walls) to the world, windows facing inward Brtzmann's place was different, though, and that was due to Heffley's aforementioned professional habits. Because once they were seated and beginning to tape in fact, precisely at the moment Brtzmann said "Okay," in the particular tone he did, to the few words Heffley spoke to set up the interviewthey were no longer at a table on the ground floor,

but grounded so at the much greater height of , which I strove to realize as the setting for all MY interviews with, specifically, the men I had settled on as the personifications of FMP West (Gebers, von Schlippenbach, Brtzmann, and Kowald) and East (Petrovsky, Gumpert, Bauer and Sommer). It is an earthy place, not otherworldly, but that grainy, gritty earth sits high among drifting clouds, and looks down on the rest of the world as if from sky. It could have been a mountain plateau anywhere, but in fact it is the ancient Greek place of the ancient Greek gods. Why there, why them? That Heffley did not know, since it had risen, Atlantis-like, from the depths of his subconscious, but he trusted he would figure it out later (and he was right, as I am here to explain it, soon). It was just another one of those deviceslike Lady Europa and the Three Furieshis mind had constructed to frame the parts of the new culture here that were mildly shocking, or puzzlingonly in this case it was a real place that arose to meet the demands of real time (interviewing). Those were in fact the demands of performance, much like musical performance, much like improvisatory musical performance: years of thought and preparation, background research, focus on a discourse and its participants; logistical real-world maneuvering to get in a position to sit down at the table with the subject, to be taken seriously and opened up to, given the benefit of all doubt; finally, a finite, fleeting bit of (necessarily) scheduled time, in which something magical and momentous can take place

real communion over weighty mattersor not, depending on the skill and attitude of the participants. Like a musician entering into a pact with her audience to give it no less than her best, to know what they want and help them get it, MY interviewees and I were coming together to meet for an hour or two out of our lives in hopes that we would exchange their essences successfully enough to convey them to, potentially, the rest of humanity for all time. Moreover, our chosen means of doing that was not to prescribe and script itto write down questions, write down answers, have no real exchange in the moment unmediatedbut to meet as two open minds with a few vaguely sketched routes to explore, and the power to do so spontaneously, interactively, responsibly and fruitfully (as, indeed, I am doing here alone with you). It wasn't even conscious any moreHeffley went into the same trance as when he played music; pressing that tape recorder button and making his opening remarks to the interviewee was like hitting the stage of a performance and playing those first few notes. Much depended on them; the better and more effective they were, the better the prospect for all that unfolded from them. Like a trombone, Heffley's tone, affect, as much as his words, signaled to Brtzmann his invitation to join him there in Olympus; Brtzmann's immediate responsive "Okay," through its tone and affect, signaled to Heffley, like a clarinet, Brtzmann's recognition of the place and a readiness to join him there. Listen to CD 7/2, track 5 "When you look back on this time from today," I begin, "do you feel the recordings of the first-hour periodMachine Gun, For Adolphe Sax, The Living Music, European Echoesare all good documents of the music as it was emerging live?" "Yeah, even though some are not very well recorded. But especially Machine Gun is, for that time, a classic. It documents the feeling perfectly. There are today a lot of young people interested in this type of music, and to find out about the European roots of it, I think Machine Gun is a must for them. It's still the best-selling FMP recording. You

know our business: you sell five hundred or maybe a thousand records, then after a couple of years it's overbut Machine Gun just keeps going. Some of my or my friends' recordings disappear somehow, but that one really keeps going through these thirty, thirty-five years." "It's clear that its success must please you as one of the musicians. Is it also such a success in you own inner musical life? Do you still hold its presence in your mind, maybe listen to it now and then and hear new or fresh things in it yourself?" "Yeah, it is like that. I mean, I'm now thirty years older or so, and I've done a lot of other work but, you know, in this period of life one doesn't often have such a thing to look back on; I feel very happy that I did it when I was very young. It was not just the music, it was a kind of feeling of the time that made all of us enthusiastic, happy. "I always see jazz music as coming from working together. True, there is a solo part to the thing too, but what always fascinated me about it was the collaboration and cooperation with other people from other countries, other parts of the worldit doesn't matter at all. We all learned that very early in those years, and I think to keep going as we have on that idea alone is already something important. And the music itself, beyond that idea, I think is a perfect representation of that period: Europe in 1968, '69, Paris, Berlin it was happening. Machine Gun I see as belonging to those years. I wouldn't say that I planned it as a kind of political statement; we just lived it, in that time, and we made music, so we took our inspiration out of the situation." "What's interesting to me is that you don't look back on it as something from youth that you've grown out of; it's something that stands as important now just as it did then. So I wonderif you keep this vision in your mind for so long, when you hear this early music now, what new things do you find there that you weren't necessarily conscious of at first?" "Well, I should say first that I don't typically listen to my own recordings, but sometimes I have to, if I give interviews in radio stations, for examplewhich has

