Download - Downbeat

34 DOWNBEAT OCTOBER 2010
chemistry—who can recognize when things happen and not get in the way
of it—and when I find them, I milk it as long as I can. I try to set up problems
for them to solve. It’s like being a painter with a full palette of colors at
your disposal to organize. The tunes are like provocations to motivate improvisation.
If they aren’t forced to do something they ordinarily wouldn’t
do, we might as well just jam.”
Berne is not one to talk about the specific vocabulary and strategies
that he deploys to articulate his aesthetic. His recent partners, however,
had much to say about the impact of his musical production on their
generation.
“I grew up with Tim’s music,” said Iverson. “Buffalo Collision is twothirds
of the Bad Plus meets our formative influences.”
He referenced Berne’s two mid-’80s recordings for Columbia, Fulton
Street Maul and Sanctified Dreams, and his cusp-of-the-’90s dates for JMT
(Fractured Fairy Tales, Miniature, Pace Yourself), on which such virtuoso
improvisers as Roberts, Bill Frisell, Mark Feldman, Herb Robertson and
Joey Baron uncorked some of the strongest playing of their early careers.
“When I moved to New York in 1991, it seemed like the coolest, newest
stuff around,” Iverson continued. “I thought everybody would know them
and regard them as the latest advance in jazz. I am firmly convinced that
everybody who made music on the Downtown scene in the ’90s—Dave
Douglas, everybody else—owes an incredible debt to what Tim did. He
plays great horn, writes great music, does this crazy improvising. There’s
never any doubt about his intention. Whatever pitch Tim is improvising
with on the saxophone, there’s a good melodic reason. In two phrases, you
can tell he’s playing. It’s his language, his thing, and he plays it very strong
all the time.”
Iverson honed in on Berne’s embrace of “eighth-note or punk energy on
vamps that evolve from the context of playing a lot of free music, beautiful
rubato melodies—Tim put that in the world.”
“Tim has tremendous power both compositionally and as a bandleader,”
Black said. “In Bloodcount, out of a two-hour set, you play about an
hour-and-a-half completely improvised, seamlessly weaving together written
material and improvisation, with different grooves, times, feels, vibes,
attitudes and energies.”
Berne describes his rhythmic conception as osmotic and intuitive.
Black broke down the components. “It’s totally James Brown and whatever
was happening with funk-based music when Tim was growing up,” he
remarked. “But there’s a thousand different ways to play a funk groove—
depending on how much energy and action you wanted at the moment, you
could play break beats over a James Brown feel. Tim uses odd numbers
of bars to follow the shape of the line he’s writing. I would memorize his
music by singing the melody, not unlike learning a Charlie Parker head, but
more twisted.”
“I was into the idea of the epic within improvisational music, the way
Tim integrates improvisation over a long form,” said Mitchell, 34. A decade
ago, he purchased scores to “Eye Contact,” a 51-minute opus for Bloodcount
from Paris Concerts, and “Impacted Wisdom,” an extended piece
from the Caos Totale album Nice View. These are but two examples of Berne’s
penchant for creating, as Cline put it, “episodic journeys that gradually
morph into virtually impossible (for me) to play melodic-rhythmic lines
that are unbelievably long.
“This kind of drama was not common in a lot of the music 20, 30 years
ago, and maybe still isn’t common in that scene,” Cline continued. “Tim
also has a certain amount of patience with improvisation. He’s always had
an amazing ability to hone in on a musician’s individual aspects and, I dare
say, eccentricities, and to capitalize on them and write for them, to play up
those aspects of that particular musician’s style or sound or sensibility, and
enable that musician to completely and confidently contribute their personality
with absolute freedom.”
In his embrace of idiosyncracy, Berne has followed the path of his own
formative role models, all graduates of Chicago’s Association for the
Advancement of Creative Musicians and the St. Louis-based Black Artists
Group, who, like Berne, migrated to New York in the first half of the