A Conversation with Tim Berne and Matt Mitchell
Tim Berne (photo by Peter Gannushkin)
By David R. Adler
For the last 30 years, alto saxophonist Tim Berne has developed a singularly challenging body of work for a host of different ensembles—from the pared-down trios Paraphrase and Big Satan to the sextet Caos Totale, from the famed quartet Bloodcount to the large ensemble heard on Open, Coma. It’s a world of scabrous dissonance, fast and elaborate lines, infectious rhythm and tightly conceived yet wildly unpredictable structure that pushes improvisers beyond their limits.
Until recently, the piano has played little to no role in Berne’s oeuvre. This began to change decisively with the appearance of pianist Craig Taborn in the Berne-led groups Science Friction and Hard Cell. Now Berne has struck up a promising creative relationship with Philadelphia-based Matt Mitchell, who brings formidable keyboard skills to two of Berne’s newest projects, Adobe Probe and Los Totopos (“chips”).
Adobe Probe, a septet, makes its Philadelphia debut on December 12, the second night of an Ars Nova Workshop-sponsored Composer Portrait honoring Berne. Mitchell will begin the evening with a set of Berne’s works for solo piano — a bold new departure for the composer, but one that calls for extensive improvisational input from the performer. On December 11 Berne appears with Big Satan; he’ll also unveil a new treatment of music from his ambitious 2002 release The Sevens.
I sat down with Berne and Mitchell in a Brooklyn coffeehouse to discuss the new music.
♦♦♦
David R. Adler: Matt, tell us about the solo piano music you’ll be performing.
Matt Mitchell: There’ll be about five pieces. “Traction,” “I-Hornet,” “The Opener” and two other things, the newest things…
Tim Berne: You can call them “Flirting With Success, Parts I & II.” Is that pretentious enough? I like to keep a balance.
DA: In January 2009, Matt, you played a solo piano show at the Stone in New York, and one of the pieces was Tim’s “Huevos Expanded.” So you’d already been delving into Tim’s music in a solo context?
MM: That was probably the first time. At that point I had spent the last few months learning the Adobe Probe parts. A lot of them sound good by themselves, but there’s extra stuff that’s not in the piano part. It wouldn’t be feasible to perform any of it solo. That’s when Tim mentioned the possibility of doing a solo piano project.
Matt Mitchell (photo by Dario Villa)
TB: I always wanted to hear somebody approach my stuff on solo piano and make decisions without me around to interfere. I talked to Craig [Taborn] about that for a long time. We did a lot of sound checks where Craig would play my shit. I’d hear him practicing a part and I’d go, “Wow, it really sounds cool without the other instruments.”
DA: Is the solo piano music fully notated?
TB: It’s like the tunes without the band [i.e., not fully notated]. I know this is a “Composer Portrait,” and yet I don’t want to act like the composer. I sort of outgrew my control-freak tendencies probably about 10 years ago. Part of my thing is to find people who are willing to take responsibility for what they improvise. … I’d still rather have an improvised transition than a written one. And the way jazz musicians interpret written music is pretty high-level. They just have this rhythmic flexibility that very few musicians have. They can play an eighth note 20 different ways. That’s where my stuff just comes to life.
DA: Tim, you were mentored by [alto saxophonist and composer] Julius Hemphill, and in turn you’ve nurtured the careers of younger players like [saxophonist-clarinetist] Chris Speed and [drummer] Jim Black. Do you see your collaborations with Matt in the same light?
TB: I’ve always been into that, finding these weirdoes that no one knows about…
[Mitchell grimaces...]
TB: … you know what I mean, people with personality, and catching them on the rise, before they get seduced by the scene and become professional musicians in the worst sense of the word.
DA: How did you two meet?
MM: I’ve been a fan of Tim’s music since I was in high school. Especially the longer pieces — the more nuts and the more sections it had, the more I liked it. When I heard the second Miniature album, I Can’t Put My Finger On It (JMT), I realized half the tunes were Tim’s and they were the ones that took me the longest to “get.”
So I wrote Tim a letter. I typed out a letter asking if I could buy scores from him. And I threw my number in there just in case. He actually called me, and we ended up talking sporadically for a couple of years. He sent me scores for “Eye Contact” and “Impacted Wisdom.” He charged $20.
