At age 75, saxophone/clarinet/taragato player Peter Brötzmann could easily coast on past accomplishments. Instead, the German free-jazz founder is forging new relationships and touring them around the world. This duo with pedal-steel guitarist Heather Leigh (Charalambides, Scorces, Tarpis Tula) proves to be a simpatico pairing on this 28-minute set, which was recorded late last year in Poland. Leigh, who grew up in the U.S. and lives in Scotland, bypasses her instrument’s genre-based baggage and instead generates fluctuating swells, ghostly harmonic chimes and swirling maelstroms of pure sound.
Brötzmann’s vocabulary has been thoroughly documented for half a century and is consequently more familiar. Shifting between four different horns, he ranges freely between stark, eerie laments and brutal, hammering squalls. Together, they summon the phantoms of past and present tragedies and set them alight on a pier of incandescent sound.
—Bill Meyer
