For comparison, UMS has included the live version, recorded two months earlier at the Frankfurt Jazz Festival, adding Gerd Dudek to the ensemble. For this reissue, we have resequenced the CD as the original LP, followed by the two extant alternate takes.
'Machine Gun' was a watershed - and even if it has taken four decades to find its appreciative audience, it is now an essential recording, both in terms of the development of free music in Europe and taken on its own merits, outside of the context of its creation. As Brötzmann has said: 'It was the feeling, the very naive feeling that we could take a little part in changing the world.' Adopting its title from Don Cherry's nickname for Brötzmann, 'Machine Gun' drew on the huge horn section of Lionel Hampton's 'Flying Home' for inspiration, translating the hilarious saxophonic power of the jump blues and Illinois Jacquet's booting and hollering into an abstraction painted with a flame-thrower, a la Alberto Burri. That was the impetus behind Peter Brötzmann's composition and subsequent LP, Machine Gun. But in Paris during the spring of '68, the students took the reins, and across northern Europe, a euphoric attitude had spread, charged by a sense that the world was not stuck forever but in fact could be changed. This in spite of the fact that the shitheads seemed to have the upper hand, with the quagmire of Vietnam, the intractability of the American struggle for Civil Rights, Martin Luther King's assassination, the 'shoot to kill' order in Chicago. In 1968, there was a palpable sense of optimism in the air. That water heater was a casualty of war, and its shooting was just one of those things that happens when you’re abruptly levitated out of bed in shock and awe in the form of some ferocious Pharaoh Sanders.
Posted on Feb.Arguably the single-most important landmark in European free music: the original BRO Records LP restored to its '68 format, with two alternate takes, new liner notes by Brötzmann and John Corbett - PLUS the only live version of 'Machine Gun' ever recorded. We didn’t mean to shoot the water heater. Don't be daunted by the large file size - about 27Mb, I'm afraid - just grab this one and surrender to it. This train takes all passengers, and offers them one of the most spectacular rides ever. Worried on two fronts: what if it's too much of an atonal mess for me to cope with, and what if it doesn't live up to the hype? Have no fear. With a line-up including such luminaries as Evan Parker and Han Bennink, it's one of those recordings I was always nervous about approaching. This album was recorded in 1968, and it's lost none of its power since then. Machine Gun - it's better than carving shit poetry into your arms. That'll teach him a thing or two about free expression.
Then go out into the street and find your nearest emo kid, stick him in a headlock and play this to him at full volume. Listen to this, and give yourself a break to adjust to the mental cobwebs being cleared. Listen to it through headphones, and it really does sound as if you're at the eye of the storm, with the octet raging about you. One of the most striking things about this album, and one that hardly ever seems to get noticed by critics, is the very marked stereo separation. It's raw and powerful, and absolutely captivating. If Brötzmann playing as if he was going to burst a lung is harsh enough, what's it going to sound like when the entire band is doing it?įrom the very first note, you know this is going to be something special. It features some of the hardest, most furious playing ever committed to tape. Machine Gun is legendary amongst fans of free jazz. For years I had been scared of this record.