https://joshberman.net Josh Berman Tue, 21 Sep 2021 08:56:37 +0000 https://joshberman.net en https://joshberman.net/everybody-else-s-life-too Tue, 21 Sep 2021 08:56:37 +0000 Josh Berman https://joshberman.net/everybody-else-s-life-too Josh Berman Trio everybody else’s life too Josh Berman, cornet Jason Roebke, bass Chris Corsano, drums Released on: Corbett vs. Dempsey&nbsp; Were you to tap the lifeblood of Chicago music, you would find Josh Berman&nbsp;flowing liberally through its veins. Active on the scene for more than a quarter century, the cornetist, bandleader, and composer has helped retain the unique flavor of the city's soundscape, with particular attention to the music of its jazz past – groups like the Austin High Gang&nbsp;and the&nbsp;Oliver-Armstrong&nbsp;lineage and&nbsp;Freddie Keppard, as well as&nbsp;more recent figures from&nbsp;Lester Bowie&nbsp;to&nbsp;Wadada Leo Smith. But Berman is more interstylistic synthesist than moldy fig, a fact nowhere better demonstrated than in his powerhouse trio. On Everybody Else's Life, Too, the group's second record, Berman has found the perfect percussionist for his compact-yet-expansive compositions. Chris Corsano, who plays in a staggering array of contexts from voluble free jazz to timbral sonic experiments, is in turn ideally complemented by&nbsp;Jason Roebke's bass playing, which is equally adept in all areas melodic, swingful, and textural alike. A sharp studio recording captures the rapport and playfulness, as well as the&nbsp;adventure, inherent in the threesome's dynamic interaction. Order the new album now at: Found,&nbsp;Bandcamp, or CvD https://joshberman.net/Trio-Correspondences Wed, 12 May 2021 18:13:21 +0000 Josh Berman https://joshberman.net/Trio-Correspondences Berman/Lytton/RoebkeTrio CorrespondencesJosh Berman - CornetPaul Lytton - PercussionJason Roebke - BassReleased May 17, 2019 https://joshberman.net/Trio-Discrepancies Wed, 12 May 2021 18:13:24 +0000 Josh Berman https://joshberman.net/Trio-Discrepancies Berman/Lytton/RoebkeTrio DiscrepanciesJosh Berman - CornetPaul Lytton - PercussionJason Roebke - BassFour years ago the Chicago cornetist Josh Berman dropped his most convincing and original statement as a bandleader, a trio recording of unerring succinctness and dazzling inter-connectedness titled A Dance and a Hop (Delmark). The group featured bassist Jason Roebke and drummer Frank Rosaly. When the album was released I wrote, “the members seem to be wired to make rubato a lingua franca. Berman continues to savor tart melodic shapes as he twists and works over elegant little phrases, but just as important is how he manipulates his horn, shifting between full-bodied cries and extended techniques that transform it into a noisemaker a la Axel Dörner.” His skeletal writing functioned brilliantly with a trio that exhibited quicksilver agility and electric rapport, moving as a single organism. Whenever I’ve listened to that album I’ve envisioned one of those thumb (or push) puppets, where a small plate with a spring controls wild gyrations of some animal atop the surface, with wild herky-jerk motions—but instead of a single character, Berman’s trio featured three of them, all moving impossibly in sync.In a short profile I wrote about him in the late summer of 2017, in advance of the debut of a new quartet with Roebke, reedist Darius Jones, and drummer Michael Vatcher, he discussed the impact the trio had on him:The trio sparked a new way of working for me. I really loved working that way—rather than coming up with arrangements, you write pieces that are phrases and gestures, some of which can be quite tunelike. I like tunes. With the trio record, I think I figured out a way to do a lot of things I like. I like tunes and I like free improvisation, and I like it when they happen at once.Not long after making the record Rosaly moved from Chicago to Amsterdam, so the leader was forced to sub out on the trio’s sporadic local gigs, and when a European tour was organized—and Rosaly was unavailable—he enlisted the singular free improviser Paul Lytton, a tireless experimenter but, like Berman, a musician with a deep connection to the swing impulses of jazz. Now, thanks to Astral Spirits, we can hear why that experience opened the cornetist up to more febrile, unstable collaborations. Released last Friday, Trio Discrepancies maintains that highly reactive, nimble sense of movement, but the performances dispense with composed themes in favor of long-form improvisations where the leader’s innate sense of melody arrives in terse sallies erupting from