"Born Remscheid, Germany on 6 March 1941; soprano, alto, tenor, baritone and bass saxophones, a-clarinet, e-flat clarinet; bass clarinet, tarogato.

Peter Brötzmann's early interest was in painting and he attended the art academy in Wuppertal. Being very dissatisfied with the gallery/exhibition situation in art he found greater satisfaction playing with semi-professional musicians, though continued to paint (as well as retaining a level of control over his own records, particularly in record sleeve/CD booklet design). In late 2005 he had a major retrospective exhibition jointly with Han Bennink - two separate buildings separated by an inter-connecting glass corridor - in Brötzmann's home town of Remscheid.

Self-taught on clarinets, he soon moved to saxophones and began playing swing/bebop, before meeting Peter Kowald. During 1962/63 Brötzmann, Kowald and various drummers played regularly - Mingus, Ornette Coleman, etc. - while experiencing freedoms from a different perspective via Stockhausen, Nam June Paik, David Tudor and John Cage. In the mid 1960s, he played with American musicians such as Don Cherry and Steve Lacy and, following a sojourn in Paris with Don Cherry, returned to Germany for his unorthodox approach to be accepted by local musicians like Alex von Schlippenbach and Manfred Schoof.

The trio of Peter Brötzmann, Peter Kowald and Sven-Ake Johansson began playing in 1965/66 and it was a combination of this and the Schoof/Schlippenbach Quintet that gave rise to the first Globe Unity Orchestra. Following the self-production of his first two LPs, For Adolphe Sax and Machine gun for his private label, BRÖ, a recording for Manfred Eicher's 'Jazz by Post' (JAPO) [Nipples], and a number of concert recordings with different sized groups, Brötzmann worked with Jost Gebers and started the FMP label. He also began to work more regularly with Dutch musicians, forming a trio briefly with Willem Breuker and Han Bennink before the long-lasting group with Han Bennink and Fred Van Hove. As a trio, and augmented with other musicians who could stand the pace (e.g. Albert Mangelsdorff on, for example, The Berlin concert), this lasted until the mid-1970s though Brötzmann and Bennink continued to play and record as a duo, and in other combinations, after this time. A group with Harry Miller and Louis Moholo continued the trio format though was cut short by Miller's early death.

The thirty-plus years of playing and recording free jazz and improvised music have produced, even on just recorded evidence, a list of associates and one-off combinations that include just about all the major figures in this genre: Derek Bailey (including performances with Company (e.g. Incus 51), Cecil Taylor, Fred Hopkins, Rashied Ali, Evan Parker, Keiji Haino, Misha Mengelberg, Anthony Braxton, Marilyn Crispell, Andrew Cyrille, Phil Minton, Alfred 23 Harth, Tony Oxley. Always characterised as an energy player - and the power-rock setting of Last Exit with Ronald Shannon Jackson, Sonny Sharock and Bill Laswell, or his duo performances with his son, Casper, did little to disperse this conviction - his sound is one of the most distinctive, life-affirming and joyous in all music. But the variety of Brötzmann's playing and projects is less recognised: his range of solo performances; his medium-to-large groups and, in spite of much ad hoc work, a stability brought about from a corpus of like- minded musicians: the group Ruf der Heimat; pianist Borah Bergman; percussionist Hamid Drake; and Die like a dog, his continuing tribute to Albert Ayler, with Drake, William Parker and Toshinori Kondo. Peter Brötzmann continues a heavy touring schedule which, since 1996 has seen annual visits to Japan and semi-annual visits to the thriving Chicago scene where he has played in various combinations from solo through duo (including one, in 1997, with Mats Gustafsson) to large groups such as the Chicago Octet/Tentet, described below. He has also released a number of CDs on the Chicago-based Okka Disk label, including the excellent trio with Hamid Drake and the Moroccan Mahmoud Gania, at times sounding like some distant muezzin calling the faithful to become lost in the rhythm and power of the music.

The "Chicago Tentet" was first organized by Brötzmann with the assistance of writer/presenter John Corbett in January 1997 as an idea for a one-time octet performance that included Hamid Drake and Michael Zerang (drums), Kent Kessler (bass) and Fred Lomberg-Holm (cello), Ken Vandermark and Mars Williams (reeds), and Jeb Bishop (trombone). The first meeting was extremely strong and warranted making the group an ongoing concern and in September of that same year the band was expanded to include Mats Gustafsson (reeds) and Joe McPhee (brass) as permanent members (with guest appearances by William Parker (bass), Toshinori Kondo (trumpet/electronics), and Roy Campbell (trumpet) during its tenure) - all in all a veritable who's who of the contemporary improvising scene's cutting edge. Though the Tentet is clearly led by Brötzmann and guided by his aesthetics, he has been committed to utilizing the compositions of other members in the ensemble since the beginning. This has allowed the band to explore an large range of structural and improvising tactics: from the conductions of Mats Gustafsson and Fred Lonberg-Holm, to the vamp pieces of Michael Zerang and Hamid Drake, to compositions using conventional notation by Ken Vandermark and Mars Williams, to Brötzmann's graphic scores - the group employs almost every contemporary approach to composing for an improvising unit. This diversity in compositional style, plus the variety in individualistic approaches to improvisation, allows the Tentet to play extremely multifaceted music. As the band moves from piece to piece, it explores intensities that range from spare introspection to all out walls of sound, and rhythms that are open or free from a steady pulse to those of a heavy hitting groove. It is clear that the difficult economics of running a large band hasn't prevented the group from continuing to work together since its first meeting. Through their effort they've been able to develop an ensemble sound and depth of communication hard to find in a band of any size or style currently playing on the contemporary music scene."

