By dc92823
12-Aug-2010
Fascinating collection from a Renaissance man!
Alexander Berne is a New York composer, visual artist, and performer who has practically created his own art forms. He began as a serious sax artist in the jazz scene, even teaching for a bit at the Stanford University Jazz Workshop alongside Joe Henderson and Stan Getz.
Berne then moved to Belgium where he devoted himself to solo saxophone performances and gathering a well deserved following. The new three CD "retrospective" on Innova is a great intro to his music. The discs serve mostly as three different sets of performances with sections (they can't really be described completely accurately as "pieces" or "movements") The discs - the pieces - are grouped or titled as "The abandoned orchestra", "The saduk" and "The soprano saxophone choir".
His music is fascinating but a little hard to categorize - my initial reaction to Berne (before this particular CD) is that it owes a little to Brian Eno or Jon Hassell with some saxophone lineage going back to the Glass stable containing Jon Gibson and Dickie Landry.
Will theorists want to type his work as minimalist? Or is it somewhat 'new age' or ambient? It works no matter what you may want to label it. His work with David Sanborn and others shows clearly in his multi tracked sax pieces (like the soprano sax choir) and the "Saduk" is a reference to the ‘saduk’ that Berne himself invented, a kind of cross between a saxophone and the Armenian duduk, and has a warm, woody tone unlike any ever heard before.
Berne serves as his own principle player and sound designer as well and refers to the "choir" piece as an "overtonal, textural, harmonic, vibratory, 'soundistic' experience." The "Abandoned Orchestra" collection, existing again in both an acoustic as well as electronic environment refers to "abandoned" as unrestrained, unbounded. While all of this music is indeed hard to categorize, it is very pleasant to listen to.
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