German guitarist Caspar Brötzmann is the son of saxophone colossus Peter Brötzmann, a musician hose fierce reputation for taking European free jazz to the epicentre of the pain threshold, and back again, is the stuff of legend. Instead of following in his father’s shadow Brötzmann junior chose the electric guitar as his principal instrument, partly because he wanted to rock out, but mainly because he knew that his father and his peers sneeringly considered such music to be Americanised. Undeterred by this reaction, however, Brötzmann formed a trio, named them Caspar Brötzmann Massaker and booked a recording session at Berlin’s FMP studio in August 1987, where the trio would piece together their debut album The Tribe. While the bulk of what CBM play here is undeniably hard-rock based, there is a genuine sense of improvisation being explored by the trio as they endeavour to break free from conformity and energetically bounce ideas around. As a player, Brötzmann’s guitar sound partly belongs to the late 1970s New York No Wave loft-rock school, together with a more than appreciative nod in the direction of Jimi Hendrix. This latter influence fully rears up on ‘Bonker’s Dance’, a rip-roaring testimony to the art of electric guitar where the player and his instrument are bonded inextricably together, with explosive results. The Tribe album was given a parental seal of approval by being blessed with one of his father’s paintings as its cover, and it would seem that elements of Brötzmann senior’s musical output (especially his Machine Gun period) were also being subliminally absorbed into CBM’s still embryonic master plan.

Where The Tribe echoed with rock bombast, Black Axis (recorded again at FMP the following year) is a more ambitious work – as Brötzmann, bass player Eduardo Delgado Lopez and new drummer Frank Neumeier close in for the kill like a pack of sonic wolves. On ‘Hunter Song’ Brötzmann’s flaring guitar tears a hole through the ceiling, an escalating sheets-of-sound power blast that owes more to the fire music of John Coltrane, Albert Ayler and fellow guitar shredder Sonny Sharrock than it does to his beloved stadium rock gods. Equally titanic is the extended title-track where (after a series of experimental guitar actions) the trio’s loping backbeat suddenly shifts alarmingly into an electric storm of noise and improvisational fury. ‘Like father, like son’ is the inevitable phrase that comes to mind as ‘Black Axis’ hits its tornado-like peak.