happened quite a lot in recent years in universities in the States, and of course Machine Gun is on the table What I still like most about it is the feeling of commonality, a kind of vision of sound we all shared. As you know, I haven't really been a guy so keen on subtleties, too-sensitive things. I mean I've changed a lot since then, hopefully, but at that time I had an idea of sound, of complex sound. It didn't really matter so much what instruments made itsaxophone, basses, whateverit was just a vision of complex sound. And I still have it, hopefully in a different way, because I've learned a lot in these past decades." "I'll ask you more about that. I can tell you that when I first heard Machine Gun, being around the same age as you, growing up in those times in America, exposed to Coltrane then, and Ornette Coleman, and Albert Ayler, that the energy you guys had seemed to be the same kind of energy, but it felt like it was phrased, and shaped, and flowing more from the breath of the horn players than from the rhythm of the drums. Not that the rhythm wasn't there, but in the music I was used to there seemed to be this ongoing river through the drums" "Yeah" " but what I heard everybody doing here seemed to be more based around the breathlike, how long can a breath last, and what can happen in a breath?" "Yeah. Of course, the horn playersand I would say especially the three horn players in this part of Europe, Evan Parker, Willem Breuker, and myself"the three on Machine Gun"formed that kind of feeling in those years. Of course, we had the drummersHan Bennink, the young Paul Lovens coming up, Tony Oxley (who always was working in a little bit different area of the music), Johnny Stevens was still alive so it was quite an exchange of language between the drums and the horns. Evan is, for the English scene, as important as Willem for the Dutch and, hopefully, as I am in Germany for this kind of thing. We played the horns extremely differently from anyone before us, as well as from our peers at the time in the States. All my American friends, whom I like very much,

have always played the horn differently, because they have another view of the instrument, from another tradition. Of course I like Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, Sonny Rollins and even earlier players, but I can't say I have it in my blood. I learned and listenedbut if I even talk to younger people, American guys, 35 or so, I feel they have it, this feeling, black or white, it doesn't matter so much, because they are American (from my point of view)." "Did you spend a lot of time as a young player, when you listened to American jazz, trying to get that American feeling?" "Oh yeah. You know, after the war there was just one radio to a family. And I was going to school, and every night, at 12 o'clock, we had Willis Conover's Voice of America music broadcast. Of course, I should have been in bed already, but I sneaked downstairs and listened like this to Willis Conover. I was very hungry for information about the music, because we had very few of our own radio things like this here, and they were quite old-fashioned, and Willis Conover gave us new, fresh information. "Then I started a kind of jazz club at my school. I was about 13 or so, and I played to records by Kid Ory and Benny Goodman, Louis Armstrong and the Hot Five, all kinds of records. Then, the clarinet player in our school band graduated, and the clarinet was school property, so I grabbed it, and started playing to the records I had. I was quite lucky that some older guys who had studied at the very famous Folkwang Hochschule in Essen let me sit in with their group, and after a couple of weeks they said, 'Okay, let's try this.' So I was in a band at 14 and 15 with players who were 18 and already quite good. One is a professor now, and he is a drummer in a symphony orchestra. We had a kind of swing band, playing night clubs in the area "But eventually, of course, I realized that I wasn't a black man, wasn't even an American, I had my culture here and, you know, hand in hand with playing music was already in my very young years my involvement with painting. "I left school in my hometown of Remscheid to come over to Wuppertal to this art

schoolwhich is now part of the university hereand I studied graphic arts and painting. My other fruit was in that area. At that time there was a very good gallery over here, the Galerie Parnass. The guy who owned it was really a fantastic guy. He organized the most avant-garde stuff in these years that you could find in Europe or America. The first big exhibition of Nam June Paik happened here, and Beuys, and the Fluxus Movementit all happened here, some of it for the first time. To this day, I'm still very good friends with Nam June Paik; he was a big influence on my thinking and doing. "At that time, I thought I would earn some money with graphic art, so I jumped into the painting. I had my first exhibitions, and some were quite successful, in a way (whatever that means). But playing music increased, and I was involved much more in that. I like to have a real audience in front of me, I like to travel, and I found that much more interesting and much more serious than all this work in the art field I quit school in Wuppertal when I was 17. I went to this art school here, and the first guy I met who played music, or wanted to play music, was Kowald. So we stuck together for the next ten, fifteen years" "Wuppertal is written about as on an axis with Berlin in FMP history. Peter Kowald just did that major project Ort, conceived around the community and locale here. You and he, along with Hans Reichel, have lived and worked here a long time. I've even read about a 'Ruhr Valley' sound. How does the character of this place really relate to your music?" "This town is a very artificial thing. The two biggest parts of Wuppertal are Elberfeld and Barmen, a bit more to the east. It's really a row of villages along the Wupper River. Then, to please Kaiser Wilhelm, they built up the Schwebebahn (a hanging overground train), and then they thought, 'Okay, we are not just villages anymore, we have to be a proper city,' with this new 'Wupper Valley' name. So this town has no center, in a way. "We have had interesting people living here at any given moment. Very strongminded, some of them not looking left or right, just doing their things, and we had a lot of

quite rich bankers here, and these were very, very open, and they looked around for art like the Impressionists and Expressionists and all from that area. So our museum, for examplethe Von der Heydtis named after one of these guys. It has a lot of really beautiful art from the early years of the century, in stockit's too small to show, but they have it. So this town does have something special. "And you know it was well known before the first and second wars as the town with the most religious sects. You have different churches, not only the Catholic and Protestant but all kinds of small shit," he laughs, "so the people here are kind of different from others. It's all mixed up. "You even have two roots of language here. You have the Western part, that of the Rhine peoplefrom Kln, and Dusseldorfand the Barmen, in the east, goes more to the woods and is a bit more rough language, toward Westfalen. So Elberfeld and Barmen really meet at the language border of these two groups. But of course through the war and after the war it's all mixed up. You find from time to time old people in the bar just talking original dialect, but they pass away, of course. "For this music, Wuppertal has always had either me or Kowald really doing something. Kowald is different from me. I live here, and in the early years we did our activities together. But nowadays I just live here. I play once a year, or twice, and that's enough. Kowald plays all around the year everywhere and is involved in a lot of city activities, which is not my cup of tea, I must say. I like to come back, I prefer to go," he laughs, "and the rest, as you see, the sun is shininga very rare situation this time of year." "How is the relationship between music and visual art for you? Have they always fed each other, or do they do different things? How does that work?" "It would be too easy to say that in both fields you work with colors and this kind of thing. That might be very obvious. I think being busy with the (let's call it) fine artthe paintings and graphics and woodcuts and working together with people like Nam June

