Recorded September 9, 2006 at Bohus Sound Recording, Sweden.
Originally released February 19 2008 by Atavistic, USA as a 2CD-album and the last track "Dead and Useless" was released as a 12" vinyl LP by Omlott, Sweden on February 6 2014.


+ The first tour ever with this Brötzmann/Uuskyla sax and drum duo was happening the week prior the studio recording date. An audience DAT-walkman recorder captured the concert at the Nefertiti jazzclub in Gothenburg on September 2, 2006. On track 5-9 you hear the first sketches of what was to become the musical statement titled Born Broke a week later.


Original linernotes:
PETER BRÖTZMANN asked me to write some notes about me walking the quite hard and dirty road of musicmaking. The liferoad of the one life you have. Been fighting all the time for playing untouchable sounds of simple music, my definition of beauty. Untouchable, therefore powerful. Simple, therefore universal, for everyone. Music that belongs to everybody. Take it or leave it, but you are not able to keep it only for yourself. That´s the strength. Sometimes the struggle is too hard and you just have enough of the terrible conditions around the playing. The lowbudget touring, the stupidity, the curators, the organizers, the ones with power to decide who plays where and what. Geniusgrants killing natural musicmaking because of simple music being just to simple, not being complex and confusing enough. To illustrate bigheaded nonsense with living music makes you fall into a trap where pure joyful musicmaking is forbidden although sold as free jazz, freely improvised, spontaneous, creative music! This is the situation you have to deal with. Days of solidarity and bands kept together are long gone. Replaced by common egopower and loneliness among millions of lonely people in the big cities. You are also alone when making your musical statement. Alone together but still basically alone. Got to be strong to face that kind of reality. My eternal Sisyphusical circle is playing music for the strength to keep going. Nobody tells me anymore what and whom to play with. Not even Peter Brötzmann. He anyway never has. I have always liked his way of making music with his beautiful, deep, total sounding horn. No rehearsals, instead you have to bring yourself together, prepare, get ready, concentrate, pay attention and when time comes take off. That´s the way this music is made. Dragan Tanaskovic recorded the small drumkit and the saxophone with his old tube microphones in his large studioroom. Quite a comfortable recording situation. No amplification, not even monitorspeakers or headphones needed for this duo. The punch and the scream, the foundation of natural musicmaking! Living in this complicated, complex and confused society it is most important to make clear and honest statements. PEETER UUSKYLA




The Wire, May 2008 review:
Peter Brötzmann &
Peeter Uuskyla
Born Broke
Atavistic

Stephen Malkmus (born 1966) speaking in March 2008: "My standards for agressiveness and weirdness are still there - I don´t yell as much, you know, an old man yelling is like an old man on Ecstasy. It´s just not right." That´s LCD Soundsystem and Ricardo Villalobos on notice then. Why, in a review of a new duo set by Peter Brötzmann and Peeter Uuskyla quote hipster theorising on the age at which you should just settle gracefully? Because whenever you listen to the saxophonist who recorded Machine Gun (1968) and Nipples (1969), you have to ask, how long can you go on playing Fire Music? When does the rage become a raging against the dying of the light?
Born Broke feels like a long meditation on this question. It also circles around questions of finance, support, stamina and persistence. These (not always happy, or even defiant) conversations between Uuskyla´s drums and Brötzmann´s reeds are about the near impossibility of making this kind of music at all: "Ain´t Got The Money", "Dead And Useless", "Beautiful But Stupid". Anxieties abound about aesthetic value versus the kind of use value which is the only kind the arts councils of this world can do their sums with.
So when, in "Born Broke", Brötzmann breaks off from the increasingly tangled skein of tenor sax he´s been weaving, and after a long pause returns with a lingering, mournful clarinet, it´s not just an arbitrary switch of instrument, nor a polite invitation to Uuskyla to solo; it´s like a hard-won lesson in how to conserve (or spend) your artistic energy (or capital). The pay-off is the 40 minute marathon of "Dead And Useless" filling the second disc, which fizzes with ideas enough to have stood as a release of its own. It suggests that, contrary to Malkmus, if they´ve got something to yell about and the third or fourth wind to sustain it, old men should definitely go on yelling.
SAM DAVIES




All Music Guide, 2008 review:

Born Broke is a double-disc duet recording between saxophonist Peter Brötzmann and drummer Peeter Uuskyla. It is a delightful surprise. Those who are used to the incredible fire-breathing blasts of Brötzmann's saxophone, taking on all comers with its fire and velocity, will be quite literally astonished at the range of dynamics here. This pair has been playing together in different contexts for more than ten years. There is a very distinct kind of communication going on here that takes its time in developing, and it's due to the intuitive drumming of Uuskyla. He regularly employs circular rhythms, standard blues forms, and military march patterns in his methodology; and what you have is much more than the sum of a free jazz pairing. As a result, Brötzmann is allowed a wider emotional and tonal palette to work with. The evidence is in the opening title track on disc one, which begins with a repetitive drum pattern on snare, floor tom, and bass drum. The listener is already hooked into the rhythmic structure before Brötzmann enters, and when he does, he flows into the stream of rhythm and adds his own very moving, songlike voice on the tenor (not something usually associated with his playing) and unhurriedly goes through a series of twists, turns, and long and short statements from fast and furious to slow and deliberate, which come out on the other side with his clarinet. The freer playing on "Beautiful But Stupid" reveals that all of the intensity is still there -- all of the bleating aggressiveness -- but even here thanks to Uuskyla that intense soloing moves along a path and finds ways through it that are not in a straight line, not even in a curved one, but in a series of angles, turnarounds, and multiphonic statements that push the horn all the same. On the final cut on disc one, "Ain't Got the Money," Brötzmann channels the big warm tenor sound of Booker Ervin for a moment before moving into Albert Ayler's "folk music" territory and heading off for parts unknown. Uuskyla leads as much as follows; he shoots quick ideas inside his own ever-embellished rhythmic frames to offer a place for the saxophonist to explore. That he doesn't take a furious flailing approach to improvisation on his kit is such a plus that it can't be overstated. He doesn't lack the power or aggression to hang with the tenor player, but that sense of flow and dynamic is such an important part of the dialogue that he tends to move toward a kind of structural architecture that builds, dissembles, and builds higher. The second disc is one long improvisation, called "Dead and Useless," that lasts almost 40 minutes. It is an utterly astonishing display of energy, creativity, and overall rigor; it will have one exhausted but utterly fulfilled. Highly recommended. Thanks to the continued vision and dedication of the Atavistic imprint, listeners have this music readily available in America.
THOM JUREK