extended passages of herky-jerk abstraction. Berman’s puckered tone, fatback licks and tart smears—as ever bridging the gap between the garrulous, vocalic excursions of Ellington trumpeters like Bubber Miley and Rex Stewart and modern seekers like Wadada Leo Smith and Nate Wooley--are steadily buffeted by the rhythm section’s shifting gambits. The bassist unfurls deep, woody lines and the drummer peppers his flow with wonderfully jarring, chaotic accents, but despite the turbulence they forge an inexorable sense of forward motion, providing a platform for the cornetist to toggle masterfully between lyric flurries and knotted outbursts. Unlike the airtight miniatures on A Dance and a Hop, these pieces allow the players to resituate the same language onto a wide-open plane—pushing and pulling in changing directions and allowing spontaneous motifs to play out fully, although each musician never lets any single notion overstay it’s welcome. As you can hear below on the album’s lengthy opening track “Padova,” named like the others, for the city in which they were performed, the trio manages to avoid the usual ebb-and-flow of many extended improvisation—there’s no shortage of ideas and the combo thrives on carving out space as much as it does piling on sound.-Peter MargasakReleased September 20, 2019 Recorded by:JD Service (Jose &amp; Marco Dicati) at Cinema Torresino, Padova, Italy - April 7, 2018.Jason Roebke at Fri Form, Trondheim, Norway - April 11, 2018.Mixed by Todd A. Carter and Jason Roebke at belAir, Chicago.Mastered by Alan Jones at Laminal Audio.Released on Astral SpiritsThanks to Ståle Liavik Solberg, Tollef Østvang, and Stefano Merighi.Design by Jaime ZuverzaLayout by Drew Liverman https://joshberman.net/A-Dance-and-A-Hop Wed, 12 May 2021 18:13:12 +0000 Josh Berman https://joshberman.net/A-Dance-and-A-Hop <img width="586" height="585" width_o="586" height_o="585" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/fe7b96122f311ca34f2cb2a209cee9d03783c130587a9c4c0d550a0ef656cfbf/Dance-and-a-Hop.jpg" data-mid="108539380" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/586/i/fe7b96122f311ca34f2cb2a209cee9d03783c130587a9c4c0d550a0ef656cfbf/Dance-and-a-Hop.jpg" /> Josh Berman Trio A Dance and A Hop Josh Berman – cornetJason Roebke – bassFrank Rosaly – drums Berman has long been one of the most thoughtful musicians on Chicago’s diverse jazz and improvised music scene, a player who steadily digests a world of influences to craft something more original with each passing year. But he reaches new heights on A Dance and A Hop, a gorgeously conceived trio outing that shows him reveling in sound qua sound as never before. Peter Margasak, Chicago Reader One had to marvel at the sheer amount of melodic invention Berman produced, showing a remarkable capacity for continuously creating lines that twist and turn in unexpected directions. Whether he was articulating mercurial motifs in “Hang Ups” or leaving ample space between softly stated gestures in “Blues,” Berman never lacked for ideas. That his musical vocabulary danced around traditional notions of harmony and tonality only heightened one’s admiration for the creativity of this work. Howard Reich, Chicago Tribune https://joshberman.net/There-Now Wed, 12 May 2021 18:13:17 +0000 Josh Berman https://joshberman.net/There-Now <img width="586" height="586" width_o="586" height_o="586" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f35870ea7ad3400f3689372b92a241112ea1cd55d970759d3190450b1bedda18/There-now.jpg" data-mid="108539403" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/586/i/f35870ea7ad3400f3689372b92a241112ea1cd55d970759d3190450b1bedda18/There-now.jpg" /> Josh Berman and His Gang There Now Josh Berman – cornetJeb Bishop – tromboneKeefe Jackson – tenor saxophoneGuillermo Gregorio – clarinetJason Stein – bass clarinetJason Adasiewicz – vibraphoneJoshua Abrams – bassFrank Rosaly – drums And His Gang: that takes you way back, to the 1920s when a few leaders led one—like Perry Bradford, who’d written “Crazy Blues” and run one of the first hot black recording bands, Mamie Smith’s Jazz Hounds; future Hollywood character actor Jay C. Flippen; the forgotten Arthur Gibbs, first to record James P. Johnson’s “Charleston.” And of course Bix Beiderbecke whose Gang updated pieces by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band in 1927—a very early jazz repertory project. For Chicagoans like the players here, the tag also suggests the Austin High Gang, a gaggle of suburbanites (Bud Freeman, Frank Teschemacher…) who’d developed personal and collective