

#Peter brotzmann biography series#
Ken Vandermark has been riding the same nerve in a controversial series of postings this month to the on-line All About Jazz forum. So why is he so often caricatured? Perhaps because a finer grasp of him might pinch one of the music world's more sensitive nerves. Lately he's led large-group work with his internationalist Chicago Tentet, as well as smaller ensembles including Sonore, a sax trio with Tentet front-line players Ken Vandermark of Chicago and Mats Gustafsson of Sweden, who are on tour in Canada this week. One detractor will say Brotzmann ripped off black American innovators, another that he spat up a new European conceptualism and broke with jazz - fables that say more about the tellers than the told.Īt 63, Brotzmann has collaborated as widely as any musician, with 1960s trumpet sorcerer Don Cherry, free-grooving drummer Hamid Drake today, electric bassist Bill Laswell in fusion group Last Exit in the 1980s, and Japanese electronic trumpeter Toshinori Kondo in the 1990s.

The Brotzmann-Man will get you if you don't stay under the covers.Īfter 40 years in the deep grass of international improvised music, he's still mythologized as the rampaging German saxophone guerrilla-gorilla for his landmark 1968 barrage, He currently tours and holds workshops in improvisational music and percussion technique, and teaches private lessons in rhythmic analysis, music composition, and percussion technique.If jazz were a fairy tale, Peter Brotzmann could be the bogey parents invoked to keep kids in bed:

Zerang has collaborated extensively with contemporary theater, dance, and other multidisciplinary forms and has received three Joseph Jefferson Awards for Original Music Composition in Theater, in collaboration with Redmoon Theater, in 1996, 1998, and 2000. As a percussionist, composer and collaborator, Zerang has over one hundred titles in his discography and has toured nationally and internationally to 35 countries since 1981, and works with and ever-widening pool of collaborators, primarily in The United States, Western and Eastern Europe.
#Peter brotzmann biography professional#
He has been a professional musician, composer, and producer since 1976, focusing extensively on improvised music, free jazz, contemporary composition, puppet theater, experimental theater, and international musical forms. Michael Zerang was born in Chicago, Illinois, and is a first-generation American of Assyrian decent. Incorporating Afro-Cuban, Indian, and African percussion instruments and influence, in addition to using the standard trap set, Drake has collaborated extensively with top free jazz improvisers Peter Brotzmann, Fred Anderson, and Ken Vandermark, among others. By the close of the 1990s, Hamid Drake was widely regarded as one of the best percussionists in improvised music. Hamid Drake has been a member of the Latin jazz band Night on Earth, the Georg Graewe Quartet, the DKV Trio, Peter Brotzmann’s Chicago Octet/Tentet, and Liof Munimula, the oldest free improvising ensemble in Chicago. An eclectic cross genre, cross cultural program with Afro-Cuban, Jazz, Middle Eastern, and Indian influences and utilize instruments including bendir, daq, djembe, tabla, dumbek, and trap sets. Special attention will be paid to the Frame Drum, of ancient Mesopotamian origins. Chicago percussionist/composers Zerang and Drake presenting work utilizing a variety of percussion instrument from the Middle East, Africa and East India.
