Recorded September 9, 2006 at Bohus Sound Recording, Kungälv, Sweden. Originally included in the 2CD-album Born Broke 2008 by Atavistic and released as this single LP/CD by Omlott February 6, 2014.


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


Dead and Useless (Omlott Records MLR 003 LP) is an extension of the saxophonist’s on-going dialogue with Uuskyla, who is a little more than a decade younger than Brötzmann, has worked with players such as saxophonist Biggi Vinkeloe and electric bassist Peter Friis Nielsen and first recorded with the saxophonist in 1999. A Jackson Pollack-like drip painting, compared to the Wassily Kandinsky-like sound portraits which maintain figurative associations on the other disc (Songlines, Trost TR 138 LP), Brötzmann’s improvisations here include faint echoes of half-remembered American Songbook melodies. These floating associations never come fully into focus, but as Uuskyla exhibits his skill by calibrating and recalibrating the beat at varied pitches and tempos, the saxophonist is never off track. With both players functioning like high-performance sports cars in a race along mountainous road, the thrill comes in experiencing how these evenly matched high-precision machines – or instruments – operate.
Standing back for solos during “Side B”, which is almost the same length as “Side A”, individual idiosyncrasies become more pronounced. Here it’s the drummer who moderates the interaction with sand-dance-like slides. Not only is he able to set up a call-and-response among his kit’s components; but it’s also evident that he’s translating some of the saxophonist’s more comely phrasing into percussion language. Before an extended pause that moves the two into the track’s climatic final section, a Brötzmann shift from mellow Ben Webster-like tone spinning to grittier, shattering stridency doesn’t upset the drummer’s binding texture either. Sling-shot-like catapulting, cathedral-echoing bell ringing and some lug loosening and tightening give notice from Uuskyla that any reed distortion can be echoed and amplified. Finally the two tones correlate in clattering resolve, with a bass drum whack signaling the end.
Sonic inspiration and cohesion was part of Brötzmann’s game plan in his fifties and sixties as this disc demonstrate. With the right partner the resolve continues to this day.
—Ken Waxman, 2015