Peter Brötzmann, Peter Uuskyla & Peter Friis-Nielsen - Live at Nefertiti

Johan Lif, Västmanlands Länd Tidning

Improvised Music which burst the borders.

Sine the epoch-making debut with "Machine Gun" Peter Brötzmann has worked for a radicalisation of the modern music.
While other musical revolutionaries have sold themselves out or laid of, Brötzmann has continue to keep the flag high for the free jazz. This two years old recording from Nefertiti in Gothenburg shows that his forces haven't been reduced; there is still no one who in the same way completely turns his instrument inside- out.

Brötzmann is here in the company of the Danish bassist Peter Friis Nielsen and the Swedish drummer Peeter Uuskyla. Both musicians who during many years have worked with the improvised music in Scandinavia, even during a period when the interest was very slack.
Uuskyla has, for instance, played with Cecil Taylor and together with the foremost free form pioneer in Sweden, Bengt "Frippe" Nordström, the man who produced the first recording with Albert Ayler.

Ayler's spirit rests over this new CD, "Live at Nefertiti", which convenient enough has been issued by the small independent Swedish label Ayler Records. There are a couple of moments when the music calm down but the ecstatic and the high energy dominates.

It is said that restraint is an access for improvising musicians - one must be happy that this trio doesn't care about this trivial advice. Brötzmann has an ability to always take the music one step further than what one thought was possible. Other musicians' power dry up after a while; Brötzmann continue a long time after the breaking-point should have been passed. Most impressing is that he makes it without repeating himself and without that the full expression kills the creativity of the ideas.

Friis Nielsen and Uuskyla is a nearly organic welded rhythm section, a two-headed monster infighting with Brötzmann's furious tenor saxophone. The use of the electric bass creates an elasticity for rhythm section. The concert was recorded by The Swedish Broadcasting Company and the quality of the sound is splendid - as a nice change to all other rumbled, poor recorded free jazz CDs.

The recording centres around Brötzmann's "Nidhog", an energy trip in four parts named after a dragon from the Old Norse mythology. The music is free but it never drops its connections with the jazz, something which becomes obvious in Peeter Uuskyla's "Third Sun", were Brötzmann blows some phrases which is pure blues.
When the 70 minutes of the CD have passed one is totally exhausted but grateful overwhelmed.

The free jazz can be trapped in two ways; tiered John Coltrane pastiches or pretentious yuppie-avant-garde. Brötzmann mange to avoid both traps by playing a music which is cemented in the tradition and in the bodily expression, at the same time it search for new expressions.