noise; others sat there with their mouths open, astonished.”
“In the beginning it was a basic rule that the musicians were to be there the whole time, and available to the audience,” says Jost Gebers. “There were real discussions, especially at the Akademie, out in the pub. So, people could go and say, ‘Brötzmann, what kind of shit is that?’ For us it was a matter of principle; we said you had to be there and you had to answer questions when they came up. And also in the early days—now I’m talking about the Academy of Arts—there were public rehearsals in the afternoons, where people could come listen to a rehearsal at five, for free. But we gave that up quickly. Because you can’t rehearse certain things at all, and because a lot of people would come to the rehearsals, but then not to the concerts, even though the concerts only cost 1.10 or 1.20 marks per day. That was kind of funny. I think we stopped in 1971. The only one who really rehearsed anyway was Steve Lacy, with his quintet. That made sense, he was playing pieces, but for the others it was nonsense, because they didn’t rehearse on principle. A lot of them made fun of it.”
Louis Moholo looks back on the Berlin FMP time with great emotion: “God bless those years, man. FMP, those were the days. I don’t think they will ever come back again. God was with us then, fantastic scene. Straight from heaven. Yeah, very important. We can’t imagine what kind of music was being played in there, man. Jesus Christ, a lot of music, man, and I like the idea. The ideas behind it, man, like just everybody is the same. It’s a fantastic lesson, man. Like no band leader; it is a collective of musicians. I live in Cape Town now, in Langa Township. I did have a heart attack actually from this fucking music, man, I’ll tell you. Some of my friends have died, especially drummers. Maybe it’s just paying my dues. I have a pacemaker now. But then, there’s nothing I know better now. I had my lovely, lovely hours; I had my lovely times. And when it happens, the sunshine is fantastic, like playing with Irène, that’s some sunshine. Playing with Peter Brötzmann, Cecil Taylor, that’s some sunshine, man. Yeah, it’s heaven. I don’t know when I’m going to play with Cecil Taylor now and with Irène Schweizer as well. It’s been a long time, too.”
FMP was very active, agrees Rüdiger Carl: “Concerts all year round, two festivals a year in the good times, over long distances, and a few extra concert situations as well. At the Grunewaldsee, in the Rathaus Charlottenburg, whatever was available, clubs and this and that, it was very lively. Gebers made it all happen by himself. You have to take your hat off to him.”
“Until Dieter Hahne joined, in the mid-1970s, I usually organized everything on my own,” says Gebers. “In 1968 all the musicians stayed in a kind of youth hostel in the area that we could rent. Everybody slept there; many also stayed with friends, of course. Hotels only in case of emergency. For the Workshop it was a little better, because the Academy of Arts provided some money for it. A little, but at least it was possible to stay in a house. They had some apartments in the Hanseatenweg where some of the musicians could stay. There was also a small hotel near the academy; many people used to stay there. Brötzmann often stayed with Thomas Schmitt. Everyone had their friends, it worked out somehow.”
“People often stayed with the artist Thomas Schmitt, too,” says Rüdiger Carl. They frequently hung out together in the Paris-Bar, but then he “became difficult and thin-skinned. Later you’d get a hotel paid for in the budget. I think that started around the end of 1970.”
“At a certain point, we got a guarantee from the Berliner Festspiele for the Total Music Meeting,” says Gebers. “It started sometime in the mid-1970s and lasted until 1988, when they said, ‘No, we don’t have any more money, we’re not giving you any more.’ Not long before we could even go public with it, the Department of Cultural Affairs jumped in and said, ‘Okay, we’ll give you money for the project.’ Then in 1988 we did an emergency program, and from 1989 onwards the Department of Cultural Affairs was involved. This of course lasted a long time, with constant discussions, until finally the decision was made: ‘We’ll give FMP an institutional subsidy, out of which you have to pay for everything, but that’s all you’re getting.’ So that was clearly a different situation.”
“With the exception of Brötzmann’s concerts, almost no one but insiders came to FMP events. There was no scene for this music yet. You had to fight for every single person, to get them to listen to the stuff we were doing. And that was true for the musicians as well. They all made their reputations from those FMP times. And of course it was the same with all the live events, whether you look at Moers or Willisau or Fabrikjazz. The labels that came along later always had the advantage that a scene existed. There were people reporting on it, there was an audience for it, there were some customers who bought LPs. It’s totally different from what FMP did in the early days. When we started, there was nothing at all.”
EXCURSUS FMP Archive and Records with Irène Schweizer: Recording in the Basement
During the entire time that he was working on FMP, Jost Gebers was also a full-time social worker for the city of Berlin, at the youth leisure center in the Olbersstrasse at the Jungfernheide tram station. He had the FMP recording studio set up in the basement there, until a burglary in the summer of 1979. “There was a rehearsal room in the basement, which we had converted into a studio. Alexander von Schlippenbach’s grand piano was there, and he always had access and could rehearse there. We really recorded a lot of things in the studio. I set up all the equipment so that all you had to do was press ‘record’ and ‘stop.’ That meant I only had to be there for half a day to help adjust the sound. And then the musicians could use the machine, and whenever they wanted to record something, they could do it.”
“The recordings for Tuned Boots, with Carl, Schweizer, and Moholo—that was in Moers and in the studio on Olbersstrasse in Berlin, Side Two,” explains Gebers. “In that early period, Moers was actually Wuppertal. Brötzmann and Kowald did the programs there. Once we also did the sound tech work, it was still in the courtyard then. Those are probably the recordings. I didn’t even know that I did those. We made the others later in Berlin, as additions. They probably played at the club Flöz, I don’t know. Tuned Boots—one recording is at the workshop, that’s the thing with the trio, with Louis, Side one. And that’s the duo. And then we recorded them live. Hans Wewerka had the rights; in 1966, ’67, ’68 he financed the recordings and in return he got the publishing rights. Later he told me that he still had the recordings, and then I said, ‘yeah, send me something so I can listen to it,’ and then I bought two things. One was this early trio of Irène with Trepte and Neumeier: Early Tapes. And there was a Schoof quintet thing. And they somehow booked it here. Not anymore now, but in the beginning.”
“Santana is our production; we included it in the catalog along with many others. And it’s the only mono recording. We did that with Favre. V-Mann-Suite was at the Total Music Meeting. I don’t know if you can interpret it politically. Cordial Gratin was a duo of Schweizer and Joëlle Léandre. Those were the FMP records. And then there were special editions like For Example. The S-serie (‘S series’) are things the musicians wanted to do. I didn’t want to do it. They did them at their own risk, and we manufactured them and distributed them.”
“There’s another duo of Irène with Kowald, and then there was the duo with Marilyn Crispell. In 1990 there was a programming idea to put an American and a European on stage together, every day for five days. Irène asked, ‘Who that could be?’ I said, ‘I don’t know.’ ‘Well, is it possible to have a woman pianist?’ she asked. I said, ‘Sure, we’ll set up a second piano’. And then this combination happened, and a really wonderful record came from that. Finally there is the COWWS Quintet, the second production was still with Jay Oliver, Grooves ’n’ Loops. Messer, these are the trio recordings, re-released, all the trio material with Louis Moholo, complete.”
“If we ended up sitting on 300 LPs back then, that was a risk FMP took. A fixed sum was paid out to the artists, regardless of the size of the line-up. If ten musicians played, the leader was responsible for dividing it up. If it was a solo record, then the one person made more money. It was per LP, a fixed sum for every LP produced. Under certain circumstances we paid up front, sometimes 500 marks or something. That already existed. So it depended, sometimes in advance, sometimes after or when the record