Paik, like when I helped him as a kind of assistant in a lot of exhibitions here and in Hollandthat always gave me a lot for the music too. My decision was easier for me to just do my thing, or find out what it is, and coming as close as possible to that. I'm still on my way, step by step; the steps are getting smaller," he laughs, "but that was really a good school for me, to have that other side. I realized things earlier and faster than other people, 'normal' musicians who studied, formed bands but had no idea what was going on in other fields, or in the world at all. But for meand, in a way, because Kowald was always with me and was interested in this kind of thing tooI think for us it was not so difficult to leave the solid jazz base. In fact, it was quite logical for us to experiment with other things, other sounds, combinations, other ways of thinking about music. So that was very important for me." "Do you remember how you felt in those years in terms of being surprised as to what direction the music was taking? I'm thinking of the way it was called the Emanzipation in the media, this European style that was emerging. Did you think of it that way yourself?" "I think I was one of the very few Europeans who had, from the very beginning, a really strong feeling for American jazz music, and for the musicians I met. Persons were always the most important influences on my music anyway, whether it was Don Cherry or Steve Lacy, or evena man I shook hands with when I was very young, when he played here in townHowling Wolf. His hands were huge, and mine were so small. I've always been impressed with this kind of thing. "But there was of course a very strong feeling against Americans in these years, and quite a lot from English musicians. I don't know exactly why that was, I never had it, but I remember in the early yearslate '60s, early '70sthere was quite a strongly expressed opinion against including Americans on festival programming. Peter and I never had that. It was we who set up the first years of the Moers Festival, and we brought everybody who was available there. We didn't pay someone to come from New York or so, but we could ask our friends like Frank Wright or Steve Lacy or Don Cherry, who lived in

Europe, 'Could you pass by if you are on your way up to Scandinavia?' and they all came for nothing more than a comfortable stay and more or less pocket money. But they helped us get the thing together, and I still have to thank these guys." "I notice on the FMP catalogue, though, that there aren't too many European/American collaborations until into the '80s." "That might be true, because after the Machine Gun and Globe Unity days there came a really strong period of working only with the trio, with Fred van Hove and Han Bennink. That went on for more than ten years, and then a few more years with Han as a duo. We invited guests, but mostly European guests, I think, and the American contacts we had at that time, there are no recordings. My brother, more or less, was [American saxophonist] Frank Wright. I organized a lot of things here in Europe, mostly radio stationsNDR must still have some tapesI don't know, for whatever reason there was never a chance to decide 'let's record that.' That was in the early '80s." "At which time you recorded with Andrew Cyrille in a duo, and others after that. So there's a network of American players playing with you in Europe, and then in recent years you've been coming yourself a lot more to America. So let me jump ahead and ask you what exactly you're doing right now. What are your most regular sources of work, your usual circuit of performance venues, and the people you currently play with the most?" "To jump ahead to that, I think I must say that the time is over where you really work with just one group, as I did with my trio then. I think all of us have to look around now for what is possible. It's still the same situation. We don't get rich. The food is better than thirty years ago, the whiskey is better," he laughs, "and the sun is shining today, so I don't complain at all. I decided, and that's cool. "So what am I doing? For about eight years, I think, since the first time I met Hamid Drake in Chicago and played, as I recall, a two-hour duo, it was a kind of friendship from the first second. I would say he is the main important man in the last few years for me.

Then, I have an old Japanese friend, Toshinori Kondo, and even before I worked with Hamid I worked a lot together with William Parker. So we came to the idea of forming the quartet. Which, I must say, I would like to work with much more." "The Die Like a Dog band " "Yeah. But it costs so much to get Kondo over, and the two Americans. The people nowadays, they don't want to pay " "You mean the cultural ministries?" "Yeah, or the radio stations, or other promoters, concert peopleso the quartet is happening very seldom. It's a pity. I hope I can put it together for this fall, for the FMP Total Music Meeting. If we did a concert it would of course be recorded.1 "I had another experience last year which I liked very much. Along with Hamid Drake I collaborated with a Moroccan guy, Mahmoud Gania. He plays the guembri, a kind of North African bass-stringed instrument, and he is one of the wellknown people of the Gnawa music. Gnawa is played by black Africans coming mostly from Mali, or Senegal, as slaves. The Arab people brought them and couldn't sell them, so they stayed there," he laughs, "and they developed their own language and their own very interesting rhythm-oriented, very driving music. That is another thing I would like to go on with." Listen to CD 7/2, tracks 6-7 "Is this the frst collaboration you've had outside of European and American jazz players, with a non-Western tradition?" "Yeah, if you don't count the Japanese. I've gone there a lot for about seventeen years, and I've played with nearly all Japanese musicians, more or less, in this kind of music. But, of course, they are now distant from their own tradition, most of them, so they look . They did, it was Little Birds Have Fast Hearts. British journalist Steve Lake and I wrote the liner notes. Lake points out, correctly, that the difficulties in booking a group with members spread around the globe stem from far more than funding cutbacks in a given locale, are in fact symptoms of the occupational hazard that is the globalism to which this music itself has evolved.
1