"Oliver Schwerdt (born 13 November 1979) is a German musicologist and musician (piano, percussion) in the field of free improvisation.

Born in Eisenach, Schwerdt attended school in Eisenach until his university entrance qualification and received classical piano lessons at the municipal music school there. He did his military service as a piano accompanist in the training music corps of the German armed forces. He began his studies of music and cultural sciences as well as art history at the Leipzig University in 1999 and completed them in 2006 with a master's thesis on Georg Simmel and Dadaism submitted to Klaus Christian Köhnke [de]. In 2012 he received his doctorate from Sebastian Klotz at the Institute for Musicology at the University of Leipzig [de], for which he also worked as a lecturer. His dissertation focuses on the musical strategies of central actors in the scene of free improvised music in the wake of Free Jazz and their spatial theoretical interpretation. He has taught at the Museum of Musical Instruments of Leipzig University and with the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation.

From his musicological work, Schwerdt identified the challenge facing contemporary museum practice in relation to the "reinvention of the drum set combination" as they are "in European improvised music" of the 20th century became reality. He is committed to securing the "acutely endangered, historically so delicate, aesthetically highly fascinating and epistemologically valuable object complexes". the first generation of European free jazz or contemporary improvised music. As an author of music-critical articles, Schwerdt wrote for the Neue Musikzeitung, the Jazzthetik [de] and the Jazzzeitung [de], among others. He also wrote accompanying texts for albums by Günter Sommer/Wadada Leo Smith and Alexander von Schlippenbach/Evan Parker/Paul Lovens and Urs Leimgruber. In 2003 he founded the publishing house Euphorium Productions.

Since 1999 Schwerdt has been artistic director of the EUPHORIUM_freakestra, a project ensemble between contemporary improvisation, jazz, Neue Musik and theatre with Günter Sommer, Friedrich Schenker, Rudi Mahall, Paul Rutherford, Ernst-Ludwig Petrowsky, Frank Möbus, Wadada Leo Smith, Axel Dörner, Barre Phillips, Alexander von Schlippenbach, Evan Parker, Paul Lovens, Sven-Åke Johansson, Ulrich Gumpert, Manfred Hering, Dietmar Diesner, Roger Turner, Barry Guy, Akira Sakata and others worked together. At the 2009 33. Leipziger Jazztage, he performed with the project Transatlantic Freedom Suite Tentets at the Leipzig Opera.

From the project ensemble the quartet ember with Urs Leimgruber developed, Alexander Schubert and Christian Lillinger. From 2006 to 2016 Schwerdt worked with Lillinger and Petrowsky in the New Old Luten Trio. The recording of Petrowsky's late works, documented from 2013 to 2015 with the albums Tumult!, Krawall!, Rabatz! in a quintet formation expanded by the double bassists John Edwards and Robert Landfermann received great attention. With Schubert and Friedrich Kettlitz, Schwerdt operates the electrified Noise-Ensemble trnn.

In 2006, Schwerdt received the Leipzig Jazz Young Talent Scholarship of the Marion-Ermer-Foundation for his performance as pianist and ensemble leader. The critics Ken Waxman (Jazzword) and Rigobert Dittmann (Bad Alchemy) hear reminiscences of Oscar Peterson, Bill Evans, Cecil Taylor and Alexander von Schlippenbach in Schwerdt's piano playing.

Schwerdt uses the following pseudonyms: Edithrakneff Weinermond, Frautastem!, Ingrid Ingulfwieher, Rita Deixis, Solveig Reberp-Klamt and Elan Pauer."

"After taking up the bass, around 1987, John Edwards co-formed The Pointy Birds who went on to win awards for their music for The Cholmondeleys and Featherstonehaughs dance troupes. The group appeared at festivals in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Moers, Leverkusen, Copenhagen. Around 1990, Edwards played his first gigs with London improvisers such as Roger Turner, Lol Coxhill, Maggie Nicols, Phil Minton.

Between 1990 and 1995 Edwards was a member of three touring groups simultaneously: B-Shops For The Poor, The Honkies and GOD. During this period he also became an increasingly regular player on the London improvised music scene and performed his first solo gigs; he composed and performed music theatre with the bass and cello duo The Great Explorers, street-busked a lot and appeared at many more festivals in Germany, Estonia, France, Italy, Czech, etc.

Since 1995 John Edwards has become a "mainstay" of the London scene, playing with just about everybody, an activity that has seen him clocking up between 150 and 200 gigs a year. He has become regular player with Evan Parker, in many groupings, and with Tony Bevan, Veryan Weston, and Elton Dean, often in collaboration with Mark Sanders on percussion. He has become a more frequent player on the European (and festival) scene, appearing at Taktlos, Ulrichsburg, Nickelsdorf, Budapest, New Zealand and in the USA. He continues to work on solo performances."

