By Lazaro Vega

Saxophonist Tim Berne and bassist Michael Formenak bring their duo to Schuler Books and Music, 2660 28th Street, Grand Rapids, Michigan, Saturday, October 9 at 7 p.m. for a free concert. Also on the bill, Myra Melford's Crush Trio. The concert will be recorded for broadcast by Blue Lake Public Radio.

Lazaro Vega: When I was talking to Michael Formanek one of the things we discussed a little bit about the duet is the tendency for both of you to be rhythm players, to both be playing rhythmical aspects of music when you improvise duets. Would you comment on that from the standpoint of a saxophonist?

Tim Berne: It’s kind of interesting. We end up layering rhythms…Most of the music I listen to is rhythm based, and I tend to think that way. It’s just superimposing rhythms on top of what he’s doing. It very rarely sounds like we’re playing together literally. It’s always like there’s some kind of crossing going on.

One of the areas we tend to avoid, probably intentionally, is that kind of freebop zone that one associates with non-chord based jazz. You know, where you sort of latch on to the pretty basic rhythmic idea in jazz, the walking bass kind of thing, where Michael might support me. That’s one thing we kind of avoid. I think in a way subliminally its kind of intentional. It’s not easy, but it’s easy to kind of use that as a crutch when you don’t have a literal structure that you’re playing on. Do you know what I mean?

Vega: Sure, you can always go to swing.

Berne: And it’s something tangible and then I play off of what he’s doing. The way we play duo is really collectively. We feed on each other’s ideas.

I rarely feel like, I may be wrong, but it rarely feels like I’m soloing over what Michael’s doing. I mean it happens, but it doesn’t feel like that most of the time, it feels more like a duo where we’re each contributing something to a whole. Know what I mean?

Vega: Yes. It seems like there was a new way of improvising that developed after Ornette Coleman’s “Free Jazz,” and maybe after some of what John Coltrane did after 1965 where performance takes on it’s own structure. It seemed like when jazz or any music got to the point where anything is possible the challenge became what is the structure going to be to hold the improvisation? For many in jazz, from Sun Ra’s “Magic City” to John Coltrane ’s “Ascension” and other things it seems to be an organic process. You may have a starting point in thematic material that you’re going to be playing together with whatever instrumentation you have, but then where it ends up is something that’s going to evolve over time in ways that nobody is expecting.

Berne: A lot of it has to do with breaking down the rules and finally saying, ‘O.k. the drummer and the bass player don’t have to play time,’ or don’t have to be necessarily supportive all the time, or background/foreground, you know. I think that’s something that resulted from the freedom.

I mean what Ornette did, for me, if you hear it now you might think, o.k. That’s not so radical, but at the time it was and what he did was just, like you said, was create an atmosphere of freedom or confidence for people to do something different. And, yes, that’s Cecil Taylor or whoever, Sun Ra. It sort of like, o.k. these guys are being recognized so therefore it’s valid. We can then basically do what ever you want, in a way. Its either good or its bad and whoever’s listening is going to judge that.

Obviously it gets pretty fuzzy when you start trying to decide if something’ s bullshit or not bullshit. But all of us are trying to become as knowledgeable as we can, or as good as we can, at playing music. But in the end it really has more to do with, ‘How does it sound?’ If the two of us holding two notes for five minutes sounds good, then that’s what we’ll do, you know, in the moment.

Anything, you can sort of do anything now.

There is no such thing as playing without structure. I don’t think anybody I know plays random or just making random ideas or thoughts even when they’re just improvising. There’s always logic to it and we’re always trying to create a structure. Make it sound like a structure.

Vega: The idea of ‘free jazz’ is sort of a misnomer.

Berne: Yes, kind of. I mean there are certain moments where its just a cathartic thing; where you might, in the moment on the gig as a result of all these different things coming together, like the audience and the band, there’s certain times where you just go with maybe more emotion and energy or just a reflection of the audience or the place or something. Where you might just do something where you just lose yourself and maybe it is free. (Laughs lightly).

Most of the time we’re trying to play ideas listen to each other and make something happen that has the illusion of structure.

Vega: One of the ideas you brought up earlier was the notion of liberating the different instruments from their particular roles that were ascribed in the early part of the century, the bass player being the time keeper and the alto being the solo voice. The history of jazz is following how that changed through, for example, Jimmy Blanton with Duke Ellington’s Orchestra, and then watching the development of the bass as being less and less a rhythmic instrument and more and more of a melodic one…

Berne: Right.