jazz styles while working in tandem. Josh Berman says, “Years ago I got this old collection called Chicago Style Jazz, with a Ben Shahn cover. I was super into that.” That early LP—Columbia 632—spotlighted the 1927 Eddie Condon/Red McKenzie sides like “Sugar” and “Liza” on which four Austinites debuted. “So I put together a band playing that 1927 Condon repertoire. We did a date at the Chicago Cultural Center in 2007, followed by more writing and arranging, and then the Chicago Jazz Festival in 2008. After that, about every six months, I’d find myself thinking about it a lot. So in 2011, I got more serious about it, writing more creative music, and leaning less on the older material. At this point the band is more about how Joshua Abrams and Frank Rosaly play together, and how that changes with Jason Adasiewicz added. And it’s just as much about how Keefe Jackson and I play together. We’ve all worked together a lot, in all sorts of combinations, like my Old Idea, Jason’s Rolldown, Keefe’s Project Project and other bands. So it feels like a crew.” They often shared bandstands with Jeb Bishop, already a scene fixture when they came up. Jason Stein came later, but made quick inroads; he has a quartet with Jackson, Abrams and Rosaly. Where the Austin High Gang mostly drifted to New York, Berman’s crew stayed in Chicago, spending long nights jamming at the Hungry Brain and working for various leaders, till they learned to interact in myriad ways. The players have a lot of seasoning on them by now. In that regard this music smacks less of 1927 than Bud Freeman’s 1938 Commodore octet with Condon, Dave Tough and Pee Wee Russell: players with a hard-earned ease of interplay, who stayed true to the music that first grabbed them, while minding changing times. They used old tunes as springboards but modernized the concept. They weren’t kids anymore. They read Proust, even if he was no good in translation. New stabs at old rhythms are most always anachronistic; later developments leak through. But you can suggest the old beats. Hear how effortlessly drummer Rosaly and bassist Abrams ease between a loose 2/4 and 4/4 on “Love Is Just Around the Corner (Approximately)” and 2/4 swing and free time on “Liza” (Condon’s, not Gerhwin’s). Rosaly is the date’s linchpin—keeps the time moving, and loose, puts a boot to the soloists. The trad flagwaver “I’ve Found a New Baby” becomes an oddly subdued dirge, as if the players know too well romances don’t always pan out. Abrams, pizzicato, takes the rococo Coleman Hawkins solo, as the band intones the melody behind, to highlight his variations. The bassist’s gravitas, ebony-rubber tone and plosively plush attack are beautifully captured. The middle section honors other Chicago ancestors: the AACMers’ improvised atmo-scapes, free play in slo-mo. When the horns return to the melody, Abrams walks the tune out, just so we can hear how well he does that too. It’s his concerto. Josh Berman plays cornet not trumpet, so in a sense he always references the ’20s. He&nbsp; mixes thematic variations with purely sonic effects, like Bill Dixon. Or Freddie Keppard. Berman’s improvisations often betray a slippery relationship to the underlying beat—he’ll sliding behind only to play catch up, an old Chicago ploy. (Von Freeman, anyone?) He also has a way of honing a line down to a few essential gestures. Around 3:20 on “Jada,” he’s working variations on a wide-interval wobble when Keefe Jackson starts some friendly heckling, with a more emphatic version of the same figure. Josh’s rejoinder hints at the phrasing of Fats Waller’s “Jitterbug Waltz,” which he duly alights on before proceeding—a nice passing conversation. Jackson’s excitable like that. As “Cloudy” opens he’s charged up even before a Mingusy horn choir slides in behind. “Keefe is such a great changes player, within his own concept,” Berman says. Beat. “I wouldn’t even know what to compare it to.” As progressive dixielanders turned free players, Steve Lacy and Roswell Rudd knew you can bridge two worlds of collective improvisation. Jeb Bishop’s other gig is as a translator, so he’s comfortable moving between one rhetorical universe and another—not least when some free collective morphs into Nicksielandism or vice versa. He has a way of tailoring the volume and even shape of every note in a fast sequence—“Cloudy” makes his case—and doesn’t stoop to tailgate clichés. Indeed, the players don’t always take the bait. Berman’s “Sugar” kicks off like 1963 Eric Dolphy with Woody Shaw and Bobby Hutcherson—the date with “Jitterbug Waltz.” (That’s my