Peter Brötzmann was an exceptional human being who lived his life covered by a blanket of compassion. His music and artwork showed his heart for all living things. Peter was very close to nature trees, mountains, skies, and poetry, and he loved everything that showed the beauty of life. Whenever he blew his saxophone, he broke down walls of hate and pretension, replanting trees through sound. Loving him was more important than understanding him. Peter was a conduit for new cosmic music that could float over all the rhythms of the world. Playing with Peter, I was offered all the freedom in music. I could play any time, pulse, dance, or pattern to help the music find itself. It was always a joy to meet, tour, hearing the sounds playing pure music inspired by everyone from Louis Armstrong to Rev Frank Wright. Going up to the spirit house every time we played. Peter Brötzmann was the real deal reflecting on the state of the world. He could speak without saying a word – a bold and courageous man who did not go down without a fight. One group was called Die Like A Dog, Peter died like an angel, and angels never die.
William Parker

“When you hear music,
After it’s over, it’s gone
In the air. You can never
Capture it again.”

Eric Dolphy had it right. Peter Brötzmann is gone and an era has ended. Another giant is gone, and his like will never pass this way again. I had the pleasure and honour to share the stage and music side by side with Mr Brötzmann many times since our first meeting in Paris in 1977. He and Han Bennink had an extraordinary duo. Han played everything, even the walls of the theatre, and Peter’s enormous sound was like nothing one could imagine. I was playing solo and shuddered to think how to follow that, but from the very first, he welcomed me as a brother. 20 years later and for the next 15 years, I had the great fortune to be a part of his legendary Chicago Tentet.

Just two weeks before he passed, I received an email from Peter that I’d like to share which reveals a side of Peter perhaps few knew but which brings who he was full circle:

just a piece of an old cactus in the sun
thinking of another one far away,
same age, darker in colour but a brother in soul ….. halt Dich gerade, old friend.
B
Joe McPhee

Peter
Fuck it. What can we say? The world is upside down. Not only because of the passing of one of the last men standing. We have to continue. We have to fight it all. People are stupid. It is a fact. We cannot avoid it. I can hear Peter repeating it over and over: “People are stupid.” We created the present world. We must deal with it. But change IS possible. We have to choose our path. We must do it ourselves. No other way. Fuck it. Peter would have said, “Naa Jaaa… just do it your way”. Fuck the other ways. No words are possible to describe the present emptiness. The world sounds and looks very different from now. We can share memories and ‘stories’, but it does not mean shit. Real sharing is on another level.

The legacy will be there. Always will. We need to work with that. In our own way. Finding our own ways. Let’s kick ass. Let’s make some change. Our way. Fuck it. Peter changed my way. Many times. He will continue to do so. Fuck it. ONE SOUND. The whole spectrum. The whole spectrum in ONE SOUND. No fucking around. Consistency. No compromises. Gerade aus.
Mats Gustafsson

Survival! That was one of Brötzmann’s key words. Human, Brötzmann… In 1990 I spent three months living in Brötzmann’s atelier. I was his gardener, his cleaner, his conversation partner, and sometimes probably just an annoying presence. We weren’t together 24 hours a day, but when we were, the space and time was guaranteed to be replete with his spiritual force. Sex was always in the air too… After I played at the Moers Festival, I remember seeing a two page article in Brötzmann’s local magazine that he had written about sex toys! I was shocked but he was so open about things like that.

Between 1990 and 2005, I toured Europe and Japan several times with Brötzmann. We were family… Still today, I feel that Brötzmann and Kondo showed me how to live. Brötzmann used to say that he was Amadeus reborn – and I’ve never doubted him. As I’ve got older myself, I’ve come to feel acutely how not being able to get it up any more has done something to my vitality. Those areas below the abdomen and the coccyx, that’s where the life energy truly resides. Without some action down there, there’s no way I could cross swords with Brötzmann.
Shoji Hano

As the last living member of Peter Brötzmann’s first trio, which self-produced Brötzmann’s debut LP with their own music, For Adolphe Sax, the following:

It was with Peter Kowald as driver and his mid-range car, a Borgward Isabella, a German make no longer being manufactured at the time, 1966/67, and thus it could be bought quite cheaply – endless journeys across Europe on the autobahns, with Brötzmann in front, his baritone saxophone between his legs, me in the back between the drums and the neck of the double bass.