Vega: …But at the same time Formanek insisted that the bass player’s role no matter how out the music gets still boils down to keeping the pulse. Do you feel that way, too, when you play with him?

Berne: Well, yes, with him definitely! Definitely. And he knows more about it than I do, in a sense. But that’s definitely true. There’s just a lot of ways to do that besides walking. That’s what I’m kind of talking about. Not so much that the bass player doesn’t need to play time or shouldn’t play time, its just these different ways of doing it. And meeting them half way instead of me just skating over the top all the time, to actually create some kind of rhythmic thrust of my own that’s not so soloistic. Not just vamps but just a feel.

Vega: Another part of the same question is in terms of the alto saxophone, from Frankie Trumbauer’s C-melody through the great players of the 1930’s, Benny Carter and Johnny Hodges. And on to Bird and the people who followed him, to Lee Konitz finding his own direction. And then Ornette Coleman’s innovations, Sun Ra’s Marshall Allen, Anthony Braxton, Roscoe Mitchell and Julius Hemphill’s subsequent individualism. The alto has had its own unique evolution within the history of jazz as well. It seems that development gives you more of a free role to play music, and at some point music as sound and not just harmony, melody or rhythm.

Berne: Yeah, yeah: exactly. And you know, you can get music out of just riding on the subway and listening, or if you’re able to listen to the street. There are all kinds of possibilities.

The thing that I’m attracted to, probably the first thing I started seriously studying, was the actual tone that I produced, and how to command attention through your sound. Because the people I’m really attracted to in terms of horn players, they all had a really beautiful and distinct sound. I remember, like with Julius and stuff, really dealing with that, and being obsessed with having my own sound. The more people told you that was difficult, the harder I tried.

I’d have teachers who’d say, ‘Oh, you’ll never have your own sound: only a few guys have that.’ That used to really bother me when people said that. So I was really obsessed with, first of all, working on it enough so that I had different options so I wasn’t just stuck with one kind of tone. And I could then choose how I wanted to sound and change it. It meant certain classical type things, you know, pretty much using everything.

Vega: So would you find yourself changing that according to the emotional demands of what your music was?

Berne: Sure. And I think my tone has changed quite a bit over the years. Now it’s not really as conscious. I think it just sort of happens. I play so many gigs. I go through different phases. Maybe there’s a period where I’m into doing more texture kinds of things and then all of a sudden I find myself playing more melodically, more on the horn rather than a lot of high notes and stuff.

Now I find myself, since I started playing the baritone saxophone a lot, I tend to really like the low register of the alto. So that’s another thing.

You end up kind of getting kind of tired of yourself and then making changes. That’s kind of when I decide, ‘O.k., I’ve been doing this this way for quite awhile.’ I have to force myself to think differently.

Vega: So when you went to the baritone saxophone did you find that the sound production that you worked done on the alto saxophone translated easily? Did you hear your own voice on the bari?

Berne: I never listened to other baritone players that excessively, so I wasn’t worried about that. That wasn’t really a factor. It just felt very natural physically. It really fit my body, and breathing wise. I worked on all these tone things with the baritone approximately the way I started the alto. So I really got into it. I really like low notes. I really dig the low sounds. It feels like a more rhythmic instrument for some reason. I tend to play it that way more, maybe, than the alto. There’s more resistance or something.

Vega: Could we talk then about another aspect of your music and that would be composition? In terms of the duo, and you hinted at this earlier, but how much of it is improvised and how much of it is composed?

Berne: We’re a lot less concerned with the written music in this situation because with only two people it’s a task to be pretty spontaneous. Since we’ ve been playing together for so long chance are neither of us are going to let it get too static or predictable whether we’re improvising or playing written music.

Sometimes with the band the written music is there to make sure we cover different zones, to keep a certain amount of variety and set-up certain parameters to make sure. Maybe there’s going to be quiet section, maybe there will be a rhythmic section, maybe there will be a loud section. When you’re playing duo you don’t really have to go that far. I think the compositional aspect of this is not as big a factor. I mean, we like to play these little tunes, and playing off of them, but most of what we do is improvised in the duo. You just narrow down the options. Dynamically there’s a much wider range because there’s only two of us.