reading; Josh calls the arrangement “very Broadway.”) Jason Stein on bass clarinet resists temptation to go Dolphectic however: his solo has its own raspy grace, and he gets extra points for tapping Fats Waller’s “I’ve Got a Feelin’ I’m Fallin’.” One doesn’t associate the vibes with early jazz—the instrument had barely been invented—but Jason Adasiewicz is always welcome. In the rhythm section, he can lurk in the background (hear him behind Bishop on “Love Is”) or stir the pot. Adasiewicz can hit the metal bars very very hard, but the feature “One Train May Hide Another” shows off the pellucid depths of his sound, and his distinctive harmonic voice; chord tones slowly rise through a cloud of bubbles, to light on the surface. “I always heard Adasiewicz playing the melody to ‘Trains’,” Berman says: “It’s his concept exposed.” That tune takes its title from Kenneth Koch’s fine poem, about how there’s always more to consider, so you should take the time to look. That’s all but Josh Berman’s credo here, as he keeps rolling more and more material into view. His Gang has small group mobility, even in the collectives, but can also supply full-sounding background figures, the trains behind the train. Hear “Cloudy” or “Liza”—or, for gorgeous voicings, the harmonium chords behind the clarinet melody on “Jada.” Josh Berman: “In the longer pieces, there might be an intro, maybe another intro, a theme that can come forward and then recede, passages that work as backgrounds or standing on their own. I love to hear stuff that comes back, followed by still more fresh material, or a background derived from another part of the theme.” His title “Mobile + Blues” evokes Bix’s paean to a Gulf Coast city and the mobiles of Alexander Calder and composer Earle Brown. “But it didn’t end up sounding like I expected. I thought it would be really quiet.” The Gang’s apparent ringer is clarinetist Guillermo Gregorio, the Argentine composer resident in Chicago, rather older than his bandmates. But he has the most direct connection to the material, having identified with the Austin Gang early. “There are ‘scholars’ who say that ‘Chicago style jazz’ never existed,” Guillermo says, “but growing up in Buenos Aires we knew better! I got my first clarinet as a teenager after listening to records by Johnny Dodds and Pee Wee Russell. Since then, I’ve gone through many things, musically speaking—musique concrѐte, free jazz, non-jazz improvising, the Fluxus movement, graphic scores, visual art and design—which may influence my playing now, or not. Josh never told me how to play in the Gang, but the peculiar conception of his arrangements was not that far from my own interests, and I discovered new aspects of that old music.” This new music is at least partly about how old music gets remembered—how our memory shapes our reality. Gregorio plays the bridge of “Love Is Just Around the Corner (Approximately)” from memory, an act of creative reconstruction: imperfect, but just perfect. But that number is about forgetting too—the pedal-point intro that keeps restarting is so flashy, they never do play the main theme. The old numbers endure because they’re never played the same way twice; they can always be reinvented. Josh Berman: “All these musicians are really good free improvisers, and I want to feel that all the time when we play. But they all know how to play the blues too, each in their way. Every part on every piece was constructed with these guys in mind, down to which backgrounds go with which solo. After we recorded, I worried how inside and controlled some of it turned out to be, but you have to let things be as they are.” Gotta give your improvisers leeway when they come tumbling down the gangplank. –Kevin Whitehead author of Why Jazz? A Concise Guide (Oxford) https://joshberman.net/Southern-Sun Fri, 14 May 2021 16:10:37 +0000 Josh Berman https://joshberman.net/Southern-Sun <img width="500" height="442" width_o="500" height_o="442" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e45c9ec36f9cc42a71dde5cdd979ade7c6b2a66af47052bf555e465e2279c527/Southern-Sun.jpg" data-mid="108539015" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/500/i/e45c9ec36f9cc42a71dde5cdd979ade7c6b2a66af47052bf555e465e2279c527/Southern-Sun.jpg" />Jackson/Berman/Strøm/østvang Southern Sun Keefe jackson – tenor saxophone and bass clarinet Josh Berman – cornet Jon Rune Strøm – double bass Tollef østvang – drumsA killer quartet session that matches a pair of the finest, most adventurous players from the post-millennium Chicago jazz scene with equally excellent counterparts from