There are moments- like Bennink's percussion fadeout on the precipice of Niebergall's bass solo- that make it seem inconceivable these changes weren't written out beforehand. As it unfolds with duos and trios crystallizing from the splinters of the entire group's nuclear mass, it's even more apparent how well these guys understood each other's playing, to the point of being conscious of what the group performance sounded like as a whole. Unlike the alternate take filler that ruins most perfectly good jazz reissues, these are easily as good as the pieces that made it onto the original Nipples, and for 34-year-old tracks never intended for release, these recordings are astonishingly clean.The title track is 17 minutes of some of the most important music in the history of European free jazz- a second run through the only piece recorded by this particular European Union of musicians. This session from Apput British improvisers Evan Parker and Derek Bailey into a once-in-a-lifetime sextet with Germans BrГ¶tzmann and Buschi Niebergall, and Dutch radicals Han Bennink and Fred van Hove (they'd record as a quartet 6 days, later minus the Brits). Although these tracks had been previously unavailable since being recorded in 1969, they come from the same meetings that produced BrГ¶tzmann's original Nipples LP (hence the title).

We can all benefit from a few more nipples in our lives. The piece is built off of a peculiar gospel chord progression played by van Hove, setting up a melodic straitjacket that BrГ¶tzmann spends the song's first half trying to get loose from when he finally succeeds, the force is so overwhelming that only Bennink can keep pace.Don't let the fact that these are outtakes scare you away from this disc, because this stuff is essential to anyone interested in how Herr BrГ¶tzmann earned his status as one of the most devastating forces to ever touch a saxophone. 'Fat Man Walks', on the other hand, is quite unusual in comparison to the rest of BrГ¶tzmann's late-60s work- or just about any other European improv from that era.

Nipples Peter Brotzmann