Peter Brötzmann is a German free jazz musician whose work over a near-50-year career has taken him from the interdisciplinary radicalism of the late-20th-century Fluxus art movement to extensive collaborative and solo recording and performance. Primarily a saxophonist and clarinettist, Brötzmann has worked with experimental greats such as the legendary Dutch drummer Han Bennink, British fellow saxophone powerhouse Evan Parker and Japanese sound artist Keiji Haino, exploring an avant-garde, largely improvisational style of free jazz with his signature rough timbre. Based in the West German industrial town of Wuppertal for almost his entire life, he recounts police encounters, race relations and making a living off of extreme music as a family man, in a country when it was just coming out of World War II.