In those early years when I played with the trio and the octet, everything was new: sound – overtones from the sax and bowed bass with free figuration on the drums, plus Brötzmann’s tremendous forward momentum, often mixed up with lots of beer in those days.

My way from the jazz cellars in Paris to Wuppertal with my three-wheeled moped and the drums on it, led across green borders and winding roads to a former stable in the back courtyard – my new home – on a hill in the city: “Auf dem Rott.” Brötzmann wrote letters to the promoters, Kowald drove, I practised. That's how it was!
Sven-Åke Johansson

I’ll miss all of the rituals and details around playing together: the walks, the talks, the cups of tea or bottles of coke, the botanical gardens, the museums, the seaside, a cigar while I smoke my joint, discussions about the state of the world, sitting on trains and planes, marvelling at wildlife, at landscapes, listening to the blues, stories about bars and brothels, stories about all of the greats in the arts, the greats in bars and brothels, the whistling, the gait and pace, taking photos together, cakes at cafes, tense soundchecks, sitting backstage. All of the rituals were at one with the music I made with Peter Brötzmann. He taught me to appreciate the little things in every aspect of life, to turn all of the little things into art and really live! I first saw Brötzmann in concert in Texas as a teenager. Never could I have imagined we’d one day develop such a close bond, that it would become one of the most important friendships and artistic collaborations of my life. It happened because he remained truly open until the end of his days, he was always curious and wanted to challenge his notions of music, of art. So when I contacted him out of the blue and invited him to play with me he said yes and at the heart of our collaboration was YES and it took us across the world, sharing our yes with any corner that would have us and we had fun, maybe just a little. It has all felt like a dream but it wasn’t a dream at all for Peter Brötzmann. It was the hard-earned reality of the dedicated artistic life. He thought he could change the world and he did.
Heather Leigh

Droves of Brötzmann stories come readily to mind. Many of them are measured in extremes: decibels and duration; shots of espresso and rounds of rum and coke; sexual escapades and consecutive nights on the road. There’s the time that, alone, going for a piss during a midnight party in Japan, he drunkenly fell into shark-infested water between two big docked ships, only to be discovered and saved by Toshinori Kondo. Or, again in Japan, the night he sat in, unamplified, with a rock band and blew so hard he broke some ribs. Back when he was still drinking, before a 17 year hiatus, his appetite was often difficult to comprehend – we went to a liquor store to get him a bottle of vodka before the start of his never-released second round of studio duets with drummer Hamid Drake, and he had consumed more than half the fifth by the time we broke for lunch. But these tales of heroic alcoholism and mondo music – something he sometimes called “the steaming life” – do not tell the whole story. Brötzmann had a very gentle, gentlemanly side, something experienced by anyone who visited his little Wuppertal compound, with its well-kept back garden and working artist studio in the rear shed.

In 2005, I arranged a two-week residency for Peter at Ox-Bow, the summer school associated with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Located on the eastern shores of Lake Michigan, in front of an elbow-shaped lagoon, Ox-Bow has been a rustic scene of art exploration for well over a century. Peter and I loaded into the Mason, a little wooden cabin with two rooms. Before the dinner bell rang, we took the walk through the woods, looping around the central area known as the Temple up to the overlook called the Crow’s Nest. From there, a panoramic view stretched across the lagoon, past the facing dunes, onto the great lake. Peter stood still, cigar peeking out from his extra-long jacket sleeve, surveying in silence. That first week, he spent the hot afternoons in the cabin with a portable recorder and his tarogato and alto saxophone, emerging as it cooled down to work on a series of woodblocks he would print later, including one depicting his near miss with the sharks in Japan. This was the start of a rekindled love of printmaking. And each morning he set out alone, before I woke, to hit the Crow’s Nest, smoke and sketch.

