From his earliest days as a player, Brötzmann was compared to Albert Ayler. And it’s certainly true that there are many similarities between Brötzmann’s and Ayler’s sound. Both were influenced early on by Sidney Bechet, and particularly his strong, controlled vibrato. Both imbued their playing with a sense of raw, yearning – almost vulnerable – emotion. Brötzmann said: “You only have to listen to Ayler’s first ESP-Disk records, with what kind of love and desperation this man played his own stories – and also what honesty. These are three things which are important to me, which touch me. And therefore, dare I say it, there is a connection between our kinds of music.”

If much of Brötzmann’s early ferocity was born of pragmatic fury and a burning desire to challenge the tainted socio-cultural consensus of post-Nazi Germany, Ayler’s intense outpourings were in service to a transformative spiritual rapture. But here, too, it seems Brötzmann recognised something of a kindred soul, claiming: “From the very beginning, the titles of his tunes have documented his longing for another, better world: Spiritual Unity / Ghosts / Truth Is Marching In / Universal Message / Holy Family / Our Prayer / Spirits Rejoice... he really meant it.”

Yet, at other times, perhaps annoyed by the constant comparisons, Brötzmann was much more brusque in his appraisal. He told me: “The only thing we had in common, I think, was, when we started, we couldn’t play saxophone. I think he developed his way of playing very beautifully, and I found my way of doing my shit. But it’s completely a different world.” Indeed, Brötzmann consistently brushed aside suggestions that he was directly influenced by Ayler, making a case for the same kind of simultaneous invention that Ornette Coleman and the British-Jamaican alto saxophonist Joe Harriot displayed on different continents at the turn of the 60s. In conversation with Evan Parker and John Corbett, Brötzmann said: “The ESP Ayler things came very late over to us [in Germany], and I was already working the same way years before.” He also claimed: “We both tried to do similar or almost identical things at the same point in time, each independently and without knowing anything about each other – each of us within our own culture.

In fact, there’s an intriguing possibility that, in terms of influence, the direction of travel might have been the other way around. “I think that is actually the case,” Brötzmann told me. It’s known that the two met in 1960 while Ayler was stationed in Orleans, France, with the 76 Adjutant General’s Army Band. During this time, Ayler would regularly make trips to Paris and even as far as Stockholm to check out the jazz clubs and sit in with local musicians. When the band toured France and Germany between June and September 1960, Ayler made regular visits to a club called the Cave in Heidelberg, around three hundred kilometres south of Wuppertal.

“We were a kind of house band there – me and Peter Kowald and different drummers – we played very often,” Brötzmann told me. “There was always a slim Black guy sitting there, but then he disappeared. Then, later, I bought the first record that has his picture on it, from Copenhagen, where he is playing “Summertime” [1964’s My Name Is Albert Ayler]. Man, I looked closer and closer – there was the guy!”

If, as this story suggests, Ayler may have copped some early ideas from Brötzmann, and given that he then went on to exert a magnetic attraction on John Coltrane at a pivotal moment in the latter’s artistic development, is there perhaps a possibility that Brötzmann may have, in some small way, indirectly influenced Trane? Here, Brötzmann demurred with uncharacteristic bashfulness: “That would go a little too far.”

By the early 1990s, Ayler had largely fallen out of favour with listeners and critics. It was still more than a decade before the comprehensive, nine CD box set Holy Ghost: Rare & Unissued Recordings (1962–1970), released by Revenant in 2004, would kickstart a renewed interest in his work. “The man was forgotten, the subject was passe,” Brötzmann said. But, for Brötzmann, the fascination had never dwindled, as he discovered during a late-night conversation with Toshinori Kondo around the time the trumpeter relocated to Amsterdam: “Kondo and I had made a night of it – once again... During our session, we talked about everything under the sun and kept coming back to Ayler. We agreed that he should be brought back to people’s attention.”

The result was Die Like A Dog, which teamed Brötzmann and Kondo with bassist William Parker and drummer Hamid Drake. From the beginning, it was obvious that Brötzmann had a clear vision of what he was trying to achieve with the new quartet. Drake told me: “He was starting off on sort of a... maybe you could call it like a new visionary quest.” For Brötzmann, it was simple: “I just wanted to point out how important Ayler was for my way.”

The group’s first album was recorded live in Berlin in August 1993 and released on FMP the following year as Die Like A Dog: Fragments Of Music, Life And Death Of Albert Ayler. Undeniably, it’s a deeply loving tribute to Ayler, which celebrates his music while lamenting the shame and pity of the saxophonist’s death [from drowning in] New York’s East River in 1970.

From the outset, Brötzmann calls forth his most soulful, yearning tone: a wide, brittle cry, continually surfing the narrow crest of altissimo ecstasy. The long group improvisations are punctuated by brief quotations from Ayler tunes including “Prophet”, “Ghosts” and “Bells”, rising up out of the melee like rallying calls to regroup on the battleground of love. Brötzmann explained: “It was never about using the old themes or to revive the old times... There are only fragments of themes, second-long quotes we use. No, it was about the basics, the spiritual foundations of Ayler’s music. That’s what we were going for, and in our own way.” Another musical quote, the repeated return to the elegiac theme of Don Redman’s “Saint James Infirmary”, suggests a sorrowful weeping of righteous outrage over Ayler’s body laid out on a mortuary slab.

Peter Brötzmann: Free-Jazz, Revolution And The Politics Of Improvisation is published by Repeater Books. Stewart Smith's review of the book appears in The Wire 494. You can buy a copy of the magazine here. Wire subscribers can also read the review in the online magazine library.