Jazz Articles about Karl Berger

About Karl Berger

Album Review

Karl Berger/Kirk Knuffke: Moon

by John Sharpe
October 29, 2015

Cornetist Kirk Knuffke joins veteran German vibraphonist Karl Berger for a poised meditative duet on Moon. The origins of the set lie in a meeting at a concert celebrating drummer Ed Blackwell in New York City after which Berger invited Knuffke to his Creative Music Studio to teach. So successful was the endeavor that the duo was born. Each of the principals contributes half a dozen pieces supplemented by four joint ventures in a program comprising eighty minutes of music ...

Take Five With...

Take Five with Rob Saffer of the Creative Music Foundation

by AAJ Staff
September 10, 2015

In this installment of Take Five we hear from Executive Director Rob Saffer of the Creative Music Foundation, an organization founded in 1971 by Karl Berger, Ingrid Sertso and Ornette Coleman. CMS has brought together leading innovators in the jazz and world music communities through their CMS workshops. About the Creative Music Studio Fall Workshop: Composer/multi-instrumentalist and Creative Music Studio alumnus Peter Apfelbaum, master percussionist/educator Billy Martin, and composer/saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa will join CMS Artistic Directors/Co-founders ...

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Opinion

The Creative Music Studio Goes To College!

by Karl Berger
September 10, 2015

This article was originally published in 2005. In 1972 I founded the Creative Music Studio (CMS) with Ingrid Sertso and Ornette Coleman. Many luminaries were among the initial advisors: John Cage, Gil Evans, Gunther Schuller, Alan Ginsberg, George Russell, Don Cherry, Lennie Tristano, Lee Konitz, Dave Holland, Frederic Rzewski, Anthony Braxton and Jack DeJohnette, a list of participant artists that reads now like a who's who in new music, jazz and world music. For many years CMS, which ...

Album Review

Karl Berger / Dom Minasi: Synchronicity

Read "Synchronicity" reviewed by Dan Bilawsky

by Dan Bilawsky
May 23, 2012

The two men responsible for Synchronicity are known as bold risk-takers, well-informed free spirits and beyond-the-norm sculptors of sound, and these potential epithets are rightly reflected in the music they make together. Vibraphonist/pianist/wearer-of-many-hats Karl Berger and guitarist Dom Minasi met approximately a decade before this project came to pass and, while they periodically discussed the idea of recording together and even had the chance to lay down a short, 37-minute program at one point, this is the first proper, full-length ...

Album Review

Karl Berger and Dom Minasi: Synchronicity

Read "Synchronicity" reviewed by Eyal Hareuveni

by Eyal Hareuveni
May 23, 2012

Pianist/vibraphonist Karl Berger and guitarist Dom Minasi are both forward-thinking and experienced composers, improvisers and educators, with discographies that goes back to the 1960s--including, in the case of Berger, collaborations with Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry and Carla Bley; and, with Minasi, 1970s work with Joe McPhee and Matthew Shipp. Synchronicity's twelve freely improvised duets were recorded in 2010 at Berger's Woodstock studio. All rely on an emphatic and patient interplay that stresses the melodic and harmonic avenues ...

Album Review

Hasler / Paeffgen / Berger: Hasler / Paeffgen / Berger

Read "Hasler / Paeffgen / Berger" reviewed by John Sharpe

by John Sharpe
March 23, 2012

At first sight, the main talking point on the eponymous offering from trumpeter Werner Hasler, drummer Gilbert Paeffgen and Karl Berger is the vibraphonist's co-optation into the multinational trio. That impression lasts no longer than the first listen to this fresh and open collaboration. Berger, a German-born, New York-based veteran, has a long-held interest in world music, a product of his association with wandering griot trumpeter Don Cherry, which proves to be the perfect grounding for this meeting. Paeffgen, in ...

Album Review

Henry Grimes: The Call

Read "The Call" reviewed by AAJ Italy Staff

by AAJ Italy Staff
January 12, 2009

Era il 1965 quando Henry Grimes, all’epoca uno dei contrabbassisti di punta della generazione free, registrava per la ESP di Bernard Stollman il suo primo e unico disco, The Call. Chi avrebbe potuto immaginare che solo due anni più tardi sarebbe stato inghiottito da un buco nero che lo avrebbe tenuto lontano dalle scene per 35 lunghissimi anni? Della spettacolare rentrée di Grimes e delle vicende legate al suo ritorno alla musica ormai si è scritto fin troppo [per leggere ...