Han Bennink/Peter Brötzmann - In Amherst 2006

BRO C

Reuniting after nearly a quarter-century of absence in 2005, the pairing of reedman Peter Brötzmann and drummer Han Bennink was long a formidable one in European free improvisation. A listing of their appearances from 1968 through 1980 casts light on a staggering number of fascinating sides, many among them hideously rare (say what you will about the music, not too many originals of Haazz and Company float around the ether). But as their paths diverged in ensuing years, Brötzmann becoming a master of his very own small house and Bennink engaging swing and bebop proclivities more readily on a pared-down kit, it might have been no surprise that Still Quite Popular After All Those Years (BRO-4, 2005) was a sight more introspective than their duos on FMP and GUA-Bunge. Indeed, a set at the Vision Festival around that time was characterized by a critic friend of mine as “English” (whatever that means). Their approaches refined separately, In Amherst 2006 tames the beast of forty years while still letting it roar when necessary.

A blistering combination of tarogato, drums, the stage and Bennink’s sticks, “Every Man Is Me” starts the set right where they left off years before, the drummer’s kitchen sink of kinetic junk-sculpture replaced by a similar array of sounds/rhythms on a traditional kit. On the Romanian single-reed horn, Brötzmann occupies a narrow range of sinewy, dervish-like lines and terse multiphonics as everything from free-time to shuffles to near breaks to a drum choir give the engine a major shove. The dadaist gesture is part of what made the pair’s music (and in trio with pianist Fred Van Hove) in the Sixties and Seventies so uniquely powerful – irreverent, insane and as serious as a blow to the head. That requires, in many ways, a visual actualization and it’s hard not to think of Bennink with a foot on a snare and a drumstick in his mouth, even today. But without that visualization on record, one is left with something else and equal – a kaleidoscopic drummer and an extraordinarily nuanced reedman in an exchange, willful destruction and growth of ideas. An Ayler-to-klezmer clarinet digs at “I Am His Brother,” prodded and subsumed by hot floes of brushwork, while intricate percussive minutiae open “No Man Is My Enemy,” before hearkening back to the whoops, hollers and Milford-falling-down-the-stairs of old. Here, Brötzmann’s alto is dripping with bluesy pathos, kindling for future squalls. This is one hell of a pairing, even without the Black Forest, a brook and a broken clarinet.

~ Clifford Allen