It's easy within the intensity of saxophonist Peter Brötzmann's ensembles to lose sight of the musicality of his playing, to miss the waves within the energy. The linearity, the singularity of his thought is more easily absorbed, unsurprisingly, when he's on his own, as he is on Lost & Found, recorded in Nickelsdorf in 2006 and his first unaccompanied album recorded with an audience.
The album opens with a sort of clarion call, as if he were rallying himself (or maybe the audience) for the coming 45 minutes. And no doubt he plays hard, at least to start with, but the different paragraphs of the opening "Internal Rotation" are gripping. He follows that with the (relatively speaking) gentle (yet still persistent) title track, which begins almost as a ballad and makes its way slowly to quick eddies of notes, then strikes some actual bluesiness before resolving with dramatically slurred slides.
That 12-minute workout is executed quite stunningly on the B-flat clarinet. Elsewhere he is heard on alto and tenor saxophones and on the tarogato, a reed instrument something like a wooden soprano saxophone. The instrument, once known as a "Turkish pipe" has actually been used to sound battle cries, so it's an appropriate emblem for Brötzmann. However there's much more at stake in his music than the wages of war, and his solo concerts may be the best way to delve into the peaceful eye of his hurricane.
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