Tim Berne

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Tim Berne (2016)

Tim Berne (born October 16, 1954 in Syracuse , New York ) is an alto saxophonist and the protagonist of improvised music. His energetic playing is mainly influenced by the soul and blues of the 1960s, especially by musicians like Sam & Dave , Johnnie Taylor , Martha & the Vandellas and Gladys Knight . His own music, however, moves mainly in the field of avant-garde jazz .

Live and act

Berne bought his first alto saxophone while attending Lewis and Clark College in Oregon. He was initially a fan of rhythm and blues and soul music and hardly listened to jazz. “But then I heard Julius Hemphill . He had that Stax - and Rhythm & Blues sensibility, and he had this kind of other ferocity. It was amazing. Only then did I start playing. "

Berne moved to New York City in 1974 to play with Hemphill and studied with him and Anthony Braxton until 1978 . Since 1979 he has released his first own albums on his own label Empire Records . In the next few years he recorded five records under his own name, including with Ed Schuller , Olu Dara , Paul Motian , John Carter , Glenn Ferris and Bill Frisell . Two recordings for the Italian label Soul Note and the two albums Fulton Street Maul and Sanctified Dreams for Columbia Records followed. In 1988 a long-term partnership began with the German label JMT . The highlight of this period were the legendary Paris concerts with Bernes' quartet Bloodcount (published on Lowlife, Poisoned Minds and Memory Select). Since 1994 Bloodcount has played over 250 concerts worldwide.

In 1996 Tim Berne founded his own label again with Screwgun , on which he has released several albums so far (including 2003 Science Friction ). He describes himself "... as a control freak and confirms a sentence by Marc Ribot that it takes a great deal of control to create music that sounds as if it is uncontrolled."

In 2012 he and his quartet Snakeoil (Tim Berne, Oscar Noriega , Matt Mitchell and Ches Smith , later joined by Ryan Ferreira ) presented a first album of the same name on ECM : On this album the band played “a quartet music that is also multilayered in terms of sound technology builds on the achievements of postmodern jazz and the 2nd Viennese School, ”says Karl Lippegaus in the Süddeutsche Zeitung . The “four musicians - instead of a bassist, the clarinetist Oscar Noriega follows the leader like a shadow - very often play at the same time. A large, dark, shimmering stream of sound - four of the six pieces exceed the twelve minutes - meanders in long turns. Sometimes you ask yourself which movie you got into, but after a quarter of an hour something has turned noticeably in your own brain - and you are no longer the same. A real experience. ”The album was among the top ten of 2012 in the critical poll of the Down Beat . Another Snake Oil album followed in 2013, Shadow Man , and You've Been Watching You in 2015 , followed by Ornery People (2019, with Michael Formanek ) and The Fantastic Mrs. 10 ( Intakt Records ).

Web links

Commons : Tim Berne  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Lexigraphic entries

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Cf. Robert Fischer : Anything goes. In: All that Jazz. The story of a music. Reclam publishing house, Stuttgart. 3rd, expanded and updated edition 2007, p. 442
  2. ↑ Tim Berne's Snakeoil - Anything but musical quackery (there also the Lippegaus quote)
personal data
SURNAME Berne, Tim
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American jazz musician
DATE OF BIRTH October 16, 1954
PLACE OF BIRTH Syracuse , New York