really more at what is happening in American jazz much more than to their own tradition. Maybe it's coming again, but when I first went there seventeen years ago they were all obsessed, first, with what was happening in New York, and second, in Wuppertal. Those were their sources." "It's an interesting scene in New York now with the Japanese presence. A lot of students and younger players are active in both the bebop and improvised music scenes. So you got no real non-Western influences from your Japanese collaborations?" "Being patient," he laughs. "You have to get that, because you can try to learn about who they are, but even old American professors who stayed there after the war, who speak perfect Japanese, say 'The more I learn about it, the less I understand.' So you go your own way, so that's what I did. You be very frank and open, but very true to your own way, and I think they appreciate that very much. "What did I get back from them?" A pause. "There are three players I like to work with and I learned a lot from, but I'm not sure I can say what so concretely And Toshinori Kondo, my oldest friend, is not really Japanese. He says so himself. Even the Japanese people in the street, when we pass by, they look at him much more than me. For them, Kondo is not really Japanese. He doesn't behave like a Japanese," he laughs, "his behavior, his facehe comes from a small village near the Atlantic, and his father was one of those guys who came out years after the war was finished from some island mountains, not knowing that it was finished. These people are quite different from people in Tokyo," he laughs. "But he's really a very worldly guy. He has a very strong tradition in Japanese Zen Buddhism, which you find out when you sit with him through long nights. Then it starts to come out. "And then, for the last two or three years, I've worked with a guitar player named only Hainoa kind of figure out of the avant-garde rock scene. He's a crazy guy; we did a CD where he just sings and I play the tenor. I don't know if I like it, it's very strange. But he's a guy who's very, very strange. He doesn't speak, his manager has to be always

around to translate. But after a time I was on tour for four weeks last year, and I realized he understands, and after two or three weeks we started to speak English from time to time. "So the people there are different, really, not as open as I know Americans are. You really have to be patient. I mean I was sitting with my third friend, the drummer Shoji Hano, in an auto for nearly two days on the road in Japan. He had something or other on his mind, and he didn't speak a word to me for the entire time. And if you don't know, of course, you doubt; 'What's happening, tell me.' I mean, if I would sit with you for two days and you feel bad, I would see and ask you and I think that somehow I would get a kind of answer. And I knew this guy well at that point; he had stayed here in my back house for three months, we're friends. What can I say, he didn't speak for two days." "And you never did find out why?" "No, not until two years later!" he laughs. Listen to CD 7/2, tracks 10-11 "We've been laughing about it, but is there an aspect of your musical work that benefits from such patience, perhaps especially as you get older?" "Oh yeah, oh yeah," he says. "I realized that myself, and even old friends from the very early years who hear me now, they say that too, and tell me how different it is from the steaming years. That doesn't mean that my thoughts are not steaming, or that if I'm in the right mood I don't still like to play my ass off and get the guys moving but of course I learned there are other ways to play intense music. Especially the years I'm working now with Borah Bergman. I think I always did know that, but he brought it out of me with his very facile piano playing to do things that I forgot I could doespecially playing clarinet. I'm not a good clarinet player, but I like the instrument, so playing it with him I like very much. It's sometimes very, very intense, but also a very minimal thing. I think Borah is a perfect guy to get that out of me. Hamid Drake is also drawing out special things when he plays, for example, tablas or frame drums. But I think I learn

from nearly all the guys I work with." "You've done four solo recordings for FMP. Did you develop this solo work as a way to develop something on the instruments that you couldn't get to in any other situation?" "I think the history of each of these is different. The first thing I did to show the range of instruments I was playing. I wrote little pieces and tried to work with the material. The second one, 14 Love Poemshere is something I forgot to mention on the record. One of my favorite writers is the poet Kenneth Patchen." "Ah ja, from San Francisco." "Right. And he wrote a little booklet called 14 Love Poems. That was for a long time my very favorite book to travel with, so I had a very personal connection with it." Listen to CD 7/1, tracks 3-4 "So this was an example of a piece of literature shaping the concept of a recording. Do you do that often?" "I also did it with No Nothing, because at that time I was trying to read Oscar Wilde again, and, you know, with my English it's not that easy. I travel with books from time to time, I always have a special book I'm busy with. So at the time I recorded that I was reading Oscar Wilde, and all the quotations are out of his work." "Is this then a special approach for solo work?" "Yeah, it's a kind of more intimate thing, to come closer to another medium, in a way, and to another person, which gives me something for my own work." "Do you write out your solo pieces in music notation?" "No. They're in my mind, because I'm not a good reader. Sometimes I put a few notes down just to get it in my mind, but then there it is, that's it. On the very first one, I did make little tunes to play, and sometimes to remember the pattern or so I sing it on the tape, or I write the notes down. The thing I remember about Oscar Wilde was that it was a lot about landscapes and light and things. That is a kind of connection to painting, too. Landscapes have always interested methe light, the sunrise, the changing colors of the