Norway! The players are Keefe Jackson on tenor sax and bass clarinet, Josh Berman on coronet, Jon Rune Strom on double bass and Tollef Ostvang on drums – and the set is a real knockout – balancing looseness and tension with cohesion and melody in a really impeccable way. Each player gets plenty of space to shine individually, and each gets a writing credit, which makes perfect sense. We're committed fans of the players, and this session shines as brightly as any other contemporaneous work of theirs we can think of! Includes "Blues", "Southern Sun", "Your Uncle", "What Lies Ahead", "Symbol Reform", "Cold Snap" and "Blowing In From". &nbsp;© 1996-2021, Dusty Groove, Inc. https://joshberman.net/Several-Lights Fri, 14 May 2021 16:10:34 +0000 Josh Berman https://joshberman.net/Several-Lights <img width="900" height="900" width_o="900" height_o="900" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/40600f14b43677d325cbb245538ab13291fc2edb37cb78ed3704efe4e0cdf559/Several-Lights.png" data-mid="108539312" border="0" data-scale="79" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/900/i/40600f14b43677d325cbb245538ab13291fc2edb37cb78ed3704efe4e0cdf559/Several-Lights.png" /> Chicago Luzern Exchange Several Lights Josh Berman – cornetKeefe Jackson – tenor saxophoneMarc Unternahrer – tubaFrank Rosaly – drums Swiss tubaist Marc Unternahrer provided the inspiration for the exchange noted in this foursome’s moniker, but the group’s album, Several Lights (Delmark), is ultimately a landmark for Chicago music: it’s a fantastic album of free improvisation, one of the most powerful statements yet by the wave of post-Ken Vandermark players who gravitated here in the late 90s. Unternahrer, a dazzling player whose extended technique on his unwieldy ax conveys a low, trombonely range and a great deal of blubbery-sound imagination, spent five months here in 2002 as part of the Chicago Sister Cities International Program, quickly hooking up with a large crew of local players. He played most often with cornetist Josh Berman, tenor saxophonist Keefe Jackson, and drummer Frank Rosaly, and returned here last summer to record Several Lights with them. Considering that the quartet had no tunes and no preset melodic or harmonic structures, it’s astonishing how compositional the tracks feel; the players clearly have a deep rapport, but it takes an especially refined sensitivity for so many serendipitous collisions to sound so harmonious. And unlike many free-improv players in Chicago, this group isn’t ashamed to draw upon its collective love of jazz. Rosaly plays with a feather-stroke touch, dropping a hint of pulse here or a splash of color there, while Jackson’s marbled tone expresses a lovely lyricism no matter how brusque or serrated his lines get. Berman and Unternahrer play quicksilver, high-low brass games: the cornetist excels on the instrument’s lower registers and scratches up his liquid high notes, while the tubaist simulates snatches of bass lines and blows floor-rumbling long tones that resonate with the snaking lines that Jackson and Berman produce. Peter Margasak, Chicago Reader, 2005 https://joshberman.net/Old-Idea Fri, 14 May 2021 16:10:23 +0000 Josh Berman https://joshberman.net/Old-Idea <img width="586" height="586" width_o="586" height_o="586" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/098778062942ae9e89f093d7d5037cb4c8f32c5739cc16fd49f4695675b454ec/Old-Idea.jpg" data-mid="108539329" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/586/i/098778062942ae9e89f093d7d5037cb4c8f32c5739cc16fd49f4695675b454ec/Old-Idea.jpg" /> Josh Berman Old Idea Josh Berman – cornetKeefe Jackson- tenor saxophoneJason Adasiewicz – vibraphoneAnton Hatwich – bassNori Tanaka – drums Josh Berman’s first album as leader was a long time coming, but that’s OK. Old Idea is no rookie quickie: its too nuanced and layered for that, wide ranging and confident, the work of players who interconnect like telepaths and a leader who points them in the right directions. If they’re ideas are old it’s not as in old-fashioned, but well seasoned. Every jazz fan is enamored of old ideas—that’s why we have record collections—and every musician nowadays has broad listening habits. But not every brass player’s tastes lead him to Bill Dixon (on Cecil Taylor’s Conquistador: “his weird lyrical thing in the center of all this freedom”) and Ruby Braff (for the opposite: traditional settings, oddball solutions). That’ll give you some insights into Berman right there. His playing—by turns pleaful or confidential, urgent as a bugle call, sardonic or puckishly