Fred Van Hove, Han Bennink

2015 release. Recorded at the height of their powers as the leading free jazz trio in Europe, 1971 includes some of the hottest and heaviest music ever made by Peter Brötzmann, starting with an inflammatory, incandescent 26-minute live track recorded at the New Jazz Meeting auf Burg Altena. Only available on a nearly-impossible-to-find LP sampler issued at the time by the festival, this marks the first appearance of "Just for Altena" on CD. Two more tracks come from pristine studio recordings made shortly before the festival, and they show an entirely different side of the trio, with delicate and harmonically intricate work by the Belgian pianist Fred Van Hove and typically wide ranging and mondo offerings from Han Bennink, at the time when the Dutch percussionist was using a huge, ragtag setup with metallic flotsam and jetsam augmenting his traditional kit. Cover image and design by Peter Brötzmann. Mastered at Experimental Sound Studio, Chicago, August, 2014; Produced by John Corbett.