sea, this kind of thing." "Speaking of notation and organizing, how did you fnd the experience of playing in Cecil Taylor's European Orchestra, on the Alms/Tiergarten (Spree) CD? I know how he orally transmits his patterns of pitches a note at a time to such ensembles." "Yeah, but if you know his work, and the way he works, it's not so difficult to understand. He, I realized, is thinking in scales, and in movements, and it's quite easy to followespecially in this big band, where you really have to make it concrete what the players have to do. I mean, he was always lost whenI was standing right next to him at that session, near the piano, and I did my best to follow his instructions, but sometimes I tried to play my ass off, and he didn't like that at all," he laughs. "People think when they work with such a 'great one' that they have to do what he says. And I think he enjoys it much more when there's someone who kicks his ass. I think he needs it; otherwise, people are so devout, and act like he's the grandfather of everything. But he is not like that, we had a lot of times just drinking and hanging out, and it was very beautiful and informative to hear him tell about his youth, and the cotton fields and his grandma. Nice things. We have a very distanced friendship, in a way. "I would like to work more with bigger groups, to try and find a way of organizing things." "How would you do it differently than others?" "I think the first thing you have to accept is that every person is playing in the band as a really free individual. He has to decide if he wants to play, or what he wants to play. On the other hand, you need a kind of discipline with eight or ten people; then, a little structured information can help to make big things even bigger and more concentrated. "Of course, if I ask eight or ten people to play for a certain project, I have a certain idea of what it should be, so I try to find ways to get the guys playing in the way I want to hear the musicwithout cutting everything down, just to find a way to let them grow the possibilities, of sound, of their very personal sounds, and of the band sound toowhich

always requires more time than you ever have, you know." "Did you do something like that with your ICP tentet recording?" Listen to CD 7/2, tracks 12-13 "Well, that was different, because Misha's concept was to come with a certain song, or organization, or structures, but you know the Dutch have a certain way of using melodies, their own folk songs, in an ironical way, and Misha is a master at doing that The Dutch scene with collectives, especially Willem Breuker in the late '70s, early '80s, was kind of fresh, in a way, and a lot of other musiciansMaarten van Regteren Altena, for exampleand then all the Amis lived in Rotterdam or Amsterdam. It was really happening, but now the government cut the money about ten years ago, so there aren't very many places to play anymore. Whenever I meet Han Bennink he's always complaining about the possibilities in his country. Misha is not doing very much because he prefers to sit now in his chess caf and play chess, but from time to time he plays. Han is, like me, more or less in foreign countries. You know, if you're just a player, you don't get much help from the government. But if you can call yourself a composer and write some so-called compositions, they pay quite well enough. Like Willem, or Maartenhe's just sitting at home and writing piece after piece. If he is content with that, it's fine. But I wouldn't be interested. For me, this way of lifetraveling, playing, seeing other people, working with themis what I really like to do." "Naturally there have been high points and lulls in terms of activity in the improvised music scene over the last thirty years. But I wonder from what you're saying if overall you think there's been a decline in understanding of improvised music as a legitimate art form. A lot of American improvisersindeed, many of the African-American guys who pioneered ithave become 'composers' for that very reason, in part." "Sure, and I can understand that, because to survive over there is much harder than in Europe. But I think in a way I'm very old-fashioned. I'm just a guy who likes to travel, as I said, to see the world; to work, sure, that's the main reason, but it depends. If you look

at Bill Dixon of course, he's really an older man now. I'm not a young man anymore, but he's quite a bit older, and of course he likes to teach at his college, and if he travels around the world he's doing his lectures, and playing from time to time a little bit, so, okay, it's not his cup of tea anymore; his college life and his compositions and his writing about music, I think it's much more important for him." "But you seem to have succeeded in your recent years in branching out from your FMP history. The work with Borah Bergman, and Thomas Borgmann, on different labelsthis trio coming up at Mulhouse, with Majid Bekas. Is he also a Moroccan player?" "Yes, a kind of replacement for Mahmoud. It's a risk for Hamid and me, but both of us, we didn't want to lose connections." (Mahmoud was unavailable for this particular date). "I like this kind of music because it goes; and these people, they play for hours, for nights. In our way, Hamid's and my way about thinking of the timing of tunes or pieces you play after the European, or American way, it's the sameafter a time, you have to come to an end. But they never dothey get in a kind of trance. Mahmoud's wife is a dancer in a kind of dervish band with him, and it goes on for hours and hours and hours." "One of the things I've really been fascinated about in looking into all the FMP records is this sense of timing. When there's no predetermined form and everybody's working their material in the moment, I notice a certain biological clock coming to the fore." "Yeah, that's what is, I think, so fascinating for us, because through all these hundreds of years we lost it, in a way, in our 'Kul- tur'"a sarcastic tone"and all that kind of bullshit, and I think that's why my inner feeling is such an interest in that. Through playing, sometimes you come to a point where you feel it could go on and on but I think people have different pulses, so" "But what you're saying is that for yourself right now what's interesting is the idea of going for longer periods of time, with this Moroccan music?"

