Ernst Ludwig Petrowsky has died, one of the giants of German jazz, first in the GDR and then worldwide after the fall of the Wall. Luten, as they called him, after the Low German Ludwig, because he was born in Mecklenburg and always considered himself to be from there. He played the saxophone, clarinet and flute. “The wrong instruments,” as he sometimes said, because the guitar was already on the rise when he started jazz in the 1950s. Back when jazz was still under general suspicion as capitalist music. But he couldn’t do anything with rock music. No swing.
He has not only shared life with Uschi Brüning since 1982. The two were a symbiotic duo. Petrowsky as the driving force behind musical freedom. Together with her he had also become famous. Especially when they went on tour with Manfred Krug. In 1962 Petrowsky had already belonged to his sextet, when Krug played less adult pop and mainly jazz. Perhaps not the one that Petrowsky soon fell for. He could play all kinds of games, swing, be bop, cool.
The community of free jazz musicians in the GDR was a bit more conspiratorial than on the other side of the wall
It was then in Ornette Coleman’s attempts to free himself that he found himself. That was the leap into freedom, for which you didn’t even have to cross over. He developed a tone that could also increase from a Charlie Parker standard like “Anthropology” after Brüning’s scat acrobatics and Detlef Bielke’s tempo swing into a cluster wall on the alto that stood like a rock face in front of the outro. Pure powerhouse. It was always a feat on the alto saxophone.
Free music in the GDR soon came together to form a community that was a bit more conspiratorial than its counterparts on the other side of the Wall. Drummer Günter “Baby” Sommer and bassist Klaus Koch were his co-conspirators. As an exceptional musician, Petrowsky was allowed to travel to the West at an early age. In 1968 he played at the Montreux Festival. In Berlin he met like-minded people like Alexander von Schlippenbach, the collective of the Globe Unity Ensemble, who had saved themselves from the music industry on their own label FMP, and above all Peter Brötzmann, his literal brother in spirit.
After the fall of the Wall, at least traveling became easier. Petrowsky was now playing all over the world, touring with the George Gruntz Orchestra and Globe Unity. He is said to have played on more than 100 albums, only a fraction can be found in the digital lists. He had been ill for a long time and had lived in a nursing home for years. When he received the German Jazz Prize for his life’s work in Bremen last year after the many prizes, his wife and musical companion Uschi Brüning had to receive him for him. A brief moment of melancholy on an otherwise jubilant evening. He died in Berlin on Monday. He was 89 years old.