Two old wizards join forces for primal magic.
Prime German avanteer Peter Brötzmann (77) squints his eyes shut and lets his tenor sax do the emoting with a rough-grained tone and a midrange scramble of overblown notes that seems no more repetitive than Niagara Falls.
Draped in knee-length white hair, skinny Keiji Haino (66) eggs Brötzmann on, jumping around like a bullfrog and accenting the sax torrent with vigorous and sublimely timed clashes of two marching-band cymbals. He eventually moves on to evil vocal mutterings, and then to vicious but precise chordal attacks upon an electric guitar, all in holy union with Brötzmann.
Both musicians use octave splitters to make their sounds bigger, and that means real big. They grip us by the neck, shake us and never let go, making our cells rub together until the flesh ignites and disperses into a magnetic communal cloud.
Albert Ayler and Sunny Murray used to accomplish something like this with sax and drums, and a diminishing cabal of freejazzfolk (Archie Shepp, William Parker) have kept the flame lit. But the fierceness of the fire depends on the weather, and the grass must have been crispy this night.
Before the performance, the DJ spun some inspiring '70s free groove out of St. Louis. What was that? Gimme.
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PHOTO BY FUZZY BURG.