Peter Brötzmann, Lisle Ellis,
Marco Eneidi, Jackson Krall
Live at Spruce Street Forum
(Botticelli 1015)
Nos. 1-5 (57:09)
Brötzmann, ts, tarogato, cl; Eneidi, as; Ellis, b; Krall, d. San Diego , CA , 24 Mar 2002.
Recent Brötzmann recordings have been as powerful as ever, but often distressingly rational. Live at Spruce Street Forum, I’m glad to report, sounds completely bonkers. The longstanding Eneidi/Ellis/Krall trio doesn’t bother extending their guest any “after-you” courtesies: they just start blowing and make Brötzmann force his way in. The 16-minute opener is a sheer, brutal joy, beginning with five minutes of just the core trio – Krall’s quickwitted, free-but-funky drumming, Ellis’s talking bass, Eneidi’s rude, Lyonsish alto – before Brötzmann enters the fray and all hell breaks loose. Part 2 is more measured (groovy freebop rather than a bloodbath, the musicians actually taking turns to solo, Eneidi at times downright tuneful) but Brötz’s stubbornly incoherent clarinet babbling keeps things from getting too comfy, and the track ends with a convincingly ugly brawl. Part 3 is a bagatelle – a cute little two-minute onslaught – and part 4 is almost lyrical, a dismembered free-form balladish thing harking back to Ornette’s Atlantic period. As you’d expect, this musical truce proves temporary, and it’s almost a relief when on the fifth and final track the four musicians resume hostilities. Hourlong screamfests can be exhausting experiences – the kind of thing you put on the stereo only in the right mood – but not this one: Live at Spruce Street Forum is curiously addictive, and I’ve found that in order to appreciate the music’s finer nuances (that’s a joke, by the way) the best solution is to play the whole thing repeatedly from beginning to end at high volume. Discerning neighbours and family members will thank you.
Nate Dorward
Cadence, April 2005
I ended up stuck reviewing this one twice: the second time was for Signal to Noise. (Complicated story I won’t go into . . . ) The second review was completely new rather than a self-plagiarism, but it was very much a second-best piece: it runs:
Peter Brötzmann has become something of an elder statesman in the free-jazz world. Sometimes he plays like an elder statesman, too: he’s still tremendously loud, of course, but nowadays often sombre, dignified, a bit poker-faced. Live at Spruce Street Forum is a different matter, though: a fastmoving, ornery, viscerally ugly encounter with the longstanding Marco Eneidi/Lisle Ellis/Jackson Krall trio. These are tough customers indeed, disinclined to give any quarter, and much of the excitement is in hearing Brötzmann forced to fight his way into the thick of things rather than deferred to or played around. Yet the album never turns into a dreary wall of noise: it’s vibrant and surprisingly kaleidoscopic music. Of the five untitled improvisations, the three central pieces are relatively tractable (there’s even some Ornettish swingtime in part 4); parts 1 and 5, by contrast, are spectacular four-way showdowns: the horns squalling and scribbling frantically, each refusing to cede any ground to the other, Ellis jabbing and punching like Mingus in a particularly foul mood, Krall throwing accents at the hornplayers like he’s flinging dinnerplates at their heads. It’s all quite gloriously demented, and the album comes strongly recommended to Brötzologists and other connoisseurs of sonic blood sports.
