1997 · Album
The “WELS” Concert (Parts 1–3)
Recorded November 1996, Schlachthof cultural center, Wels, Austria · Okka Disk · Personnel: Peter Brötzmann (saxophone), Mahmoud Guinia (guembri), Hamid Drake (drums)
Three Strangers in a Wels Warehouse
A powerful interaction of three musicians from different countries, each with extraordinary improvisational abilities.
In November 1996, three musicians who had never played together walked into the Schlachthof cultural center in Wels, Austria. Peter Brötzmann, the German saxophonist known for his raw, unflinching approach to free improvisation, met Mahmoud Guinia, a Moroccan guembri player steeped in Gnawa tradition, and Hamid Drake, an American drummer comfortable in multiple worlds. There was no rehearsal, no predetermined form. Just three people in a room with instruments, ready to find what would happen.
What emerged across the three parts was something genuinely strange and alive. Brötzmann's saxophone doesn't dominate—it enters and retreats, sometimes wailing, sometimes whispering underneath Guinia's hypnotic guembri patterns. Drake holds everything together with a touch so light it feels like he's listening harder than he's playing. AllMusic reviewer Joslyn Lane caught what makes this work: the music has an ebb and flow that creates what he called an "outside-of-time atmosphere," meditative but never static, trance-like but never passive. The three traditions—Northern European free jazz, North African Gnawa, American free drumming—don't blur into each other. They coexist, each distinct, each listening to the others.
This is a live album in the best sense: it documents a specific moment when three highly skilled improvisers met as equals and made something that couldn't be repeated. Not everyone will connect with it, and that's fine. It's not designed for passive listening. But if you want to hear what happens when musicians from genuinely different traditions respect each other's language and speak anyway, this is the real thing.
Where next?
More by Hamid Drake
All 39 albums →