"Yeah. I mean, l'm not into this trend of everybody playing ethnic music. That started a hundred years ago with Ginger Baker bringing all his African friends and women here on stage, and it was wonderful, but nowadaysI think it's all a terrible misunderstanding a kind of commercial business way of thinking. That's not my intention here. I'm just fascinated by the way the whole thing is going, with no problemsmind, a body, and all of it is going in one kind of movement." "Has this trio played much yet?" "We had a tour of twelve days, something like that. It started at the Peter Edel [Kulturhaus]I mean, Mahmoud's a funny guy, always smiling, really dark black, one of these really friendly guysand so we said hello, onstage, and we played for a long time. There was no recording of that, but I think for the first concert it was already perfect. It went on and on and we had to travel, everybody was fucked up, having to jump on the stage after sitting ten hours on trains, things like that. Really hard work but as soon as it came to the music, on the bandstand, it was no problem any more. "I think it had a lot to do with that guy just sitting there and being one in all, his appearance. You could feel it, in a way. And Hamid is the same, in a way. Mahmoud and Hamid fit together so well, getting into such a mood of going and goingHamid is a maniac anywayso I was the guy who, besides going with them, from time to time I had todisturb them," he laughs. "To get them out of the groove?" "Yeah, it was really going farreally strong feelingbut sometimes, okay, that's my Western education, my roots I have somewhere." "Did you also play the role of the one who brings things to an end?" "Yes, I had to. I had to. I met Mahmoud the first time in France, in a small village near Grenoble. Some artists made some sound sculptures out of wood and other materials. They asked me to stop by and play with them, and there I met Mahmoud. The next day we were free of that program's festival, and we played an afternoon concert, just

us two, and I thought, 'This is it.' It was fitting so well together." "What's interesting to me about this is that your music has established itself as something with a European voice, but also with good connections to American jazz tradition. I don't know so much about the Japanese relationship, but you've explained it well. But in recent years, for example, you've started playing also this Hungarian instrument" "The taragato."2 "and you've just told me that you're not so interested in the 'world music' trend. Peter Kowald has also been expanding out into other non-Western directions in recent years. So when you play with this trio in Mulhouse, it will be a freely improvised situation, with no predetermined musical strategies, right?" "That it will." "And it will be one long set of a continuous stream of music?" "It depends on what we want to do. I can always stand back and get myself a drink. I need it; a horn player blows such a lot of moisture out of his body, he has to have it back. The way we did it with Mahmoud, we played as long as we felt the tension there, and Hamid and I, we know each other so well we know when is the way it should end, somehow. It ended up at a lot of concerts that Mahmoud went on playing his instrument alone, and singing his Moroccan songs and, uhyeah, he didn't see a need for himself to stop. So he brought us in after a time. I mean, if it goes, and if it goes in a natural, logical way, then I think it's fine." "Did he ever make the choice to stop and let you and Hamid take a duo?" "No." . Brtzmann to Witherden: "About eight years ago I played in Hungary and met an instrument maker and repairer. He asked me to his workshop, and he had a row of taragatos. I knew this kind of thing existed because years ago I met a Hungarian guy playing in a New York street on a fantastic instrument and I asked him what it was. Anyway, I was lucky to find this one in Hungary." (41)
2

"Never!?" I laugh. "Out of the question," he laughs. "And also with Beka, he will play continuously?" "Yeah, the music is entirely unstructured, the rhythm is always changing, the sound is highly monotonous, the tunes are also very similar. It's a music conceived to last for a day, a night, the next day" "So then the Moroccan players understand that this is a European concert set of two or so hours, so they play that long, more or less arbitrarily for them?" "The newer player for this gig, I know from his history, is more oriented to Europe. He's also a bit younger, knows more about the culture here; whether that's a good thing or not, I don't know." He laughs. "We'll see." "It reminds me of when Coltrane frst started playing his long sets, and how the idea of trance came into the music then. Will you be playing taragato much?" "Yeah. I think it's the perfect instrument for this trio. During the last two or three years, I come back much more often to the clarinet too. But the taragato is a perfect thing, because it is very simple, and you know the history of the instrument is that it's coming through Hungary, Rumania, through the Turks passing by on their way to Vienna. The Turkish musicians played it in earlier years not with a wooden mouthpiece but with a brass mouthpiece. That means, you know, all kinds of horn instruments coming from the Far Eastthey have the same shape as the taragato, the conical shape; they are played in the very early times with a brass mouthpiece. Monks in Tibet, for example, still play the long, big horns with a kind of brass mouthpiece." "What kind, exactly? Something like a trumpet?" "Yeah, but with a much narrower cup. After that, coming more to the West, some other folks put on a double reed, and the Hungarians put on a clarinet-like mouthpiece. But the sound still has a very nasal kind of sound from all this Oriental sound feeling." "It seems to me like your development as a tenor saxophone player, or reeds player in

saxophones, has kind of turned through this Moroccan music and this Far Eastern instrument into the tradition of horns in shamanistic cultures and musics. Is this a direction you want to explore for a while as a horn player, more than the fingering and all the notes and so on that came with Western instruments?" "Oh yeah. I never was a world champion in all the notes and that way of playing. That never interested me." "How did the fall of the Wall and subsequent changes in Germany affect your life in music here, both the spirit and the business of it?" "I don't think it affected the spirit at all. I think we had enough contacts established early so that when the Wall tumbled down I think we were really some of the only people who knew what was going on in this country about the daily situation, the daily life of our comrades there. All the speeches after the Wall fell down from the politicians, you could see they never had been there before. Maybe they'd stayed a day or two in the one beautiful hotel," he laughs, "but we knew the way of life there, and not all of it was so bad, at all. But the fall of the Wall didn't touch my musical way of thinking and work, no. "It was for meI always liked to go over there, and I think I was one of the guys who went over whenever there was a possibility to play. I think I'm a kind of very Prussian guy, my family comes from the East, and both of my family roots are there, my education is like that, and the language I think is a very important link, and landscapes, and history so I always was very keen on going there and seeing things, and people, and seeing the problems. "The only result for us as musicians is that we don't work over there so much anymore. After the Change, the big festivals we had beforein Leipzig, Dresden or whateverimmediately switched over to the Herbie Hancocks and American software," he laughs, "and we had no chance any more. I still have connections, and I will go in October or November for a couple of days again, but the good old days when you could

