Recorded at the height of their powers as the leading free jazz trio in Europe, 1971 includes some of the hottest and heaviest music ever made by Brötzmann, starting with an inflammatory, incandescent 26-minute live track recorded at the New Jazz Meeting auf Burg Altena. Only available on a nearly-impossible-to-find LP sampler issued at the time by the festival, this marks "Just for Altena"'s first appearance on CD. Two more tracks come from pristine studio recordings made shortly before the festival, and they show an entirely different side of the trio, with delicate and harmonically intricate work by the Belgian pianist van Hove and typically wide ranging and mondo offerings from Bennink, at the time when the Dutch percussionist was using a huge, ragtag setup with metallic flotsam and jetsam augmenting his traditional kit.

Peter Brötzmann, tenor saxophone
Fred van Hove, piano
Han Bennink, drums, percussion