Soldier of the Road, A Portrait of Peter Brötzmann

Produced & directed by Bernard Josse, with interviews & photos by Gérard Rouy.

"Soldier of the Road is itself a remarkable composition, the bucolic park and gleaming high-speed trains of contemporary Europe contrasting sharply with Brötzmann's memories and the raw galvanizing power of his music, whether it's deeply reflective or charging toward apocalypse. As Evan Parker declares of him admiringly, "He's just a force of nature…directed through the saxophone."

What gives Soldier of the Road its special quality is the sheer visual acuity of so many of the participants. Brötzmann originally trained as a visual artist and he has continued to paint throughout his career, including the stark expressionist images of his LP and CD covers and posters. Rouy is both one of the most talented and the most committed of jazz photographers. Bernard Josse is a particularly skilful director—some of the live footage is as good as any jazz concert footage you'll see—and there are moments in his editing that are particularly telling, cutting from an image of Brötzmann walking away over a hill and co-ordinating it perfectly with the abstracted shapes of one of Brötzmann's landscape-derived paintings. Han Bennink, an accomplished visual artist himself, talks about Brötzmann the painter as well as the man and the musician, recalling the two of them collecting bird feathers for art works. Bennink's talk about the early days—there are still photos the two took while recording in the Black Forest in 1978 as well as Rouy's photos of them in a trio with Fred Van Hove—opens onto vistas of the free, intense expression that's at the core of Brötzmann's being, the central fact of Soldier of the Road and one that's both insistent and compelling…" ©Stuart Broomer - sept 2011

www.soldieroftheroad.com