TB: I did?
MM: Meanwhile I maintained a friendship with [trumpeter] Ralph Alessi, who taught at Eastman while I was there.
TB: Ralph used to tell me about Matt. I wasn’t playing with piano players much — I was just starting to make my move around 2000 with Craig. But Ralph kept telling me I should check Matt out. “Oh, he can play your stuff. He’ll read it.” He was kind of tantalizing me.
MM: So finally, in 2008 I was a core faculty member at Ralph’s School for Improvisational Music (SIM) at the same time as Tim.
TB: At one of the SIM faculty concerts I wanted to play “Whatever” [now part of the Adobe Probe repertoire]. I thought, “Ok, I’m going to find out how sick this guy really is.”
MM: Listening to Tim’s music when I was younger was one thing. Playing it is completely different. It requires a certain level of precision that you’re never really asked for, at least not usually in jazz. I feel like I’ve improved from the sheer act of having to learn it. I had the “Whatever” part for two days, and got it to a point where it’d be good enough for the rehearsal. It was literally half an hour and Tim asked me if I wanted to do a gig.
TB: I wanted to start a younger band, something that I was going to rehearse a lot, which became Los Totopos. Matt was the first piece in that puzzle, somebody who was doing things for purely musical reasons.
DA: Matt, you’re playing electric keyboards with Los Totopos?
MM: Yes, I’m playing a controller keyboard connected to a laptop, and I have Ableton Live open mostly just as a vessel for the Softsynth sounds in there, so I’m playing an electric piano sound and a couple of other synth sounds.
TB: Los Totopos was meant to be acoustic, but we couldn’t get a piano for the first gig and had to do it electric. Now I’m thinking it should be both. I love electric shit, and I don’t want this to be “chamber music” in the worst sense. I write some powerful stuff, physically, where it’s got to be slamming. And then other times it’s got to be super-delicate. I think in the end it’ll be both. [Los Totopos will appear at the Jazz Gallery in New York on January 7, 2010.]
DA: And Tim, you’re also playing in Matt’s new band, yes?
TB: Oh, it’s great. It’s really fun. The band’s really cool.
MM: It’s me, Tim, Oscar Noriega on bass clarinet, Mary Halvorson on guitar and Tomas Fujiwara on drums. We have an Ars Nova Workshop gig scheduled for April 13, 2010. I wanted to take my time and compose and not worry about the music being too hard or whatever. I’m learning what it feels like to inflict this on other people — people who are willing to have it inflicted on them.
DA: Finally, Tim, you’re bringing Adobe Probe to Philadelphia, but the personnel has changed a bit since the January 2009 premiere at the Stone.
TB: Yeah. I would say this group is more of a when-I-can-do-it type deal.
MM: Seven really busy people.
TB: I love doing these big things, but it’s impossible!
DA: Are there attributes of the new music that are markedly different from your past work?
TB: It got to the point, probably in the late ’80s, where I got really good at organizing and structuring things so they always worked. … Now what I do is more complicated — the written stuff is more complicated and the improvised parts are less complicated, if that makes sense. I started to realize that when you have people with a lot of personality, exploit that, give them kind of an equal partnership in what’s going to happen, so that I’m surprised by what I’m doing. I also think I got more confident in my playing, and the more you do as a leader, the less precious it gets, and the more you realize that failure is kind of an inherent attribute of being an improviser. It’s almost necessary. I would say it’s a positive thing. That’s how you transition into other things. You have to have those uncomfortable moments. It means everybody’s improvising.
♦♦♦
David R. Adler writes about music, politics and culture. He covers jazz for Time Out New York, Jazz Times, Philadelphia Weekly, All About Jazz-New York and other publications. His work has also appeared in The Philadelphia Inquirer, Down Beat, Jazziz, The New York Times, The New Republic Online, Slate, Forward, Democratiya, New Music Box, All Music Guide, Global Rhythm, Signal to Noise, Coda, Jewish Currents and more. David is also the editor of Jazz Notes, the quarterly publication of the Jazz Journalists Association.
