Sites Holmquist trys, and often fails, to go no more than a couple of days without visiting (some of which Holmquist regularly swipes links from without attribution)
Like most German radicals born in the aftermath of World War II, [Peter} Brotzman and Kowald came from educated, middle-class families in deep denial about the recent Nazi past. Brotzman remembers that Kowald's father had flown in the Luftwaffe and was an educator of the deaf, and that his mother was a housewife.
"Peter's mother never forgave me for leading her son on the wrong path," Brotzman says. "But after the war we never got answers for the question 'Why did you do that?' We had to look for our own answers and raise our own questions. We in Germany had problems with our fathers' generation, and that's why our rebellion was so strong and why our early music was such violent stuff, much more violent than in other European countries."
Spurred by solitary investigations, encouraging encounters with passing-through expats like Steve Lacy and Don Cherry, and a few months on the road with Carla Bley, the young firebrands deployed American out jazz as a symbolic weapon, in Kowald's words, to kill their fathers. Then they tried to kill the stepfathers, who proved to be unconquerable.
"Growing up in the '40s and '50s, it was very difficult to sing a German song, because it always carried this smell of fascism," Kowald said. "I saw that blues musicians and Jewish musicians related to their own tradition positively. My Greek wife loved her songs. But I never used my own culture in my music. I was always interested in what the other cultures had to say, and I took it all from there. When we started to improvise, our stuff clearly came from jazz. But later we decided to do it the European way -not play classical European music, but also not copy American jazz. Of course, looking back, I have to say we took a lot from saxophonists Albert Ayler and Pharaoh Sanders, and bass players like Henry Grimes, Gary Peacock, and Reggie Workman."
