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.

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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.’”

Miles Davis: Back “On the Corner”

When it hit the streets in 1972, On the Corner was, to paraphrase James Brown, the new, new, super-heavy funk. One step beyond the already mindblowing electrification project that was Bitches Brew, this was Miles Davis’ boldest, blackest recording yet. And it still is. Underrated even by critics who defended the trumpeter’s transformation from the modal genius of the mid-1960s to the switched-on starchild of the ’70s, On the Corner was a festering soup of sonic experimentation that was all about collective jamming and deep amorphous polyrhythms. Open-ended sessions, shot through with a potent, R&B-influenced pulse, psychedelic vibes, grinding organ and dancing tables, were radically edited into form by producer Teo Macero – extrapolating the improvisatory impulse of jazz into the computer-lab world of electronic music.

The Sly-Stone-Meets-Stockhausen mash-up was several galaxies far removed from the music Davis made indelible in the late 1950s – beginning with Kind of Blue, through several Gil Evans collaborations, and onto his latter-day supergroup with Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, and Tony Williams, who all followed their leader into the brave new world of jazz-rock fusion. Critics argue that the movement was a dead-end for jazz, and it’s hard to argue away the fact that, aside from a few amazing albums, a lot of what came in the wake of Davis’ new sound was stridently commercial schlock. But what’s heard here isn’t a cul-de-sac, it’s a visionary path to the future of popular music. Like some protean fungi sprouting from a stump in the Rain Forest, the music has seeped into the post-1970s consciousness that shaped disco and dub, ambient and trip-hop, and the outré chic mixes of avant-ribshack producers like Timbaland and the Neptunes. At least, that’s what it sounds like now. What it sounded like then (or close, I think I first heard On the Corner in 1978, which may or may not have been more impressively dense and wild under the frequent influence of hallucinogens) was something like a thick syrup crawling with bees, or sweat dripping off of a provocatively naked thigh, or a lucid dream in a cybernetic jungle.

These six CDs are a map through a hypnotic thicket, offering a chronological survey of the sessions that yielded Corner and subsequent studio albums (Big Fun, Get Up With It) leading up to Davis’ retirement in late 1975. Though Davis would return in 1981, these are his last records that matter. Tracks like “Helen Butte/Mr. Freedom X” and “Black Satin” are at once bad-ass and immaculate, cosmic and streetwise: these stoned-out grooves suspend time. Fret-freaks will grab this to hear legendary guitarist Pete Cosey’s contributions, while connoisseurs of spectral funk will dig into the half-hour dirge “He Loved Him Madly,” a meditation on the death of Duke Ellington that might as easily be a eulogy for jazz itself. Columbia’s vaults may have given up the last of its Milesian ghosts with this extravagantly packaged metal box (with tactile facsimiles of the ghetto cartoon characters Davis inked for the original album cover). The eighth and final set sends out the archival series with a big bang.

The NY Sun Files: Eri Yamamoto

Originally published in the NY Sun, Sept. 26, 2008. Not revised.

Manhattan’s landscape can change in a flash, yet even near the busiest thoroughfares, a half-forgotten pocket exists where time stands still and only the escalating beer prices alert a patron to the approximate decade. Straddle a barstool inside the musty, West Village cocoon that is Arthur’s Tavern and marvel. Balloons dangle from the ceiling, slowly deflating, their candy-shop hues faded with the years. The tobacco-brown wall paneling is dotted with ratty decorations that celebrate every occasion: Cupid silhouettes for Valentine’s Day, fake cobwebs for Halloween. If there’s a ghost of Greenwich Village past, it probably abides here, harmonizing with the creaking furniture.

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Eri Yamamoto

Pianist Eri Yamamoto’s new album, ‘Redwoods,’ is out now on AUM Fidelity Records.

Dump that it is, Arthur’s makes a great bet for jazz fans. Almost every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday for the past nine years, the pianist Eri Yamamoto has led her trio through a couple of early evening sets at the Grove Street bar. It’s the sort of open-ended residency that seems rare these days, a holdover from the era when Charlie Parker would drop by and jam. Ms. Yamamoto’s focused, sensitive touch and the easy flow of her rhythm section sometimes mark a brave stand against the chatter that fills the bar.

There’s no cover charge, so people wander in and out. A ring of chairs in the back of the room, where the pianist plays on an enclosed stage, offers an over-the-shoulder vantage point.

“It’s a challenge,” Ms. Yamamoto said recently. “Sometimes it’s very noisy, but sometimes it’s fantastic.”