witty—puts all that careful listening at the service of a personal voice. “I’ve had lots of bands, but still, part of me wants to hide a little,” Berman says, explaining why he waxed this debut at 34. But he was hiding in plain sight. He’s already recorded some—as, say, part of a quartet on Chicago-Luzern Exchange alongside tenor saxophonist Keefe Jackson, with Jackson’s big and small bands Project Project and Fast Citizens, with Jason Adasiewicz’s quintet Rolldown and Rob Mazurek’s Exploding Star Orchestra. For a decade Berman has been a mainstay of the post-Vandermark generation of Chicago improvisers, a wide circle of ambitious musos who meet up in varied ad hoc or fixed settings: a circle including all the players in Josh’s group Old Idea. The Berman Story: Born in Chicago, 24 September 1972, he’d been a jazz fan since a teacher turned him on in high school, but didn’t play. (He’d rented a cornet for a week and discovered “you couldn’t play just because you like Miles Davis.”) Attending Columbia College as an art student, he landed across the hall from rough multi-instrumentalist Weasel Walter, who was putting together a band of non-musicians. “He said, ‘Look, man: you could be playing today!’” Berman borrowed a trumpet, happily blasted his brains out with Walter, for months. “I wanted to be a free jazz trumpet player, but thought, maybe I should learn how to sound like I could play jazz.” That took awhile: “I didn’t even know how to practice.” But slowly it came together: lessons with straightahead trumpeter Brad Goode, big bandleader Tom Tallman and classical virtuoso Bruce Briney, schooling in theory from John Murphy, an ear-opening Paul Smoker gig…. Josh listened voraciously, working off an on at one of Chicago’s great treasuries of recorded music, the Jazz Record Mart. Along the way he switched from trumpet to the warmer cornet. But just as he started to connect with emerging improvisers like drummer Chad Taylor, Berman left town to finish college. When he came back in 1998, everything started to click. He met and bonded with vibraphonist Jason Adasiewicz—“countless hours, playing, thinking, experimenting”—and tenorist Keefe Jackson. “When he came to town from Arkansas in 2001, I knew immediately he was the saxophonist I wanted to play with. He’s lyrical but capable of stepping off the edge, with no reference points—he takes it farther than I do.” In 2006, Berman and Jackson were on a duo tour down South, and kept running into the Chicago band Lay All Over Its. Their bassist Jason Ajemian and drummer Nori Tanaka had their own special groove going. That stuck in Josh’s mind. At the time of this recording Tanaka and Jason Adasiewicz had been playing in the trio AAT with bassist Josh Abrams. “I’ve known Anton Hatwich since he first got rolling around 2002,” says Berman. “He’s a consummate musician: one way I think of him is as a jazz guy who can play free.” Which tied in with the direction Berman was heading toward himself: “The way I think about this band, it always comes back to time and jazz.” Indeed, Tanaka’s swing feel is a conspicuous asset: what he does on “Nori” more than justifies naming it for him. Dig the drummer’s slow deep push on “D Flat,” the way he sneaks up on an stately, oddly MJQ-y trio take of “Next Year,” his personalized clavé beats behind vibes on both “On Account of a Hat” and “What Can?” Adasiewicz has been widely and rightly praised, for his expansive vision of the vibes, pursuing the exploratory vein all too briefly mined by Bobby Hutcherson in the 1960s. He values Monkly percussive clanks as well as pretty doorbell tones. Monk’s lean comping informs Jason’s work behind Josh on “D Flat.” He minds the chord changes in his oblique way but he’s also aware that sometimes the perfect thing to play is nothing at all. Berman’s cornet solos are infused with lyricism and vulnerability, even when the material suggests other ways to proceed, and he has a way of tossing off tricky phrases as if it were no big deal. (Hear his solo on “Let’s Pretend.”) You might trace that last quality to another early inspiration, Dave Douglas, but Berman knows vulnerable-sounding, puckish cornet has a long tradition. “Rex Stewart on Ellington’s ‘Morning Glory’—what else can you say?” Aside from the countless times these players had met up on the bandstand in various combinations, Old Idea played a half dozen gigs before recording in 2007. (Cruel stupid irony: shortly thereafter, Tanaka was forced back to his native Japan, having failed to convince the INS of his merits as an artist.) Berman had written the