for Evan Parker or Mick Jagger? Can't we just say Brotzmann is a great free-jazz stylist and his style is popular?
This is one big difference. Jagger and the Stones have been on autopilot for decades
Is this really true? I had never heard a Stones record like 'Has anybody seen my baby' before, and I was shcoked that they rediscovered 'Like a rolling stone' after 35 years of the original release. If you really think The Stones are on autopilot, is there that much of a difference to the works of Brotzman. To me, he belongs to 'the ramones-league' of free music, as the loudest and most Germanly stubborn of all macho reed players for 33 caricatural years on end.
now and they'll always have a huge fanbase who doesn't care whether they crank out the same, forgettable records each time. Someone like Cecil Taylor (minus the huge fanbase of course) doesn't work the same way. I have always felt that Cecil Taylor advanced his music in the same way Thelonious Monk did: doing the same material over and over again. In the process, he's redefining only tiny bits to a degree that makes his body of work worthwhile to his 'fanbase' (include me in there, when talking solo and duo performances, I don't get most of his group work).
In the 'rock icon world' I always felt the live Bob Dylan worked, and still works in this vein of 'small changes and non-progressing'-circle. I suspect this very aspect might be applicable to the body of work of the Stones, too. I have no knowledge about the Stones' live output. So I can't really tell whether this same phenomenon works for them, making 250 seemingly the same bootlegs 'worth' getting (as with Monk, Dylan, Grateful Dead, Hendrix, Coltrane, Dolphy, Zappa or Phish). Regards, Remco Takken