Josh Berman profile

[Larry Kart]

http://www.facebook.com/ext/share.php?sid=...zq-g&ref=mf

I'll be at The Hideout show tonight and will try to report.

[ejp626]

http://www.facebook.com/ext/share.php?sid=...zq-g&ref=mf

I'll be at The Hideout show tonight and will try to report.

Are you going to go early and see Toumani Diabate as well? I was sorely tempted, though domestic duties call. I did manage to see Diabate at Millenium Park last summer.

[Larry Kart]

http://www.facebook.com/ext/share.php?sid=...zq-g&ref=mf

I'll be at The Hideout show tonight and will try to report.

Are you going to go early and see Toumani Diabate as well? I was sorely tempted, though domestic duties call. I did manage to see Diabate at Millenium Park last summer.

I'll be eating at about 8, so probably not.

[Chuck Nessa]

Nice piece. Margasak did Josh proud. Looking forward to the recording.

[.:.impossible]

Thanks for the article. Its funny, because most of the time I am listening to an album that he is on, I feel like he is usually one of the brightest musicians on the recording...

A while back, Tony sent me a copy of that Luminescence release (2 of 100, hand painted) that is half Josh Berman group, half Keefe Jackson Quartet.

Recorded at Luminescence Records Loft by Chris Hutchison on January 26, 2007. Same line-up as this Delmark release, which I have not heard yet.

It is a live recording and Berman's solos really shine in comparison to most of the stuff that is going on. He always seems like he knows exactly what is happening throughout. Often times, for me, the vibes playing is extremely confused/confusing, which is odd because Roll Down is so fantastic.

I'll be interested to hear the Delmark album. I noticed that there is a mp3 for "Almost Late", which is one of the four compositions on the Luminescence release. The three others are "Let's Pretend", "On Account of a Hat", "Hide The Can".

Tanaka also plays kit for the Keefe Jackson Quartet, which includes Jeb Bishop and Jason Roebke.

I'll be listening to this one again tomorrow.

Any word on this? Lucky 7s

[ghost of miles]

Thanks for posting, Larry--I'm a fan, as you know. Looking forward to hearing the new one as well.

[Guest Bill Barton]

Thanks from me too. The word is OUT. Gotta track down that new disc...

[Larry Kart]

Strange that I've heard Josh so many times since the time I first heard him (spring 2001), yet I've never tried to write a word about him IIRC, here or anywhere else. In part that's because I went to hear him that first time because we'd become friends, not the other way around, and I've never quite lost the feeling I had as I drove to that gig -- "What am I going to say to him if I don't think he's good." As it turned out, he was good -- and in much the same fairly unusual way that Margasak's piece accurately describes: You could tell that he already had a really clear idea of what he wanted to get to, but he hadn't yet mastered the horn and the materials/details of the kind of music-making he was aiming it to get that music out. On the other hand, in this early-intermediate stage, he already was an interesting player -- in part because his (in effect, to some degree) conception-before-the-horse stance was (so it seemed/seems to me) so unusual, in part because that conception was so attractive in itself (at least to me) and one of a kind.

Probably the first and last thing to be said about that conception and how it's ripened as Josh has mastered what he knew he needed to master back then, is his almost unprecedented (in the modern era) timbral shaping of most every note. Usually (but not always) falling somewhere short of what most of us would call actual note-bending (i.e. where notes are not only shaded timbrally but also attacked from above or below), this approach seems to me to be both the emotional and musical core of Josh's thing (and why the whole thing began to come together when he switched from trumpet to cornet, which lends itself to this approach). Also, his sound itself -- though he now can sprint to upper-register peaks like a mountain goat -- is based in the lower- and middle- registers, a la two of his favorites, Ruby Braff and Tony Fruscella (and there's Bobby Bradford and Don Cherry there too, and good knows how many other fondly regarded figures; Josh is one of the world's champion record hounds, and then he pores over in his head and on his horn what attracts him, probably doing more of that taking apart and putting back together thing early on than today, though). Back in 2001, phrases tended to be fragmentary or splintered, a la up-tempo Cherry with Ornette, but I mostly thought that this is how he was hearing things; they made sense, though I could also tell, after he switched to cornet, that he wanted to link things up much more than he had been and had been able to -- to think and play really long singing lines. And that's what began to happen. But, again -- and this is obvious when you actually hear Josh but hard to point to because it's so one-of-a-kind -- that sensuous timbral shaping of most every note is kind of the "language" principle in his music. Initially, as one might expect, this created a air of actual or striven-for lyricism, a literally songful quality. Now, with the chops aspect of his playing having grown well beyond the point I thought it might get to (though Josh obviously had his goals clear from the start), facility in terms of speed and upper-register ease has kind of fed back into the conception (or what one thought, from the outside, the conception mostly was) and filled it with passages that are much or more rhythmic in impulse as they are lyrical. I mean, I thought for a moment at one particularly and literally hot point, that I has hearing Charlie Shavers -- that kind of almost ridiculously playful, doubling and tripling back on itself zest. Quite a player.

Haven't heard the album yet, though I bought a copy. Last night, everyone played great. About Shevitz's vibes on that Luminescene disc (which I think I have but can't find right now) and elsewhere, there have been times when I haven't been able to take it all in, but listening to him last Sunday leading a trio, I suddenly realized that though there is a top-line above/ decoration below feeling to his four-mallet work, that's not how it goes; rather, it's from the bottom up and.or the inside out. There's a LOT going on there harmonically (though some of that usefully works back and across the line between harmonic events that function linearally and harmonic events that are as much acts of rhythm and "sound" (if you know what I mean -- these guys know their Morton Feldman). I don't hear confusion. BTW, Shevitz has mentione that one of his chief inspirations is Hasaan Ibn-Ali. He often plays (and plays the heck out of) one of Hasaan's pieces, though which one escapes me right now.

[.:.impossible]

Don't get me wrong, I really like the way he plays. Quite a bit actually. I am infatuated with the vibraphone and work at a four mallet technique myself.

I saw Shevitz (much easier to type!) rehearsing with Bill Dixon and Exploding Star one afternoon before the Chicago Jazz Festival performance. There was another vibist there that afternoon as well. I can't come up with his name. Anyway, we listened to them freely improvise in trios, quartets as Dixon signaled to the musicians. Shevitz' playing that afternoon was brilliant. He was absolutely fantastic.

[ghost of miles]

There's an article about Josh Berman in the new issue of Downbeat--hoping to read it tonight or tomorrow night.