Berne, Baby, Berne

New York jazz in the 1990s spawned some monstrously good working bands, outfits so keenly focused that they could trigger the transcendental glimmer of highly skilled players in burning improvisatory flux. Depending on your taste, those bands could have been Joshua Redman’s quartet with pianist Brad Mehldau, John Zorn’s all-star Masada, the David S. Ware Quartet, or Bloodcount – formed by alto saxophonist Tim Berne in 1992.

RED BLOODED: Alto saxophonist Tim Berne has revived Bloodcount.

Bloodcount, which featured Jim Black, drums, Michael Formanek, bass, and Chris Speed on tenor, was a percolating laboratory for Mr. Berne’s complex and detailed compositions. It wasn’t unusual for a Bloodcount piece to last a half-hour. If the notion implied high-minded severity, that was never the case in practice. Even at its gnarliest, the music conveyed a sense of adventure and risk, rewarding the attentive with intriguing structures, surprising depths of soulfulness, and spirited interactions between the players, whose roles might revolve like a Calder mobile. Besides, there were Mr. Berne’s titles, which brimmed with his peculiar wit: “Sense and Sinsemilla,” “Yes, Dear,” “Scrap Metal.”

“I always find that people like my bands a lot more after I stop doing it,” Mr. Berne said. “But if something becomes successful, I move on and see if I can work something else out. Once it gets to the point that no one is complaining, I get nervous.” That explains why he broke up Bloodcount in 1999. After what he cautiously estimated as a “billion” gigs, Mr. Berne said he could no longer compose for the band’s instrumentaton. Now, almost a decade later, he began hearing some different music for the same group. Bloodcount marked its return to the stage this year with an ongoing series of clubdates, during which
the six-foot-four Mr. Berne likes to play in his stockinged feet, avant-casual. “You can reinvent an old band by writing new stuff and starting fresh,” he explained. “I didn’t want to do it as a retrospective.”

For that, fans can check out “Seconds.” The new CD/DVD release, on Mr. Berne’s Screwgun label, features two discs of vintage Bloodcount live recordings and a 1994 concert video from Paris, shot by Susanna Schonberg, that reflects the energies of the performance in a restless montage of extreme close-ups and offstage passages. But the music Bloodcount has now begun to play sounds much different than that, Mr. Berne promised, chatting recently from his home in Park Slope, where he has lived since the 1980s. (“The downtown scene?” he said, as if cocking an eyebrow.
“I’m a Brooklyn guy.”) “My writing changed a lot when I started writing for keyboards,” he said, referring to an ongoing affiliation with the pianist and electronic composer Craig Taborn, who plays in Mr. Berne’s trio Hard Cell and alongside him in a quartet with guitarist David Torn. “There’s certain rhythmic stuff, certain harmonies. I guess rhythmically more than anything, and the counterpoint is stranger.”

Mr. Berne was a late-bloomer musically. He didn’t pick up a horn until he was 19 or 20, excited by the countless gigs he attended
at bustling mid-1970s haunts like Studio Rivbea and Slug’s. One day he sprained his ankle, and purchased a $200 alto saxophone to help him kill time. His astute taste in mentors proved exceptionally fortunate. Mr. Berne’s favorite musician was Julius Hemphill, the visionary saxophonist and composer (“Dogon, A.D.,” “Long Tongues”) who proved open to taking on a completely green student. “I started making music because I saw him doing it,” Mr. Berne said. “I was pretty naïve for quite a long time. I started as a bandleader by default. It’s a good thing I learned how to do it early on, and I learned how to put out records. I just had to learn music.”

Now 53, the saxophonist honed his chops and had a contract with Columbia Records in 1986, even though he was working a much different line than the label’s loudly touted jazz star, Wynton Marsalis. The deal only lasted for two albums, but Mr. Berne became fast friends with its graphic designer, Steven Byram, and began a long artistic partnership. (Mr. Byram creates all of the amusingly abstract design for the saxophonist’s CDs, which upend the dry and amateurish norm for avant-garde jazz packaging).

“I just want to own the stuff, I don’t know if it makes any difference,” Mr. Berne said. He’s been marketing his own discs since 1996, with 19 titles available on his website – www.screwgunrecords.com. During a short spell a few years ago, he became ambitious about running an indie label, but burned out on the effort involved. Lately, he’s tried to take advantage of MP3 technology. “Today I sold six downloads!” he said, with an air of mock pride. More common, he lamented, was learning how easily his performances could be acquired elsewhere. “It’s hard to sell stuff because everyone gets it for free. I was talking to a friend in Europe after we did some shows in Barcelona and Budapest and he had already listened to the gig, 24 hours after we played it.”

As for the recharged Bloodcount, Mr. Berne advised to expect the unexpected. His recent European tour with Mr. Torn, whose music is dense and boiling, yielded precisely the response that he thrives on. “About 20 percent of the audience was shocked,” he said. “We weren’t preaching to the choir. Some like you, and some don’t, and you get a kind of tension. That first year or two with a band is really different than the rest of the time. Nobody knows the music – including me.”

Perhaps the only thing for certain is that Mr. Berne’s new pieces will stretch out at their leisure. There’s a good reason he prefers extended compositions, he said.

“I never liked to talk.”

The NY Sun Files: Kidd Jordan

Even people who aren’t sure they’ve heard of Kidd Jordan have probably heard him. Now 73, the tenor saxophonist has been playing since the early 1950s. And since Mr. Jordan’s spirited adolescence coincided with the dawn of rock ‘n’ roll and the explosion of new sounds coming out of New Orleans’s fertile rhythm-and-blues scene, the Crescent City native was at the right place at the right time.