Ars Nova Workshop presents:
Tim Berne: Works for Saxophone Quartet and Trio: Friday, December 11, 2009. 8PM. (Pre-concert discussion with Nate Chinen and Steve Byram 6:30-7:30 PM.) Philadelphia Art Alliance, 251 S. 18th Street. $15. Click here for tickets.
Tim Berne: Works for Large Ensemble and Solo Piano: Saturday, December 12, 2009. 8 PM. Philadelphia Art Alliance, 251 S. 18th Street. $15. Click here for tickets.
♦♦♦
Links!
Matt Mitchell: Myspace | Website
Tim Berne: Myspace | Screwgun Records
School for Improvisational Music (SIM)
Tim Berne & Matt Mitchell
December 2009
By David R. Adler
For the last 30 years, alto saxophonist Tim Berne has developed a singularly challenging body of work for a host of different ensembles — from the pared-down trios Paraphrase and Big Satan to the sextet Caos Totale, from the famed quartet Bloodcount to the large ensemble heard on Open, Coma. It’s a world of scabrous dissonance, fast and elaborate lines, infectious rhythm and tightly conceived yet wildly unpredictable structure that pushes improvisers beyond their limits.
Until recently, the piano has played little to no role in Berne’s oeuvre. This began to change decisively with the appearance of pianist Craig Taborn in the Berne-led groups Science Friction and Hard Cell. Now Berne has struck up a promising creative relationship with Philadelphia-based Matt Mitchell, who brings formidable keyboard skills to two of Berne’s newest projects, Adobe Probe and Los Totopos (“chips”).
Adobe Probe, a septet, makes its Philadelphia debut on December 12, the second night of an Ars Nova Workshop-sponsored Composer Portrait honoring Berne. Mitchell will begin the evening with a set of Berne’s works for solo piano — a bold new departure for the composer, but one that calls for extensive improvisational input from the performer. On December 11 Berne appears with Big Satan; he’ll also unveil a new treatment of music from his ambitious 2002 release The Sevens.
I sat down with Berne and Mitchell in a Brooklyn coffeehouse to discuss the new music.
—
David R. Adler: Matt, tell us about the solo piano music you’ll be performing.
Matt Mitchell: There’ll be about five pieces. “Traction,” “I-Hornet,” “The Opener” and two other things, the newest things…
Tim Berne: You can call them “Flirting With Success, Parts I & II.” Is that pretentious enough? I like to keep a balance.
DA: In January 2009, Matt, you played a solo piano show at the Stone in New York, and one of the pieces was Tim’s “Huevos Expanded.” So you’d already been delving into Tim’s music in a solo context?
MM: That was probably the first time. At that point I had spent the last few months learning the Adobe Probe parts. A lot of them sound good by themselves, but there’s extra stuff that’s not in the piano part. It wouldn’t be feasible to perform any of it solo. That’s when Tim mentioned the possibility of doing a solo piano project.
TB: I always wanted to hear somebody approach my stuff on solo piano and make decisions without me around to interfere. I talked to Craig [Taborn] about that for a long time. We did a lot of sound checks where Craig would play my shit. I’d hear him practicing a part and I’d go, “Wow, it really sounds cool without the other instruments.”
DA: Is the solo piano music fully notated?
TB: It’s like the tunes without the band [i.e., not fully notated]. I know this is a “Composer Portrait,” and yet I don’t want to act like the composer. I sort of outgrew my control-freak tendencies probably about 10 years ago. Part of my thing is to find people who are willing to take responsibility for what they improvise. … I’d still rather have an improvised transition than a written one. And the way jazz musicians interpret written music is pretty high-level. They just have this rhythmic flexibility that very few musicians have. They can play an eighth note 20 different ways. That’s where my stuff just comes to life.
DA: Tim, you were mentored by [alto saxophonist and composer] Julius Hemphill, and in turn you’ve nurtured the careers of younger players like [saxophonist-clarinetist] Chris Speed and [drummer] Jim Black. Do you see your collaborations with Matt in the same light?
TB: I’ve always been into that, finding these weirdoes that no one knows about…
[Mitchell grimaces...]
TB: … you know what I mean, people with personality, and catching them on the rise, before they get seduced by the scene and become professional musicians in the worst sense of the word.