really go from Rostock to Sud in the south and criss-cross from Frankfurt-Oder to Magdelburg and spend fourteen days there playing every nightthis time is over. The people, of course, have other problems. It's now getting to a point of 'normal,' like in the West. Here in the West the situation is not so good either. Most of my work I do in foreign countries." "What are the other places you play the most at this time?" "It's always changing. As you know, I'm going quite a lot to the U.S.; sometimes a little bit of Canada is connected, Japan, every year for a month or so..." "In the U.S. it's usually New York, Chicago . ." " and Atlanta. I've built up some connections traveling around too; there are big audiences there. It's very funny, because it's always a money problem, because you know the money for this kind of music you're lucky if you bring a couple of dollars back home. Western Europe, Eastern Europe is the same money problem, because I don't want to be paid in rubles; I can throw these away, or give them to an old grandma on the corner, you know" "I've noticed that the players from the East are, if anything, a little more understandable and accessible to American jazz-listening ears than those in the West. Who are some of the players in the East that you've worked with the most? I know you've worked with Gnter Sommer a bit." "Yeah, we tried a trio with Uli Gumpert about five or six years ago for a short time that was right after the Wall felland Hannes Bauer, the younger brother of Connie Bauer, I like very much, and he was always in my bigger groups when I needed a trombone player. Uli is a very sensitive guy, and a very good pianistI have the feeling that he has his problems in finding his way in this new situation. He isn't playing too often, I think, and I don't know how he makes his living. I think he did a couple of TV series productions, wrote some music for thatbut I think the guys couldn't make it here so well. "

"Living here in Wuppertal is a trumpet playerHeinz Beckeryou know the name, I'm sureand, as you know, trumpet players are very rare in this music, and he is a good oneat least he was a good one, in the GDRand he came over before the Wall fell down, andhe couldn't make it here. I mean, I tried to help himeverybody tried to help himbut nothing at all. I don't know" "A psychological thing?" "I think so. Klaus Koch, for example: an excellent bass player, but he stays at home, works only with old friends; he never was able to make it in the West. Hannes, the trombonist, I think he was young enough at the time we first came to the GDR; he was very young, had just finished the army, and he was playing in a very special band over thereso he was open already and could come over and get a lot of ideas about how it was going here. Connie always had, from before, his connections, especially the Scandinavian. But some of them just don't know what to do." "Much like the problems the Eastern people as a whole are having?" "Yeah." "You did this Free Jazz with Children. Have you generally been involved with bringing improvisation into an educational setting, or with private lessons or such?" "No, that was a part of a summer holiday program of the Academy of Arts. In those years we had quite a good connection with them, and they asked me and the trio to try and prepare instruments and simple situations for amateurs, to make some kind of holiday activities for some kids interested in music, from ages four to fourteen. Some could play instruments already; we said yes, because it was a job and it was paid. At that time, the lady who was manning the music department, she was really so very sweetwe all wanted to do it. And, you know, in these years Berlin still had some money for these kinds of programs, education, jazz in schools. "I remember a time, in the night, Misha, Han and I played in some clubs, then just took a shower and went to some school concerts in the morning at 9 a.m. or so. So we

made some instruments, some very simple things. We had a couple of prepared pianos, we had all kinds of little things you could make noises with. We had some real pianos, so some nice young ladies could play the Moonlight Sonata, things like that. "We were busy all week, and in a way it was very nice. You could see that the kids had no idea about instruments, just jumped into everything. They tried to play, organized little groups, and we played a little bit around. The interesting thing was that the nice young lady could play, for example, the Moonlight Sonata, and after seven days she still was sitting alone there playing the Moonlight Sonata," he laughs. "So it was a nice little example of social behavior and making things possible. What can you do with a young person, with parents and teachers already; they get to some point where they never will get away from that nonsense." "So that's not really been a part of your musical life." "No, it was a nice interesting week, because you could study human behavior, and we tried to leave it open as much as possible. Or was it so nice? Anyway, it was interesting. For the last concert we invited Don Cherry and we had the afternoon concert with the kidstwenty-four or soand the trio, and Donand Don, you know, with kids, always was something, you know," he laughs. "We played a little, kept very in the background Don and the kids played some songs, and I tried my best not to blow them away, he laughs. "But then, I had time enough to watch the parents who attended, family friends, or whatever. They were so fucking stupid. Whenever they saw that their son or daughter didn't assert themselves enough, they said, 'Hey, go on, get up there, work!' you know. Oh-h-h-h," he moans, "so it waswe finished that after a time and played quite a nice concert with just Don and the trio. "But no, for me, and I think for all of us, it was mostly just a nice study in human behavior." "When you think about the whole thirty or so years as a saxophonist in improvised

