Peter Brotzmann - The Inexplicable Flyswatter - Book / CD combo

Artist: Peter Brotzmann | Label: Atavistic | Format: Book / CD Combo | Genre: Free Jazz / Art | Condition: New (Open) 

Peter Brötzmann is best known as one of the founders of European improvised music and one of the most powerful and original jazz saxophonists of the post-60's era, but in fact began his creative life as a painter and even established ties with members of the Fluxus movement, primarily Nam June Paik.

With a burgeoning career in music, Brötzmann's artwork has been kept a private activity over the years, with infrequent exhibitions and graphic design work done for album covers and posters. In late 2002, the first major retrospective of Brötzmann's visual art was finally mounted at Ystads Konstmuseum in Sweden.

Curated by John Corbett, in collaboration with the artist, the first North American exhibition of Brötzmann's visual art, The Inexplicable Flyswatter, follows up on the Swedish retrospective, focusing on a set of pieces that were left out of that show. The primary subject of the exhibition is a set of over 50 works on paper (paintings, collages, lithographs) created over a four year period, more than half of which focus on a common, peculiar image: the flyswatter.

This 48-page four-color catalog contains nearly 50 reproductions of Brötzmann's work, including most of the pieces in the exhibition, as well as a dozen previously unseen photographs from the period, which include images of Brötzmann demonstrating some of Paik's installation pieces in 1963. An in-depth essay by Corbett sets the context for Brötzmann's work and explores the transitional period of the early '60s, when Brötzmann shifted his focus from being a visual artist to being a musician. Two interviews with Brötzmann are included, one from 2002 (concerning the relationship between his art and his music) and an incredibly rare archival interview from 1965 (concerning his music).

An audio version of the early interview is included in the catalog, along with two previously unknown quartet musical recordings (also featuring bassist Peter Kowald in his earliest recording yet released), predating the earliest Brötzmann music yet publicly available by two years. The percolating rhythm section brings out a heretofore unheard post-bop aspect of young Brötzmann. The package's enhanced CD features three films, as well, all from the early '60s, shot and edited by early Brötzmann colleague Manfred Montwé. Two of these short silent films feature Brötzmann's trio in '64, with beautiful hand coloring and distortion of the film by Montwé, while the other film is an incredibly important, previously unknown document of a major Fluxus festival in Amsterdam in 1963, which features Brötzmann alongside Fluxus founder George Maciunas, Emmett Williams, Tomas Schmit and others..

Long out of print, this NEW, but open BOOK is accompanied with a CD