''The Wels Concert'' is a live album by German saxophonist

Peter Brötzmann Peter Brötzmann (born 6 March 1941) is a German saxophonist and clarinetist. Biography Early life Brötzmann was born in Remscheid, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. He studied painting in Wuppertal and was involved with the Fluxus movement ...

, Moroccan

guembri The sintir ( ar, سنتير), also known as the guembri (), gimbri or hejhouj or Garaya in Hausa language, is a three stringed skin-covered bass plucked lute used by the Gnawa people. It is approximately the size of a guitar, with a body car ...

player

Mahmoud Guinia Mahmoud Guinia ( ar, محمود ﯕينيا, and rarely or ; also spelled Gania, Guinea or Khania; 1951 – 2 August 2015) was a Moroccan Gnawa musician, singer and guembri player, who was traditionally regarded as a Maâllem (), i.e. master. T ...

, and American drummer Hamid Drake. It was recorded in November 1996 at the Schlachthof cultural center in

Wels Wels (; Central Bavarian: ''Wös'') is a city in Upper Austria, on the Traun River near Linz. It is the county seat of Wels-Land, and with a population of approximately 60,000, the eighth largest city in Austria. Geography Wels is in the ...

, Austria, and was released in 1997 by

Okka Disk Okka Disk is an independent American jazz record company and label founded in Chicago by Bruno Johnson in 1994. Okka began as a rock music label, but Johnson soon changed direction to record free jazz.

. In an interview, Brötzmann expressed his admiration for Guinia, and for Moroccan

Gnawa music Gnawa music (Ar. ) is a body of Moroccan religious songs and rhythms. Its well-preserved heritage combines ritual poetry with traditional music and dancing. The music is performed at ''lila'', communal nights of celebration dedicated to prayer ...

, stating: "In my way about thinking of the timing of tunes or pieces you play... after a time, you have to come to an end. But they never do - they get in a kind of trance... it goes on for hours and hours and hours." After Guinia's death in 2015, Brötzmann and Drake would go on to record the album '' The Catch of a Ghost'' (2020) with his brother, Moukhtar Guinia.

Reception

In a review for

AllMusic AllMusic (previously known as All Music Guide and AMG) is an American online music database. It catalogs more than three million album entries and 30 million tracks, as well as information on musicians and bands. Initiated in 1991, the databa ...

, Joslyn Lane described the album as "a powerful interaction of three musicians from different countries, each of whom have extraordinary improvisational abilities and deep, grounded technique." He stated that the music is "meditative" "in the ecstatic-trance sense of the word, meaning that the music's energy level has a natural ebb and flow," and noted that "this current results in an outside-of-time atmosphere that's meditative even while remaining very musically active." He concluded: "The result is a unified, energetic, affecting, free performance." The authors of the ''

Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings ''The Penguin Guide to Jazz'' is a reference work containing an encyclopedic directory of jazz recordings on CD which were (at the time of publication) currently available in Europe or the United States. The first nine editions were compiled by ...

'' called the album "impressive" but stated that Brötzmann is "often overwhelmed by the shamanic Gania," decorating "rather than finding a way into the music." Steven A. Loewy, writing for ''

Cadence In Western musical theory, a cadence (Latin ''cadentia'', "a falling") is the end of a phrase in which the melody or harmony creates a sense of full or partial resolution, especially in music of the 16th century onwards.Don Michael Randel (199 ...

'', remarked: "''The Wels Concert'' shows a different side to free improvisation and one that not only works, but adds a new dimension, an overlooked nook, a glimpse at eternity. What more can one expect?" Author Mike Heffley called the album a "musical-traditional triangle with one point in Brötzmann's Northern Europe, one in the North African home of the Gnawa musicians, and the other in the African-American milieu of drummer Hamid Drake's Chicago." He commented: "The net result is a musical network that links up farthest flung voices of whiteness and blackness as imaged in the representations of African-American, African traditional, and German free jazz in the music press both academic and popular, and shows them to be integral, organic parts of the same musical village."

Track listing

Composed by Hamid Drake and Peter Brötzmann. # "Part 1" – 25:46 # "Part 2" – 25:15 # "Part 3" – 19:17

Personnel

– tárogató, clarinet, alto saxophone, tenor saxophone *

–

, vocals * Hamid Drake – drums, frame drum, tabla

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Wels Concert 1997 live albums Peter Brötzmann live albums Mahmoud Guinia albums Hamid Drake live albums Live free jazz albums Okka Disk live albums