tunes over a couple of years, often with Jackson or Adasiewicz in mind. In rehearsal, he wasn’t shy about giving the musicians specific direction, though he didn’t always have to. For intricacy that doesn’t trip the players up, hear the opening “Hat.” It starts with a staccato line for well-matched horns (a taste of things to come), replaced by a thorny but circular riff for vibes and bass (which goes on to back the horns’ next line). Drums make a delayed entrance, softly playing with and against that vibes/bass figure, thereby foreshadowing Nori’s improvisation over the same repeater lick later. Adasiewicz’s solo catches some of that same circular quality. He honors a key lesson Steve Lacy took away from Monk: that the composition and improvisation should be part of the same package, reflecting the same sensibility. The way things keep coming back gives the program built-in unity: “I wanted to make a record,” Josh says simply. Themes return transformed as in a novel. The descending horn line on the head of “Let’s Pretend” returns on vibes and tenor toward the end of Josh’s solo, in a loose cascade the players gradually tighten up. (I’d told Josh the piece’s sauntering gait, aggressively creative vibes and horn blend reminded me of Eric Dolphy’s Out to Lunch. He recognized the parallels—“free/not free, time/no time”—but it wasn’t a conscious influence.) This things-coming-back is most obvious in the three takes of “Next Year,” very different from one another. Berman and Jackson play it in duo, demonstrating how much time they’ve spent phrasing together and blending their tones. That version is counterbalanced by that rhythm trio take where Adasiewicz demonstrates his luminous sound and disarming Milt Jackson bluesiness. Finally, the full quintet’s reading is surprisingly spare, phrases separated by pregnant rests, the colors thinly applied: a ruckusy band’s restrained finale. Josh Berman says Old Idea cut a few more versions of “Next Year” to give listeners a sense of the possibilities in the material. But then, these five players do that even on the tunes that appear just once: the band’s resourcefulness, high level of engagement and conceptual clarity come across in everything they do. That’s where countless hours of playing, thinking and experimenting together will get you. –Kevin Whitehead https://joshberman.net/Rummage-Out Fri, 14 May 2021 16:10:31 +0000 Josh Berman https://joshberman.net/Rummage-Out <img width="600" height="600" width_o="600" height_o="600" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/83653f9ad5994e748070e7731f1222916cf8c57e52da4c635b420c43927490ae/Rummage-Out.jpg" data-mid="108540124" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/600/i/83653f9ad5994e748070e7731f1222916cf8c57e52da4c635b420c43927490ae/Rummage-Out.jpg" /> Matt Piet &amp; His Disorganization Matt Piet - piano Josh Berman - cornet Nick Mazzarella - alto saxophone Tim Daisy - drums and percussion 2018 There are some new protagonists in the Chicago jazz scene, due to the revelation of a younger generation of musicians and the defection of some of the big names to other American regions, like Jeff Parker and Rob Mazurek. One of these Chicago exponents, gradually gaining importance, is pianist and composer Matt Piet, a former student at Boston’s Berklee&nbsp;College of Music. Leader of two fundamental bands in the city,&nbsp;Matt&nbsp;Piet Trio and Four Letter Words, and one of the vertices of the&nbsp;Rempis&nbsp;/ Piet / Daisy triangle, he has broken into the Chicago improvised music community as a “melodic player” whose “tonefulness&nbsp;is thrillingly shaken by a rhythmic volatility and a fractal sense of phrasing”, according to the jazz journalist Peter&nbsp;Margasak, who compared his sound to Cecil Taylor in the late ‘50s and the early ‘60s.&nbsp;Piet’s is a&nbsp;welcome approach, considering that one of the members of the new band Matt Piet &amp; His Disorganization is the saxophonist Nick&nbsp;Mazzarella,&nbsp;often&nbsp;described as a direct heir of the illustrious&nbsp;altoists&nbsp;Eric&nbsp;Dolphy,&nbsp;OrnetteColeman, Henry&nbsp;Threadgill&nbsp;and Oliver Lake, and like them&nbsp;driven&nbsp;to “embody the history of jazz while pushing it forward into new realms” (Troy&nbsp;Dostert).&nbsp;The same characteristic defines cornet player Josh Berman, a player known to combine aspects of pre-bebop jazz with avant-garde experimentation, sometimes producing a&nbsp;strikingly&nbsp;dissonant New Orleans style.