music, what do you think of having learned sheerly in terms of your relationship with your horn and music, in terms of things like breath, fingering, tone, whatever aspects you may have noticed?" "I remember the first time I met Evan [Parker], and Evan heard me playing on a very bad old saxophone, very cheap shit, but he said, 'Hey, how do you make such a sound?' Because at that time he was just coming out of the very normal early Coltrane school, and he had a completely different sound from what he developed after that. He said, 'How do you make it?' Because my embouchure was totally wrong in terms of formal conventional training; I still blow it very open, I don't press so much, I let it vibrate much more and things like that. So for once in my life I could tell Evan a little secret! I got a lot back from him" "I had a good interview with him in Nickelsdorf, and he told me about that time, what a revelation it was for him. How, then, with your relationship to your horn, as your body has aged, how do you approach it differently?" "As soon as I get the horn in my mouth and feel it and have it close to me, it goes. But I must say that all the travelingl'm not thirty any more, and it's not easy to accept that sometimes. Sometimes I feel like it, but it's not the same. I think all of us older guys, we have to take more care of our health much more than even ten years ago, or fifteen, but it's hard work, and it's stress, and it's all kinds of really heavy shit (laughs). As soon as you play and as long as you take care, a little, about the bodyand the drinking so much is not possible any more. I still like it, but for work, it's not possible." "I notice you're not a smoker." "No. After a nice dinner, a cigar from time to time, maybe once a week, or sometimes once a month, but that's it. I was a heavy smoker, heavy Dutch European shit, heavy black stuff, and there was a time I started to feel pain in my lungs, so I could decide. No, there was no problem with that." Listen to CD 7/2, tracks 14-15

**** Brtzmann told Witherden he likes "to be totally pumped up after a gig, so the mind is empty and the body is falling apart" (41). Heffley is in that state himself now, as I dismount him after his own long set with Brtzmann. I let him linger as long as he wants here in Olympus to finish his workcollect himself and his thoughts, organize the interview material to his tastes. I feel real affection for this old horse. How many others would have been psychological and physical wrecks at this point in their lives, having been ridden so relentlessly for so long? The earthly phenomena housing these numinous Olympian moments are the Greek restaurant around the corner from Brtzmann's, then a ride on the Schwebebahn, the train hung on an overhead rail directly over the Wupper River, whisking MY horse like some Valkyrie over the Rhine, while he muses over and sorts through his work. Every word is gold, at first; as in a free-music gig, whatever happens in the time it happens seems sacred, significant, obsessively fascinating. As time passes, even the artist-shaman in him that would have snarled like a bitch protecting her pups at any attempts to evaluate, judge, interpret, claim them well, let's say even the bitch assesses those pups for their (and her) readiness to leave the teat and take on the world. Heffley is looking at his time together with Brtzmann as a whole, a three-hour moment whose flow of words is contained in a shifting shimmer of gold and black and white. It is not words on a page he sees but the actual time of their exchange in the world. His eyes excise, laser-like, the opening words exchanged: three pages worth of Brtzmann's personal and FMP history he could work into the chapter (Six) on FMP; he leaves in the large chunk following because historical recount gave way to the inner experience of Brtzmann's own perception of the history now, and to Heffley's, and the conversation was dynamic and balanceda medium making itself its messages touching on the idea of breath-based rather than heartbeat-based improvisation on the poignancy of falling in first, formative love with an "other," changing "self" forever, but

having no response to make to that love except what "self" can be and make, the thrill and joy when that proves to be love's own response the sense of place of Wuppertal the suggestion of synsthesia in the involvement with painting (of music's flow with vision's moment) the economic challenges of the moment, the musical and personal contours of its projectsof most interest, the solid, active links with African-Americans, Africans, Japanese, after a career marked by a very public individuation from American jazz, and by proactive, even defensive assertions of European and German identities the issues of composition and improvisation in which he wants to couch this look at the players the talk about the Wall coming down, the East-West thing (Brtzmann's identification of himself as Prussian catches Heffley's eye immediately; this would be of great interest in considering the nature of the relationship between the West and East German players) the telling observations of childhood education-socialization at work, the contrast between (per Hall) acquired (improvisatory) and formal/technical (performative) culture, their conflict in action the confirmation of the music's contemplative as well as cathartic aspects, and of its timeless value thereby to the artist as an older man, matching or exceeding that it held for the younger. All this Heffley blessed with his eyes, caused it to grow in its goldness. He would mix it in with the other exchanges, make them all a delicious stew cooked slow over Olympian fire, for all the world to sup for millennia to come. What wouldn't go in was some twelve pages worth of gossip and chitchat, some griping, most affectionate, all respectful, about musicians and others Brtzmann had worked with. Maybe some of that material would work in the spoken narrative framing the musical examples supplementing the text. Nowwhat about that problem of time slipping around like an episode of Star Trek? He supposed he couldshouldattend to it for a moment or two, while there was a lull in the Olympian action. I glanced at him, his body, far below, finishing off its meal in the Greek restaurant, riding the rails in the air over water, a freight he could never hop in his

own land. He didn't seem to be suffering unduly from these disjunctures between "I" and "he," between the vertical and horizontal, no-time and time, Moment and Flow; he seemed to realize that he was messing with forces beyond his control, certainly beyond that of his rational intellect. Why shouldn't his rational inquiries into musical and biological time trigger his own body's experience of linear time's chimeric evanescence? Why shouldn't his rational inquiries into the Urgrund of Western and African history and cultural identities become his own visits to , and his own possession by the "spirits" there? What do you expect to come of his inquiries into the nature of consciousness as both personal and universal, both immanent and transcendent, other than his own possession by, out of all such spirits, ME?