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Take Five with Rob Saffer of the Creative Music Foundation
by AAJ Staff
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 ...
Continue ReadingThe Creative Music Studio Goes To College!
by Karl Berger
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 ...
Continue ReadingKarl Berger / Dom Minasi: Synchronicity
by Dan Bilawsky
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 ...
Continue ReadingKarl Berger and Dom Minasi: Synchronicity
by Eyal Hareuveni
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 ...
Continue ReadingHasler / Paeffgen / Berger: Hasler / Paeffgen / Berger
by John Sharpe
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 ...
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