Like the sound of flesh being torn from a spindly set of bones? Then chances are you already know Peter Brötzmann's music. The German saxophonist has made a career out of the kind of ear-shredding, lung-collapsing free jazz that makes most mortals run screaming for cover when it's thrown on the stereo; 36 years and counting from the release of his first record, Brötzmann still possesses the sandblasting tone that made his early LPs and performances the stuff of legend. As the story goes, at one moment of particularly divine inspiration, the man blew through his horn so hard that he burst a blood vessel in his forehead. If that's not hardcore, I don't know what the hell is.
More Nipples is the fifth archival Brötzmann release from Atavistic, under the wing of Chicago jazz gadfly John Corbett's Unheard Music Series. Although these tracks had been previously unavailable since being recorded in 1969, they come from the same meetings that produced Brötzmann's original Nipples LP (hence the title). This session from April 18, 1969 put British improvisers Evan Parker and Derek Bailey into a once-in-a-lifetime sextet with Germans Brötzmann and Buschi Niebergall, and Dutch radicals Han Bennink and Fred van Hove (they'd record as a quartet 6 days, later minus the Brits). Unlike the alternate take filler that ruins most perfectly good jazz reissues, these are easily as good as the pieces that made it onto the original Nipples, and for 34-year-old tracks never intended for release, these recordings are astonishingly clean.
The title track is 17 minutes of some of the most important music in the history of European free jazz-- a second run through the only piece recorded by this particular European Union of musicians. As it unfolds with duos and trios crystallizing from the splinters of the entire group's nuclear mass, it's even more apparent how well these guys understood each other's playing, to the point of being conscious of what the group performance sounded like as a whole. There are moments-- like Bennink's percussion fadeout on the precipice of Niebergall's bass solo-- that make it seem inconceivable these changes weren't written out beforehand. It's also an unfortunate reminder of how compatible Brötzmann and Parker's polar opposite styles were-- if only their egos hadn't been too overpowering for them to work together very often after these recordings.
Of the quartet tracks, "Fiddle-Faddle" is the least revelatory, blistering along at an even keel with fairly programmatic free jazz structure until Niebergall's percussive bass and Bennink's hydra-limbed drum attack whirl up a remarkable climax. "Fat Man Walks", on the other hand, is quite unusual in comparison to the rest of Brötzmann's late-60s work-- or just about any other European improv from that era. The piece is built off of a peculiar gospel chord progression played by van Hove, setting up a melodic straitjacket that Brötzmann spends the song's first half trying to get loose from; when he finally succeeds, the force is so overwhelming that only Bennink can keep pace.
Don't let the fact that these are outtakes scare you away from this disc, because this stuff is essential to anyone interested in how Herr Brötzmann earned his status as one of the most devastating forces to ever touch a saxophone. We can all benefit from a few more nipples in our lives.