One night during the second week, around 3am, a ruckus erupted from up the hill at another cabin area. My wife Terri, who had joined us, and I lay quietly in our bunk as a couple of dozen half-naked, stoned and plotzed art students beat on metal tubs and whooped and hollered continuously. After about 20 minutes, from the other side of the wall, out of the pitch black, Peter’s voice rose in a whispering tone: “What ze fuck?!” Our ride home that weekend was wordless. I had the feeling that, in spite of some woodcuts, the residency had been a bit of a bust. Then, about a year later, preparing for Peter’s first exhibition at our gallery, Corbett vs Dempsey, he presented a group of new watercolours and ink drawings with titles like “Ox-Bow Landscape”, “Lagoon” and “The Dunes.” These images continued into his recent work. Peter told me that he thought about the view from the Crow’s Nest daily, that the experience of that terrain in that spot at that time, being off road in the woods up there, had, for some reason, been one of his fondest, along with the beaches of Slovenia and the valleys of his beloved Rhineland.
John Corbett

On the flight to our first Full Blast concert in the autumn of 2004 at the Knitting Factory, NYC, I confessed to Peter that I didn't really like playing with reed players – and he confessed to me that for him, after Bill Laswell and Last Exit, the chapter of electric bass was closed. Perfect conditions for more than 200 concerts together as Full Blast in 34 countries and 11 recordings until the pandemic!

We immediately found each other musically and personally. I was overwhelmed by Peter's sensitivity, the quality of his sound and his ability to build long arches – always ingeniously moderated by Michael Wertmueller on drums. Peter always had big ears and was an intense listener and interactor. If some of his co-players were not able to keep up or had nothing to oppose him, then he just played his thing, naturally. But with Michael and myself, it was almost a jazzy approach, depending on one another, listening and cheering each other on, allowing crossfades, stopping together. What followed over the many years of playing music together was the musical journey of my life – full of ecstasy, craziness, dedication and friendship.

In the end, the Covid period was a disaster for Peter’s health. He had been suffering from COPD for years, but constant touring and playing proved the best therapy and strengthened his lungs. The Covid break brought him down from 100 to zero. This inactivity weakened him dramatically – and in his condition Covid was a constant serious threat. But Peter fought his way back to the stage in late summer 2021. After musical highlights – it was like a miracle – with Full Blast in Duisburg (Ruhrtriennale) and Wuppertal (BRÖtz 80! festival), he unfortunately experienced a new setback, from which he never really recovered. During the last weeks of his life we knew about his deplorable condition. His death came nevertheless unexpectedly, all hope was in vain.
Marino Pliakas

THE SOUND AND FURY... I first met Peter Brötzmann in NYC in the early 80s, at one of Derek Bailey’s Company concerts, at a small artspace named Roulette. I had heard a lot about him. Mostly that he was a heavy drinker, and a kind of threatening character. As I was preparing to move to the back of the venue, Brötzmann appeared in the doorway, buzz cut, huge moustache, all in black, big leather coat, the Soldier of the Road. We met and quickly ascended to the bar directly across the street. That would set us on a path for the next few decades which could be described among other things as self-destructive. There were a lot of great times and some brutal sound explosions. I will think of him and the memories but for now, I wish it would rain.
Bill Laswell

Ah, Peter Brötzmann, my brother, friend and comrade. What a being he was and still is.

Peter and I met for the first time in Chicago. It was the summer of 1987. We did a concert at South End Music Works. I think I was the first of the Chicago musicians to work with Peter. From that first meeting onward it was non-stop. It would take up too much space to mention all the various collaborations.

Peter was a musician, visual artist, a father, and a friend to many. A complex man with many sides, challenges, hardships. Growing up right after the Second World War I’m sure had a tremendous impact upon him.

Good fortune allowed me to experience many of Peter’s various sides. His family etc...

He had a lot going on to say the least. But I also had the opportunity to witness a man with a heart of gold, who knew compassion, empathy, sadness, joy, pain and love.

Peter Bröztmann, the great enigma.

Peter Brotzmann, a human being to the fullest.

I love him and always will.
Hamid Drake

Thanks to Alan Cummings