Along the Way

Improvisations on the road, on tour. “Being on the road so much the time-space between the tours is not big enough for preparing big canvases and starting oil-paintings. You use what´s on the table - paper, cardboard, an empty cigar box, pens, felts and brushes, ink in a glass or a Chinese ink stone. You use what there is and that´s what we musicians call improvise and that´s what the works in this book are about [and my life too] : IMPROVISATION” (Peter Brötzmann) “The art that Brötzmann produces was always there, it was there before the beginning of time. It was there before he became “Machine Gun”. For the public eye this art was initially used to support his designs, you see sculptures, collages, later also watercolors etc. as the starting point or ball-bearing of what became the incredible string of fantastic record covers, posters, fliers etc. of the past 50+ years. The art of Brötzmann, the visual art is the kind of art that he is able to do anytime anywhere. It is about finding something that was lost and once he finds it, he just recombines it into that which becomes his art. Simple. But maybe he also tricks us into thinking that. What is clear to see is that he can take three crayons and some discarded piece of paper, paper that is always around us and then, in what looks like nano-seconds, he sketches a vibrant representation of something that often can be associated with “Home” (a cup, a house, a tray) and/or “Away” (a ship, a landscape). And these small but primary interventions make us see the things that we usually do not see, the potentialities that we so often discard and leave behind as we just continue, pass by, walk on.” (Markus Müller) With text contributions by Peter Brötzmann, Thomas Millroth, John Corbett, Markus Müller, Sotiris Kontos, Stephen O´Malley, Heather Leigh, Karl Lippegaus