&nbsp;In this bass-less quartet,&nbsp;the drummer/percussionist is Tim Daisy, one of the most versatile&nbsp;rhythmicists&nbsp;in activity&nbsp;today, equally at ease with the fire music of Ken&nbsp;Vandermark&nbsp;and the electro-acoustic abstract explorations of Kyle&nbsp;Bruckmann. Chicago jazz is very much alive, and&nbsp;Rummage Out&nbsp;is fantastic proof. https://joshberman.net/Cinema-Spiral Fri, 14 May 2021 16:10:28 +0000 Josh Berman https://joshberman.net/Cinema-Spiral Jason Roebke Octet Cinema Spiral Greg Ward - alto saxophoneKeefe Jackson - tenor saxophone, sopranino saxophone, contrabass clarinetJason Stein - bass clarinetJosh Berman - trumpetJeb Bishop - tromboneJason Adasiewicz - vibraphoneJason Roebke - bassMike Reed - drums Perhaps the most efficient way to sample Chicago’s wealth of top-notch musicians would be to attend a gig by the Jason Roebke Octet. A veritable who’s-who of scene-leaders, the Octet comprises Greg Ward on alto sax; Keefe Jackson on tenor and sopranino saxes, plus contrabass clarinet; Jason Stein on bass clarinet; Josh Berman on trumpet; Jeb Bishop on trombone; Jason Adasiewicz on vibraphone; Mike Reed on drums; and, of course, Roebke himself on bass. As busy as every one of these guys is—they’ve probably all hit our blog’s pages in the two years since the Octet’s debut, High/Red/Center (Delmark, 2014)—each one brings to Cinema Spiral the full force of his power, thoughtfulness, and individuality. While on the surface these seven tracks offer plenty to enjoy—from tight group arrangements to masterful solos to killer freewheeling group improvisation—you might need a few listens to really appreciate Roebke’s vision here. There’s a certain slipperiness to the album, a clever ambiguity that proves Cinema Spiral to be an apt title, reflecting as it does the music’s play with the line between a whole gang of film-related binaries: community and isolation, motion and stasis, parts and whole, even predetermination and improvisation. Expectations, in other words, aren’t much use.The album opens (“Looking Directly Into the Camera”), for example, with swells of sound, tightly controlled and full of potential energy, but only twenty seconds in abruptly reroutes into a lengthy halting bass solo. As the other instruments join back in—starting with hair-raising bowed vibraphone—it becomes clear that Roebke’s structural design extends all the way across the album’s seven tracks, each one with its own quality but intimately connected to the next, like scenes in a movie. It’s not until the very end of track two, the gently swinging “Focusing,” that those opening swells return, a motif that both helps maintain the larger organization of the piece but also toys with our sense of forward movement: how did we get back here?According to Greg Buium’s excellent and highly recommended in-depth Point of Departure feature on Roebke, the bassist calls motifs like this one “little vignettes.” Elsewhere the vignettes are harder to pin down, rising subtly underneath the matrix of group improvisation and then receding so that, kaleidoscopically, all the tumbling tonal colors pull together for just a moment, before slipping apart again. In describing his compositional process, Roebke cites Herbie Hancock’s Mwandishi as a model: “It’s not like everyone’s improvising, and then everyone’s playing written material. The way that Herbie Hancock was doing this stuff, it was like, everybody’s improvising, and then all of a sudden Julian Priester and Bennie Maupin would play some line as sort of a background, to nothing. It was not a background. It was just a thing—that somebody took and then went a different direction with it” (quoted in Buium).Though it’s rewarding to listen for and learn to recognize these cues, as I said above, you don’t have to in order to enjoy the music. The ballad “In the Moment” features some gorgeous trombone work from Bishop, as well as another tasteful bass solo. There’s a great dual feature for bass clarinet and sax on “Getting High.” “People Laughing” starts in hysterics and somehow finds its way to whispery extended techniques. As the album climaxes it delivers my favorite two tracks last: first the grooving “Waiting,” which puts the segue model to maximal use, and finally “L’Acme,” a lush 6/8 stunner where expert ensemble improvisation meets solid writing in a perfect, fleeting balance.-Eric McDowell released May 1, 2016 NBCD 86 No Business Records All music composed by Jason Roebke in collaboration with the musicians Recorded on the 9th November, 2014 by Brian Sulpizio at Minbal Recording, Chicago Photo by Marcus Price Remastered by Arūnas Zujus at MAMAstudios Design by Oskaras Anosovas