For the saxophonist and composer Tim Berne, the Brooklyn bar Lowlands is a favorite neighborhood hangout. Lately, it has also become his musical laboratory.
During the past two years, Berne has regularly walked the block and a half from his Gowanus home to the cozy establishment on a sleepy stretch of Third Avenue. Tall, with a moseying gait and a mop of gray hair, he blends in easily. There is no stage, so he and his bandmates, a rotating cast of newer and longtime associates, set up on the floor, amid purple Christmas lights and an illuminated Miller High Life sign.
Passers-by might expect a classic-rock covers gig, but that changes when Berne begins warming up. His alto sound, chiseled and neon-bright, cuts through the space like a laser beam. It’s an instant reminder that one of the true thought leaders in progressive jazz — an unassuming yet undeniable force in the music for more than four decades — is still operating at peak strength as he approaches his 70th birthday on Wednesday. (He returns to Lowlands on Oct. 22.)
“That Lowlands gig, he takes it as seriously as if he was going to be playing at Carnegie Hall,” the guitarist Bill Frisell, a frequent Berne collaborator in the ’80s who has re-entered his orbit, said in a video interview. “It’s like his life is on the line.”
Frisell said that after their early work together, he didn’t keep close tabs on Berne’s music. “I heard him again, and it was like, ‘Man alive,’” he said, going on to describe “how these germs of ideas that were there at the beginning had blossomed and expanded, and his sense of all the parts — the melody, the rhythm, the harmony, the counterpoint — all of that had just kept on getting richer and richer.”
Active since the mid-70s, Berne came up alongside John Zorn and other fellow luminaries of New York’s so-called downtown scene but has carved out a singular path. He has written an abundance of music that packs a visceral thrill despite its elaborate sonic geometry, and played it with a long string of bands, often including musicians who have gone on to become internationally renowned stars of cutting-edge jazz.
In the ’80s, he briefly recorded for a major label, and in the 2010s, released four albums via the esteemed jazz imprint ECM, but he has spent much of his career operating independently. After starting two boutique labels, Empire and Screwgun, he now works with various small imprints and issues a steady stream of new and archival albums via his Bandcamp page, with titles that reflect his dry wit — recent releases include “Live in Someplace Nice,” a 1984 live duo with Frisell, and “No Tamales on Wednesday,” by his outstanding early 2000s band Science Friction — and covers that he shoots on his iPhone.
“I’m not an artist; I’m just playing music,” he said, sitting at a table in his sunny combination living and dining room a few hours before a Lowlands gig in June, wearing a baggy blue shirt, his face dotted with salt-and-pepper stubble. He doesn’t want to feel “like I’m performing for you, and I’m a different species than you are,” he explained, his voice heavy with disdain for pretense. “That’s why I like playing in bars.”
Branford Marsalis, a friend and admirer, praised the way that Berne has pared his creative life down to its essence. “As players and jazz musicians, or people on the outside of popular culture, we spend so much time emulating popular culture,” he said in a phone interview. “He never got caught up in that nonsense. You find like-minded people who want to play, and you play, and the gig is the gig.”
Growing up in Syracuse, N.Y., Berne soaked up Stax and Motown records from one of his brothers and avant-garde jazz from another. As a teenager he made frequent trips to New York jazz clubs. He picked up saxophone in college, at Lewis & Clark in Portland, Ore., buying an alto on impulse while laid up with a basketball injury. Accompanied by friends with similar interests, he jammed outdoors near a river, dropping acid and taking inspiration from the collective explorations of groups like the Art Ensemble of Chicago.
“Even though I could barely play,” he recalled, “I know there was something happening.”
A key discovery came via “Dogon A.D.,” a 1972 LP by the Texas-born multi-instrumentalist and composer Julius Hemphill that struck a rare balance of spontaneous expression and ingenious structure, with an undercurrent of taut groove — all qualities that would manifest in Berne’s work. Berne called the album “the perfect fusion of soul music and avant-garde jazz.”
Berne moved to New York in 1974, shortly after Hemphill had, and quickly entered his orbit. Hemphill became Berne’s teacher and, eventually, his roommate in a Downtown Brooklyn loft. “I would bring in these little tunes,” Berne remembered. “And he never said, ‘You can barely play; you shouldn’t be writing music.’
“Anybody else would have said, ‘Yeah, whoa,’” he added, but Hemphill “took me seriously.”
Beginning to document his work, Berne took cues from Hemphill, who ran his own label, so a D.I.Y. approach never seemed “like an act of desperation. It was more like, what a great idea.” Supporting himself with day gigs at a bagel shop and various record stores, Berne self-released albums on Empire in the late ’70s and early ’80s.
The guitarist Gary Lucas, a childhood friend then working at Columbia Records, secured a deal for him there. Berne’s debut for the label, “Fulton Street Maul” from 1987, marked a critical breakthrough. “The album is a major event both for Mr. Berne’s music — which is by turns wild and woolly, intimate and thoughtful, in about equal proportions — and for the fact that it has been released by Columbia Records, a major label that rarely issues such uncompromising music,” Jon Pareles wrote in The New York Times.
The Columbia partnership fizzled after one more album, but it gave Berne a strong base, and kicked off an ongoing collaboration with the artist and designer Steve Byram, whose charmingly frenetic work adorns Berne’s walls and most of his releases since that time. “He’s one of the most creative people I know,” Byram said before a September Berne gig at Lowlands, “and fearless in that, too.”
That spirit has proved highly influential. Several generations of up-and-coming composer-improvisers have now passed through his bands, including the saxophonist Chris Speed and the drummer Jim Black (both members of Berne’s ’90s quartet Bloodcount), and the keyboardists Craig Taborn (who played in Science Friction and Hardcell) and Matt Mitchell, a member of Snakeoil, which played its final shows last week.
Aurora Nealand, a multi-instrumentalist and vocalist who works frequently with Berne, said that he “has a way of encouraging musicians that he thinks are creative and exploratory to become more themselves through welcoming them into his own music.” Taborn noted that Berne “just wants to be surprised continually.” Mitchell concurred. “If something ever works really well on a gig, he doesn’t want you to replicate it,” he said. “He wants the opposite.”
At the September Lowlands performance, Gregg Belisle-Chi, a guitarist in his 30s whom Berne recruited in 2020 after seeing him cover Berne’s pieces on Instagram, tore through newer compositions alongside Tom Rainey, a drummer in his 60s who has powered many of Berne’s best groups for decades. In between pieces, Berne offered up deadpan banter. “I’m going to tell you about the money situation,” he said, indicating empty beer pitchers that double as donation receptacles. “It’s pretty dire.”
Late in the set, another musician walked through the bar and set his horn case down behind the band. He shot Berne a grin as he readied his tenor saxophone, then waded into the choppy flow already in progress. It was Chris Potter, the sax great, who lives up the street from Berne and often joins him at Lowlands.
At home before that night’s performance, Berne marveled at the fact that world-class musicians routinely join him for these pay-what-you-wish neighborhood shows. “People like Scott Colley,” he said, indicating the renowned bassist, who had guested earlier in June, “he’s like, ‘When can I do another Lowlands gig?’”
“For me, that’s success,” he added. “People want to play with you in a bar.”
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