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Tim Berne
Predisposition
for Change
By Ted Panken
Midway through 2009, Tim Berne dreamed up a new ensemble.
“When I was sleeping I was playing in my brain with Marc Ducret,
Paul Motian and Mary Halvorson—I can’t remember the
bass player,” Berne related. “I actually heard the music; I woke up thinking
I’d just done a concert. I thought, ‘Wow, this would be a great band.’”
In conjuring this imaginary two-guitar quintet, Berne drew directly
from concrete associations. He’s deployed guitarist Ducret over the past
two decades in such units as Bloodcount, Science Friction and Big Satan;
toured with Motian in the early ’80s groups that recorded Songs And Rituals
In Real Time (Empire), The Ancestors (Soul Note) and Mutant Variations
(Soul Note); and, more recently, incorporated acoustic guitarist Halvorsen
in Adobe Probe, a band that also includes such accomplished speculative
improvisers as trumpeter Shane Endsley, bassist John Hebert, drummer
Gerald Cleaver and pianist Matt Mitchell.
Indeed, for Berne, to explore different sonic contexts and personnel
combinations is more default m.o. than aberration. “It’s a compulsion, like
I don’t have a choice,” Berne elaborated between bites of salad in an Italian
restaurant several blocks from his Brooklyn home. Tall and trim at 55, the
alto saxophonist wore his customary uniform of untucked shirt, blue jeans,
running shoes and several days growth of beard.
“Every time I say I’ll never lead a band again, two minutes later I’m
starting one, or I’m thinking about it, or I’m writing,” he said. “I have to in
order to feel good. A couple of my bands were together for four, five years.
Then people got busy, it became an ordeal to rehearse and find dates in
common, and I moved on. When I think I’m getting stale, I tend to seek out
other players rather than try to change what I’m doing. Playing with different
people changes me by osmosis, and I start getting different ideas—I’m
too lazy to figure out how to do it myself at home.”
Reflecting this predisposition for change, Berne’s itinerary over the last
two years includes several new, concrete configurations. After initial winter
and spring ’09 engagements, he toured last February with the co-op
quartet Buffalo Collision, which includes Bad Plus pianist Ethan Iverson
and drummer Dave King, and cellist Hank Roberts, a frequent presence on
Berne’s reputation-making latter-’80s recordings for Columbia and JMT.
Their 2009 recording, (duck), on Berne’s Screwgun label, displays a col-
32 DOWNBEAT OCTOBER 2010
lective sensibility that is at once highly organized and free-flowing—as the
pianist put it, “Dave and I go in and out of interlocking, almost composedsounding
events, while Tim’s and Hank’s response is to keep searching for
their pure, natural improvised selves.”
Over this period, Berne has played several engagements with BBC (now
known as Sons of Champignon), also a co-op group with Jim Black, Berne’s
drummer of choice with Bloodcount since 1994, and guitarist Nels Cline, now
best-known for his contribution to Wilco, who produced Berne’s 1979 debut
recording, The Five-Year Plan, for his first imprint label, Empire.
Both units focus on tabula rasa collective improvisation, differentiating
them in process from all but one of the various ensembles that performed
the dense, multi-thematic compositions that define Berne’s 30 or so leader
dates. “Partly it was practical, because it’s so hard to get people together
to rehearse anymore,” Berne said. However, over the past year Berne has
been on a writing binge for two ensembles—Adobe Probe and a quartet
called Los Totopos, with Oscar Noriega on clarinet, Mitchell on piano and
Ches Smith on percussion. The kindling spur was an encounter with a oneperformance-only
suite composed and performed by Julius Hemphill at the
end of the ’70s with Lester Bowie and Don Moye.
“I thought that I’d arrange this instead of trying to come up with something
new,” Berne said. “Something about it is so organic and simple and
complicated at the same time, and I started writing arrangements, just to get
myself going. It put me into this space of, ‘OK, I’m going to start working
on music all day like I used to, and fuck all this other stuff. If don’t have any
gigs—fine. I won’t have any gigs.’”
Bookings have been few and far between for Adobe Probe, partly because
of its unwieldy size, but Los Totopos now boasts a resume of 15 performances
and, by Berne’s estimate, four sets worth of compositions.
“I didn’t want to write a lot of hard music and then not be able to play
it,” Berne said. He told Mitchell, Noriega and Smith, “We’re going to do
this, but we have to rehearse a lot—I want it to sound like a band.” Each
member was amenable.
“They can all read flyshit and play 90 different styles, but that’s not really
the point,” Berne said of his personnel. “I’m looking for people you
can’t pigeonhole, who don’t play in styles. I get people who have a natural