The pianist, who is in her early 30s, was sitting in her Hell’s Kitchen apartment on a recent Saturday morning. She was still excited about the evening before, when a full house of European tourists had sat in rapt attention during the performance. And she had other reasons to feel cheerful. The week before was spent in Milan, where Ms. Yamamoto appeared as part of a soulful sextet led by the indefatigable bassist William Parker. And there was her new album, “Redwoods,” a sparkling trio session that complements a release from earlier this summer, “Duologue.” Both were released on the Brooklyn-based label AUM Fidelity.

Where “Redwoods” presents a cycle of nature-inspired compositions that emphasize the melodic mesh of a working band (with bassist Ikuo Takeuchi and drummer David Ambrosio), “Duologue” is a departure, a collection of improvisatory duets among Mr. Yamamoto and Mr. Parker, the drummers Hamid Drake and Federico Ughi, and the saxophonist Daniel Carter.

“I had a dream,” Ms. Yamamoto said. “It was a very clear dream. I was recording a duo album with these musicians. I woke up and thought, ‘That’s perfect.’” She had dreamt up specific melodies for each musician and wrote them down immediately. With the songs in tow, Ms. Yamamoto contacted the producer Steven Joerg, whose AUM Fidelity label released numerous albums by Mr. Parker’s group, including the 2008 “Corn Meal Dance” with Ms. Yamamoto on piano.

“To me, William’s music is very natural,” she said of the kaleidoscopic composer, with whom she has toured the past two years. “I didn’t feel any difference between that and what I’ve been doing. I don’t feel like I’m writing music ‘for jazz.’ It’s been the same since I was little.”

Trained in classical music, Ms. Yamamoto decided while in college to become a teacher. The native of Osaka, Japan, might still be doing that if not for an invitation, 13 years ago, to visit her sister in Manhattan.

“I had no idea about jazz,” she said. Picking a show at random from the Village Voice, the sisters went to Tavern on the Green to see the pianist Tommy Flanagan. Ms. Yamamoto was disturbed to see that the great pianist, who died in 2001, needed assistance to reach to the bandstand.

“I thought, ‘Oh my gosh. I paid $40 to see that old guy?’ But once he started playing, it was very strong. That moment, I knew I wanted to be like him.”

Flanagan told Ms. Yamamoto that if she intended to play jazz she had to move to New York. A few months later she did. After meeting the bassist Reggie Workman, Ms. Yamamoto enrolled for the next three years at the New School, where he taught. She immersed herself in the study of Bud Powell and other canonical figures, but it took a while for the student to gain enough self-confidence to begin playing her own music in public.

That changed in 1996 when she saw Paul Bley lead a trio, with the drummer Paul Motian and bassist Gary Peacock, at the Knitting Factory. She heard in the group’s language, with its sources in the freer forms that began emerging in the late 1950s, a way to unlock her own voice.

“I was very relieved,” she said. “I knew I wasn’t going to be a musician like Bud Powell. His life was so different from how I’d grown up. But when I heard this trio, the music reminded me of my own roots. I didn’t have to be the next Bud Powell fake. I could play what I wanted.”

Ms. Yamamoto’s jazz career began in earnest in 1997, when she picked up a regular gig at the Avenue B Social Club. The short-lived East Village bar was a favorite after-hours hangout for several generations of Lower East Side avant-garde musicians, literary types, artists, deadbeats, couples who would slip downstairs to make out, and drug addicts too stoned to snap out of their spells: an ideal audience for a novice.

“I saw her many times get a bar full of yuppies to get quiet and actually listen,” the pianist Matthew Shipp said. Mr. Shipp, whose often aggressive and deconstructive style might seem the opposite of Ms. Yamamoto’s, first heard her at Avenue B and became an ardent booster, eventually bringing her to the attention of his record label, Thirsty Ear.

“What struck me about her playing was that it had heart and soul and actually moved me, which is so unusual for a ‘jazz student.’ They’re usually caught up in chords and scales. But somehow she had already gotten to the artist part of this.”

Mr. Shipp also offered advice to the aspiring pianist.

“He told me, ‘Move your finger a half-step and you might find a different world,’” Ms. Yamamoto said.

There was no looking back. She has since developed a style that is laced with subtle colors that can rise as she blends notes in unexpected ways. The style rewards close attention. And as a seasoned bar player, Ms. Yamamoto knows how to plant flowers in the dustbin.

“My voicing is not traditional at all,” she said. “If I can hear a melody, I feel good.”