Peter Brötzmann, 82, deceased; His thunderous saxophone shook jazz traditions to their foundations

His father, Johannes, a tax official, had been conscripted into the Nazi army. Captured by the Russians on the Eastern Front, he did not return until 1948, having escaped from a POW camp in Siberia. Mr. Brötzmann grew up in Remscheid with his family – his father, his mother, Frida (Schröder) Brötzmann and his sister Mariane – but moved to Wuppertal to attend school and remained there for the rest of his life.

In the late 1950s, he studied graphic design and fine arts at the Wuppertal School of Applied Arts, where he created his own fonts: striking, checkered alphabets that he later used on the covers of many of his albums. He had his first gallery show in 1959 and took part in early performances of the experimental, interdisciplinary art movement Fluxus. In 1963 he participated in the first major exhibition of Nam June Paik, the Korean-American artist who would become known for his video work, but who was building musically oriented installations and interactive sculptural objects at the time.

Mr. Brötzmann continued to create works of art frequently, even as music became a priority in his life.

“From the very beginning, he didn’t like the art world milieu,” said John Corbett, co-owner of the Corbett vs. Dempsey gallery in Chicago, who began curating exhibitions of Mr. Brötzmann’s artworks in 2003. “But privately he continued to make visual art. He was interested in beauty, but it had to be accompanied by a certain honesty and frankness.

“He really couldn’t deal with people who were out of tune, art which was out of tune and music which he thought was out of tune,” added Mr Corbett. “He was pretty intolerant of all those things.”

In 1967, Mr. Brötzmann released his first album as a bandleader on his own label, BRÖ. If the title, “For Adolphe Sax”, read as a provocation aimed at the 19th century inventor of the saxophone, then his next BRÖ album, “Machine Gun”, released in 1968 and credited to the Peter Brötzmann Octet, announced all – waging war against all that came before.