DA: How did you two meet?
MM: I’ve been a fan of Tim’s music since I was in high school. Especially the longer pieces — the more nuts and the more sections it had, the more I liked it. When I heard the second Miniature album, I Can’t Put My Finger On It (JMT), I realized half the tunes were Tim’s and they were the ones that took me the longest to “get.”
So I wrote Tim a letter. I typed out a letter asking if I could buy scores from him. And I threw my number in there just in case. He actually called me, and we ended up talking sporadically for a couple of years. He sent me scores for “Eye Contact” and “Impacted Wisdom.” He charged $20.
TB: I did?
MM: Meanwhile I maintained a friendship with [trumpeter] Ralph Alessi, who taught at Eastman while I was there.
TB: Ralph used to tell me about Matt. I wasn’t playing with piano players much — I was just starting to make my move around 2000 with Craig. But Ralph kept telling me I should check Matt out. “Oh, he can play your stuff. He’ll read it.” He was kind of tantalizing me.
MM: So finally, in 2008 I was a core faculty member at Ralph’s School for Improvisational Music (SIM) at the same time as Tim.
TB: At one of the SIM faculty concerts I wanted to play “Whatever” [now part of the Adobe Probe repertoire]. I thought, “Ok, I’m going to find out how sick this guy really is.”
MM: Listening to Tim’s music when I was younger was one thing. Playing it is completely different. It requires a certain level of precision that you’re never really asked for, at least not usually in jazz. I feel like I’ve improved from the sheer act of having to learn it. I had the “Whatever” part for two days, and got it to a point where it’d be good enough for the rehearsal. It was literally half an hour and Tim asked me if I wanted to do a gig.
TB: I wanted to start a younger band, something that I was going to rehearse a lot, which became Los Totopos. Matt was the first piece in that puzzle, somebody who was doing things for purely musical reasons.
DA: Matt, you’re playing electric keyboards with Los Totopos?
MM: Yes, I’m playing a controller keyboard connected to a laptop, and I have Ableton Live open mostly just as a vessel for the Softsynth sounds in there, so I’m playing an electric piano sound and a couple of other synth sounds.
TB: Los Totopos was meant to be acoustic, but we couldn’t get a piano for the first gig and had to do it electric. Now I’m thinking it should be both. I love electric shit, and I don’t want this to be “chamber music” in the worst sense. I write some powerful stuff, physically, where it’s got to be slamming. And then other times it’s got to be super-delicate. I think in the end it’ll be both. [Los Totopos will appear at the Jazz Gallery in New York on January 7, 2010.]
DA: And Tim, you’re also playing in Matt’s new band, yes?
TB: Oh, it’s great. It’s really fun. The band’s really cool.
MM: It’s me, Tim, Oscar Noriega on bass clarinet, Mary Halvorson on guitar and Tomas Fujiwara on drums. We have an Ars Nova Workshop gig scheduled for April 13, 2010. I wanted to take my time and compose and not worry about the music being too hard or whatever. I’m learning what it feels like to inflict this on other people — people who are willing to have it inflicted on them.
DA: Finally, Tim, you’re bringing Adobe Probe to Philadelphia, but the personnel has changed a bit since the January 2009 premiere at the Stone.
TB: Yeah. I would say this group is more of a when-I-can-do-it type deal.
MM: Seven really busy people.
TB: I love doing these big things, but it’s impossible!
DA: Are there attributes of the new music that are markedly different from your past work?
TB: It got to the point, probably in the late ’80s, where I got really good at organizing and structuring things so they always worked. … Now what I do is more complicated — the written stuff is more complicated and the improvised parts are less complicated, if that makes sense. I started to realize that when you have people with a lot of personality, exploit that, give them kind of an equal partnership in what’s going to happen, so that I’m surprised by what I’m doing. I also think I got more confident in my playing, and the more you do as a leader, the less precious it gets, and the more you realize that failure is kind of an inherent attribute of being an improviser. It’s almost necessary. I would say it’s a positive thing. That’s how you transition into other things. You have to have those uncomfortable moments. It means everybody’s improvising.
So glad to hear both these guys talking about these new (newish) projects. Can’t wait to hear them.