Click Image to Enlarge

Luciano Rossetti

ON THE HORN The saxophonist Kidd Jordan.

Mr. Jordan was barely out of his teens when he began gigging with the Hawkettes, a band featuring future New Orleans musical royalty Art and Aaron Neville, whose 1954 hit “Mardi Gras Mambo” became a parade anthem. In the half-century since, the avuncular multi-reedist has backed up everyone from Ray Charles to Martha and the Vandellas to Stevie Wonder, worked alongside Professor Longhair and Little Richard, and recorded with Elvis Costello and R.E.M. But for all his session and stage credits, Mr. Jordan has always pursued a parallel path as a jazz avant-gardist of the purest intent. It’s in that role that the saxophonist visits New York this week, headlining a Wednesday night tribute to his career at the 13th annual Vision Festival, the world’s leading free-jazz summit. This year’s edition will present more than 50 events, including music and dance performances, poetry readings, film and visual art projections, and panel discussions.

“It’s like a love-in,” Mr. Jordan said of the festival, where he has performed nearly every year since it was launched in 1996 by the dancer-choreographer Patricia Nicholson Parker and her husband, the bassist and bandleader William Parker. “All the cats that I love are playing. It’s a family thing. You just get up and assert yourself. You play and you do what you do.” Talking by phone from his daughter’s house in New Orleans, Mr. Jordan often displayed an amused regard for the world and for himself. “You know, other than in Chicago, New York, and Europe, people always look at me strange.”

Mr. Jordan is no stranger to the Vision Festival, where his fierce and lyrical style can erupt in whatever impromptu pattern he chooses, without puncturing decorum.

The weeklong lollapalooza first emerged as an alternative to the city’s big-ticket corporate jazz festivals of the mid-1990s, namely the mainstream JVC festival and the long-defunct Bell Atlantic and Verizon festivals organized by former Knitting Factory owner Michael Dorf. Though the Vision Festival has an amorphous relationship to genre — it has hosted artists as non-jazz as Cat Power, and has long fostered an appeal to indie-rock fans — it revels in old-school free improvisation and next-wave jazz exploration. There’s a particular focus on the long tail of influence extending from the revolutionary sounds of such 1960s icons as John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, and Albert Ayler. It’s a continuum into which Mr. Jordan slips seamlessly, as he will demonstrate when he plays four sets in a variety of combos featuring such favored associates as Mr. Parker, the drummer Hamid Drake, and Chicago tenor saxophonist Fred Anderson, another unsung hero who was previously honored by the festival.

“We’re used to playing together,” Mr. Jordan said of Messrs. Parker and Drake, who are to this kind of music what, say, Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare were to reggae in the 1970s, and who have collaborated with the saxophonist in various settings during the past decade. Thanks to such a high degree of almost telepathic chemistry, the musicians can move together like a breeze gathering force, capable of radical and unexpected shifts. In the quartet with Mr. Anderson, the rhythm section may become the front line, musically speaking, while the saxophonists create a modulating background of rushing, roiling tones. “They’ll throw different things at you; that’s what I like about improvised music. You don’t get stuck in ruts. You can’t look for nothing!”

A fifth ensemble, formed around two of his musician sons — trumpeter Marlon and flautist Kent — as well as alto saxophonist Donald Harrison, will pay a New Orleans-themed tribute to Mr. Jordan.

It’s appropriate, given that the musician chose to stay in his hometown rather than join a generation of his peers who left for Los Angeles and studio work in the 1960s, or spent most of their time on tour. Instead, Mr. Jordan became an educator, teaching at Southern University in Baton Rouge, running summer music camps for kids, and raising seven children of his own, four of whom are now professional musicians.

“I figured if I always had a job teaching, I could play what I wanted to play,” he said. The only thing that pushed Mr. Jordan out of the city was Hurricane Katrina, which forced him to relocate to Baton Rouge until his home is finally repaired. (“Nobody’s getting nothing done,” he said. “But you got to put up with it. You can’t do nothing about it.”)

While Mr. Jordan became a valued resource in New Orleans, his work as a soulful improviser with a surplus of old-school R&B shout in his heart has filtered out to free-jazz fans through a network of independent labels in America and Europe. As a young man, Mr. Jordan said, he was another horn player copying Charlie Parker’s licks. Then one day, someone played him “Something Else!!!!” a new album by a then little-known musician named Ornette Coleman. “And I said, ‘This is it! I know I’m in the right direction now,’” he said. “Oh, man. When I heard that … Hallelujah!”

As far as lifetime recognition goes, though, Mr. Jordan has no worries. The characteristically self-effacing performer may appear modest, but beneath his New Orleans charm he’s just as tough and singular as Mr. Coleman — and as purely individualistic as any of his now-legendary bandmates from the 1950s and ’60s. As we spoke, he cracked a joke about the time someone was trying to track him down.

“I said, ‘Man! If you want to hear me play then come by my house. As long as I can practice, I don’t care if I play nowhere.’”

Hello my friends

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Alrighty now! Just warming the seat up. Return for further emissions regarding, in no particular order or consequence: Belgian beer, mass media, NYC street culture, the fiery pleasures of dining in Elmhurst, Chinese girls singing about meeting Jesus in Heaven, really goddam noisy fucking jazz, Japanese metal, minimalism, the aesthetics of porn, the porn of aesthetics, modern furniture, the impossibility of a happy life without hot peppers, strong coffee and obscure Korean cinema, all things Brooklyn, Los Angeles, Chicago, Panhandle Florida, redneck mothers, watermelons, weirdos, underground comix, Coney Island, the end of the world as we know it, Iggy, visionary fuck-ups of every stripe, and what Nick Tosches once called “the sevenfold path of the unfiltered Kool.” And so on …