The Five Horsemen of the  

this is part of Mike Heffley's second book: Northern Sun, Southern Moon: FMP and Europe's ReInvention of Jazz?

Thomas Borgmann

Willi Kellers: "Thomas Borgmann is surely one of the best organizers in the world; he has incredible energy, and a knack for the business side of things. Earlier I tried other managers, but none are as diligent as Thomas; he is a wild man at the telephone. I knew him already in the '60s and '70s, when he played in Nickelsdorf and other places. He seems to have decided a few years ago that a full proactive engagement with the business things was the only way to survive."

Borgmann is of interest here not because of any connection to FMP; none exists, except the inclusion of some of his notated music--Two Lines for Nik: Suite for Improvisers (10 Players/15 Instruments, a very sophisticated new-music-type score, something akin to Braxton's work) in the FMP publishing concern, the enterprise required for its eligibility for E-Musik classification. However, his association with FMP elders Brötzmann and Petrowsky, as well as with American players, makes his a voice in the international spread of German improvised music, and that as a gesture deeply rooted in the same free jazz movement of the 1960s that spawned FMP and those elders.

Listen to CD 9/5, track 8

Ironically, Jost Gebers has not been interested in recording what Borgmann is doing musically because it is such a gesture; the music of Borgmann's choice runs to the "old-fashioned" (Gebers' word) style--driving, swinging, rhythmic and often over a droning central tone--of early Pharoah Sanders, early Ornette Coleman, or Archie Shepp. His choice of bandmates has included pianist Borah Bergman, drummer Denis Charles, saxophonist Charles Gayle, and bassist Wilber Morris.

Borgmann's concept of a return to what he calls the "classic free jazz" sound is, interestingly, embodied in the band he's dubbed, as mentioned, Ruf der Heimat --a distinctively German gesture he grounds in the early German free jazz not as a "European echo" of what Coleman, Coltrane, Ayler, Sanders et al were doing, but as a deeply Germanic correlate of their work (which work, of course, has been seen by all Americans as deeply Afrocentric).

Brötzmann's influence on Borgmann dates from the latter's musically formative years.

"When I was 16 or so and started with the saxophone, in the early '70s," he says, "I was in college, and I heard this music on the radio; the first free music I heard live was by Gunter Hampel and Brötzmann. I found it interesting; I had only listened to soul music before that, and Chicago, Blood, Sweat & Tears, bands like that. I took up the sax with the intention to play in a horn section of such a band. Then I got to know this music, and put all that behind me.

"When I came to Berlin, age 21 or so--right now I'm 42--in '76, '77, I was still going to Moers, at a time when it was still very discriminating in its programming, fantastic music. I got Peter [Brötzmann] to look at and repair my old C-soprano sax, back around then some time; it's funny now, because he doesn't remember meeting me then at all. There was (still is) a club in Berlin called the Zwiebelfisch (onion-fish), a meeting point for the improvisers in those days."

Borgmann's musical development turned with that of the times, until he decided, fairly recently, to bring it all back home. "During the '80s my own tastes kind of turned from free jazz to the new music area, something more along the lines of Braxton; I can show you some examples of scores from that time. I played with another musician, Nick Steinhaus, in a duo at Nickelsdorf, at a time when only Americans were on the bill there. It really got me more into the borderlines of the music."

The first enterprise of what Kellers called Borgmann's business savvy was the initiation of a semi-annual festival in the subway station café (called Kato) just blocks from his own Kreuzberger apartment. He got funding from the city, booked three or four groups, often ad hoc formations of whomever was around and available, called the two-day event Stakkato (get it? station, Kato?), and used it as a networking device to make his own connections with the scene.

"The music was very mixed," he says, "some real new-music stuff, like Steve Reich, and a traditional drummer from Basel, for example. The North Swiss have a tradition in March, a Fastnacht, and they have indigenous drummers with colorful costumes, all to drive out the devil from their town; the drummers customarily walk through the streets in this very authentically traditional way. I was thinking like a programmer, putting these guys on the bill with a minimalistic duo between, say, Wolfgang Fuchs and Rudi Malfatti [both FMP musicians]." He laughs with delight at the juxtaposition of minimalism and the folk drummers and the sparse improvisers. "So you group new music and heavy free and traditional, crazy things together--but between these borders.

"At that time, I didn't book real free jazz groups, that wasn't yet my interest. That changed also, because later it was only improvised music. Some of that shift had to do with the politics of the time, in the '80s, when the new-music scene got so much more recognition and support, more money and acceptance, which endures to this day. 'New' and 'improvised' started out, in the '80s, both as the underdog, but later 'new' broke through, but not 'improvised.' So there was really no need for me to keep my little festival as a forum for the 'new.'" To Borgmann's taste, this "new," in the flush of its success with Berlin's cultural officialdom, centered in the Eastern Akademie der Künste, has become static, predictable in concept, too safe, throughout the last decade or so.

