Conny Bauer, photo: Anno Dittmer Peter Brötzmann, photo: Michael Hoefner, www.zwo5.de

“These two musicians from the dawn of European free-jazz understood each other immediately. It were as if their long period of separation had never happened, performing like a well rehearsed duo, harmonizing superbly with one another. With great joy they passed musical beach balls to each other, taking up the other’s ideas in a congenial manner and processing them in highly creative ways. [...]”
13.08.2001, Westdeutsche Zeitung, Hartmut Sassenhausen

Peter Brötzmann

Peter Brötzmann (born 1941, Remscheid) taught himself clarinet and saxophone. Today as a jazz musician he has an enormous influence on European free jazz. His energetic and distinctive playing style lead to the coining of the verb brötzen, literally ‘to brötz’, in free jazz circles. His 1968 album Machine Gun (recorded with Peter Kowald amongst others) is regarded today as one of the most provocative works in modern European jazz history. In 1968 he became member of the jazz-noise group Last Exit alongside Sonny Sharrock and Ronald Shannon Jackson. Since 2002 he has been playing with the trio Sonore with Ken Vandermark and Mats Gustafsson. From the late sixties onwards he has also lead a number of renowned larger international ensembles. The latest – and one of the best – of these is the Peter Brötzmann Chicago Tentet, which he formed in 1997.

Conny Bauer

Conny Bauer (born 1943 in Halle an der Saale), is one of Europe’s most significant trombonists. Since the start of the 70’s he has been a founding member of numerous groups such as Exis, FEZ, Konrad Bauer Quartet, Bauer Sommer Kowald Trio, Doppelmoppel, Zentralquartett as well as the initiator of the big band Klangprojekt 86 (which later became the Jazzorchester der DDR).

Bauer gave his debut solo trombone concert in 1974.Today, over 35 years later he continues to explore and experiment with this instrument, continually developing new worlds of sound for himself and his audiences.

“In the seventies Peter Brötzmann was one of the most conspicuous figures in West German free jazz. His saxophone style – often wrongly understood as pure power play, spurred audiences from one ecstasy to the next.
At the same time trombonist Konrad Conny Bauer was at the forefront of the East Berlin avant-garde jazz scene, a tireless explorer of his instrument with an anarchic sense of fun and und level-headed artistic judgement…”
18. 07. 2002, Berliner Morgenpost

Conny Bauer “bewilders and fascinates, bringing contrasts such as loud and quiet, dynamism and wallowing, filigrees and flatness into the mix. Out of that he develops concise tales, deploying ideas such as chorals welling up, marches starting, bumblebees buzzing, alpenhorns calling out. He rumbles, grunts, squeaks, carols and swings, all without flogging the ideas to death.”
5/2007 edition, SONIC magazine, Ulrich Steinmetzger

[…] “Peter Brötzmann is a great modernist who attacks every reed instrument he can lay his hands on with an unflagging and inexhaustible commitment. Listening to him is like being caught in a tropical storm with all the doors and windows in every room in the house left open to the devious temper of the elements.” […]
09/1999, www. furious.com, Steve Kulak