It is tempting to start off a piece about Tim Berne, who plays the Camel on Monday, March 18, with the Shakespeare quote: “O for a muse of fire, that would ascend/The brightest heaven of invention.” But if the New York-based saxophonist has dedicated his five-decade career to pursuing the ephemeral beauty of moment-to-moment invention, his music is anything but pretentious. Unlike “Henry V,” the end goal is not the blaze of glory but the steady burn of artistic survival.
Since emerging on the 1980s New York City downtown music scene, Berne has played on about 150 albums and led bands with eclectic names like Bloodcount, Hard Cell, Snakeoil, and Big Satan. He has collaborated with a who’s who of adventurous players including John Zorn, Bill Frisell, and Wilco’s Nils Cline. When he found out that his mentor, avant-garde saxophonist Julian Hemphill, was only booking five performance a year, he learned how to book gigs, ultimately starting his own label, Screwgun Records, with 83 recent and historic albums and EPs on Bandcamp.
“A lot of times it goes well,” Berne says. “And then sometimes I ask myself why I am doing this. But I knew what I was getting into, you know? And sometimes you just have to just do it. Nobody said, ‘Hey, why don’t you make weird music? You’ll be a huge success.’”
Beauty is in the ear of the listener. “Free jazz” does not mean it is random, just that it develops without the guardrails of predictability. “You approach [a piece] by trying not to approach it,” Berne says. “You have to stay in the moment, which means listening to what is going on. When you take a solo in a standard, everyone has an assigned role. In our case it is three people playing at the same time, trying to make something interesting happen. It is not like playing over a rhythm section, I can force [the other players] to go my way [but I] have to accommodate and motivate them.” It is both composing and arranging in real time.
Unplanned does not mean incomprehensible. It is guiding or following the melodic line or the harmonic development wherever it leads. “There is a lot of magic involved,” Berne says. “You have to recognize when something is happening and then sort of get out of the way. You prepare by internalizing everything you can about the music. And then, when you get on stage, it is not so much that you forget everything, you can’t hesitate to think about it. You just have to be in the present.”
A musical trust fall requires trusted collaborators. Drummer Tom Rainey has been in various Berne lineups for decades. Born in 1990, Gregg Belisle-Chi got Berne’s attention during the pandemic with an Instagram series transcribing the saxophonists COVID solo record for guitar. That started a collaboration, followed by an album (“Mars” [Intakt]) and ultimately this tour.
“Belisle-Chi kind of saved my ass during the pandemic,” Berne says. “Otherwise, I don’t know what I would have been doing. Whenever I get stuck, I try to find some young musicians and find people who are really committed so I can get that energy.”
He notes that Tom [Rainey] is the same way and “having played with Tom for 45 years, he’s still just as committed, which is kind of rare.” Berne adds that “you don’t want to go through all the bullshit getting gigs unless there is someone else committed and involved.”
The audience is, in effect, another member of the band. Their response shapes unscripted improvisation far more than it does written arrangements.
Richmond bassist and “Out of Your Heads” record label founder Adam Hopkins is hosting the Camel show. He originally met Berne through his teacher, the exemplary jazz bassist and frequent Berne collaborator Michael Formanek, who later played with Berne and views the saxophonist’s Screwgun Records as an inspiration. “My label wouldn’t exist without Berne,” Hopkins says. “He is one of my top five musical heroes. I can’t give him higher praise.”
Hopkins is the bassist, along with vocalist Laura Ann Singh and trumpeter Bob Miller, who will open the Camel show with drummer Scott Clark’s Landscape Quartet. The compositions were inspired by Dawoud Bey’s “Elegy” photographic project that recently closed at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
Making a career in music has always been difficult. Probably even more since the pandemic. Venues closed and the already shrinking pool of gigs evaporated with them. Berne keeps the fires of creativity burning with a weekly gig at a local Brooklyn bar. “It’s like shooting a movie in real time,” he says. “You can’t stop. If I have a bad gig, a week later I am doing it again. I don’t have time to dwell on it. Which is good because you really don’t have an idea of what happened. It’s all based on your personal feelings about your playing. I have learned to trust the audience. That is what makes it interesting, and that’s what makes it terrifying. You don’t ever know how it is going to end up.”
According to Hopkins, Berne says this is his last tour. Then again, Hopkins clarifies, he says this about every tour. Either way, it is a rare chance to let one of the country’s most adventurous musical artists take RVA audiences on a journey to follow his muse of fire somewhere that even he has not planned to go.
The Tim Berne Trio with the Scott Clark Landscape Quartet play the Camel on Monday, March 18. Doors are at 7 p.m. $15 Admission.