"Was your festival here a way for you to meet American musicians and bring them over?" I ask. "Is that what started your trips to America?"

"No, there wasn't enough money to book Americans, as a rule." He mentions a few--the Rova Saxophone Quartet, Steve Lacy, the bassist Sirone [a one-word name], who were in the area already. And, in fact, his own first trip to America, in 1987, did come through a sextet gig Sirone set up at the Black Arts Studio Museum in Harlem. As much as anything, it seems that one aspect of Borgmann's own return to the "classic free jazz" was simply a falling into it through the vagaries of who and what happened to work out in his shotgun attempts to make things happen between disparate elements on the scene.

"The Ruf der Heimat's mix of different people came out of my situation at the Stakkato, where I would make different groups out of my guests. I played there with Petrowsky once, and discovered that he was very easy to play with. I put together a group with Heinz Sauer, Christoph Winckel, Willi Kellers, and a saxophone player from France, and trumpeter Uli Weber, from the East. It was a big group, but it really worked well.

"My idea for the name of the group, Call of the Homeland, was a reference to the free jazz which I'd grown up with, this drive and rhythm and power--as opposed to the little excursions into experimental improvisation others, and I, had taken into the new music scene. I was missing this classical free jazz power; I mean how many groups can you think of today with this power, like Frank Wright, or the old Brötzmann groups: a rhythm section behind you over which you can still do anything you want, but with this power and drive? It is also good for the audience, a musical experience that didn't leave them out of it, not some esoteric extremes good only for a few, a music that is more like philosophy in the head. The quartet with Petrowsky, Willi and Christoph was my way of getting back in touch with that vitality.

"A lot of people don't distinguish between free jazz and improvised music, but they are two distinct things. My feeling was that people had thirty years of experience now with this music, so it would be easier for more of them to handle, and it would develop more itself. I went back to it myself as a comfortable, familiar thing after playing around on the borderlines and extremes of the music for awhile.

"A couple of years before playing with Brötzmann, then, the band was initially with Petrowsky. He's a very clever player, a little bit like a chameleon. That makes it easy. I always do like playing with another saxophone. With him I could always have close interactions, melodically, or with licks; he's responsive, sympathetic. It was part of my concept for the group, to have two similar players on the front line, side by side more than going two different ways.

"I wasn't sure when we started with Brötzmann whether it would work; I was still developing on the tenor, the power horn, and I didn't know if I was up to Brötzmann yet; I was more comfortable and experienced on the smaller horns, and I sounded more like Steve Lacy or Evan Parker than Brötzmann.

"At some point, Petrowsky couldn't make all our gigs, as we got busier. I wanted Charles Gayle as a fill-in, and we did play together for maybe eight gigs (I had brought him to Germany through the Stakkato). But that situation had its own problems as a longterm one. It was Willi who really wanted Peter in, because he had worked a lot with him. I wasn't sure, but I tried it out. It did work out okay; the main thing was that I could go with Peter's melodies. You can't change Peter, but I did find my own way in that part of his sound, these broken melodies, with that broken tone. People get that shiver, you know?

"So this music was born with Peter, and he also functioned very well in terms of making the gig, unlike Petrowsky, who was always busy with that duo with his wife in the East. So our group came into its own more with Peter. One big event was at Mulhouse; we got on the front page of Le Monde, in '95."

"Would you say that this group has been somewhat important to Peter's recent music and career?"

"I don't know; he still has his own quartet and trio, which are his priority, but he does still love to work with this band, I think. I'm sure he got good feedback from the best critics, because he was like the star of the group; good for us too. The same thing happened with Borah [Bergman]. We did our Ride Into the Blue CD at Peter Edel; I intended to play with Petrovsky and Borah, but Petrowsky didn't make it, and it turned out to be a great event with Peter instead. A month later we played in Leipzig with Petrowsky, but I didn't think the mix of Petrowsky and Borah went too well, because they're both very intricate players, and it's best when a horn player does something to contrast with Borah."

"Why do you think this way of playing has come so automatically and easily to you?" I ask him this after he's told me about his instant chemistry with the late Denis Charles, re: the distinction between "drive" (which he says most European drummers have) and swing (which they don't). "Do you think they 'drive' because that's how they want to sound, or because they really can't feel how to swing?"

"In the States, a drummer has to learn every style, and how to be firm in it; here, improvising just means playing what you want. It's changing a bit as people come out of the schools and so on here, but still you find a lot of drummers and bassists who really don't know what they do want to play. In the States, you see players who want to play free music, but they also know about other styles, and working professionally in them, because they have to survive, and they genuinely like and respect those other styles. You don't find it happening that way here so much." (from September '97)

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