Description
The golden age of second generation improvised music in Germany.
This freight train phrase describes an object of study that’s been woefully under-attended relative to its counterparts in London, Amsterdam, and New York. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, across Germany, especially in the north, with outposts in smaller cities like Witten, Wuppertal, Leverkusen, Wiesbaden, and Aachen, musicians gathered as workshops, cooperatives, and collectives, presenting themselves in festivals, projects, or “meetings,” following the example set out by Jost Gebers and Peter Brötzmann’s Berlin-centered first wave free music organization, Free Music Production (FMP), away from which these regionally diffuse platforms pushed. The scenes cross-pollenated, germinated, grew into their own particular musical ecosystems. Some amalgamations were fleeting; others were longer lasting. A few jelled into bona fide bands.