"Whether performing today's most challenging double bass repertoire, developing his own music, or working sound systems with his bass guitar or a set of turntables - John Eckhardt is testing the limits of being a bassist on planet earth in the 21st century, working towards a broader vision of what bass always was and can become in the future.

Seeking to combine scope with depth, John Eckhardt is constantly involved in the creation of new music and has both collaborated with a wide spectrum of artists and created his personal brand of solo projects. He worked with many composers including Helmut Lachenmann and Pierre Boulez, top new music groups such as Ensemble Modern, Klangforum Vienna and musikfabrik, improvisors from Evan Parker, Elliott Sharp and Peter Evans, to today's new blood in a wide field of today's music.

John Eckhardt has performed on over 30 recordings, among them Iannis Xenakis' masterpiece "Theraps" (Mode Rec.) and three internationally acclaimed solo releases. These share an interest in low frequency and spectral immersion, spatial depth, and themes of repetition and evolutional process.

The Evan Parker produced "Xylobiont" (Psi Rec. 2008) turned into a work in progress with 40 solo double bass recitals all over the world up to today. "Forests" (Depth of Field Music, 2014) expanded these themes into a set of branching, overdubbed bass string quartets. Along with high resolution audio and 200 photographs, they were released on a wooden USB memory stick in a transparent box containing actual forest material - nearly selling out an edition of 250 within one year.

As Forresta, John Eckhardt performs on bass guitar and live electronics, and released "Bass, Space & Time" (Depth of Field Music, 2016) in a special edition of 100 moss-green, marbled double-vinyl records in a hand made, embroidered carton box. Each contains a foto print as front cover chosen by the listener from 100 images of John Eckhardt's corresponding photographic project. This music is also the musical foundation of visual bassic, his long standing collaboration with analog light projection artist Katrin Bethge.

Driven by curiosity and passion for different styles, cultures and artistic means, John Eckhardt keeps drawing new connections and expands a bass cosmos of unusual dimensions. The latest addition is his Basswald DJ project that presents a diverse spectrum of bass music with a special ear for sound system culture. It is accompanied by a steady flow of downloadable podcasts.

John lives within earshot of the Hamburg harbor."

"Christian Lillinger (born April 21, 1984 in Lübben ) is a drummer, composer and percussionist of modern creative style and new improvisational music.

Lillinger studied at the University of Music Carl Maria von Weber Dresden at Günter Sommer from 2000 to 2004. Between 2001 and 2003 he was a member of the Bundesjugendjazzorchester.

Lillinger plays in the trio Gropper | Graupe | Lillinger, until 2015 under the name Hyperactive Kid, with the saxophonist Philipp Gropper and the guitarist Ronny Graupe, where he is largely confined to the conventional drum kit. In 2008, he composed his first band Christian Lillingers Grund, whose first two released albums were released at Clean Feed Records at the end of 2009 and 2013. In addition Lillinger works as a sideman with well-known musicians such as Rolf Kühn, Joachim Kühn, Miroslav Vitouš, Beat Furrer, Rudi Mahall, John Schröder, Barre Phillips, Ernst-Ludwig Petrowsky, Wadada Leo Smith, Frank Gratkowski, Simon Nabatov, Tobias Delius and Axel Dörner, Thomas Lehn, Michael Wollny, Louis Scyvis, Bruno Chevillon, David Liebman, Edmund Lehmugruber, Theo Jörgensmann, John Edwards, Greg Cohen, William Parker, Joe Lovano and Tony Malaby. Since 2004 he has been working continuously in the EUPHORIUM, the international ensemble of contemporary performing arts and music around the Leipzig-based Oliver Schwerdt, especially in the trio with Schwerdt alias Elan Pauer and Ernst-Ludwig Petrowsky. Since 2009, Lillinger has also been working in the Klaviertrio Grünen with Achim Kaufmann and Robert Landfermann, who presented a first album on the Portuguese label Clean Feed Records in 2010. Since 2010, Lillinger has also worked in the trio Dell Lillinger Westergaard, which also performed with John Tchicai. In 2011 he founded the Trio Starlight with Petter Eldh and Wanja Slavin, who moved his debut CD 2013 to the Swiss label Unit Records. With Eldh and Slavin he also founded the Quartet Amok Amor with the American trumpeter Peter Evans, who released his first album of the same name in 2015.

Lillinger is also a member of the following groups: Rolf Kühn Unit, Henrik Walsdorff Trio, Pascal Niggenkempervision 7, Ronny Graupes Spoom, Schmittmenge Meier, Marc Schmolling Trio, Wanja Slavin Quintett, Carl Ludwig Hübschs Drift, Hübschacht, Uwe Steinmetz Stream Ensemble, The upper class, Ember, Gerhard Gschlößl's group of four, Gerhard Gschlößls G9, KUU! And also plays with Joachim Kühn in trio.

From 2012 to 2013, Christian Lillinger was a member of the board of the Union of German Jazzmusicians."