Adam Berenson: What Is This Place?

Pianist/keyboardist/composer Adam Berenson is fascinated with Eberhard Weber, the German jazz player probably better known for his "worked with" listing than his own album releases. The influential bassist/composer has helped to shape and shade and color albums by, among others, saxophonist Jan Garbarek, Pat Metheny, guitarist Ralph Towner and vibraphonist Gary Burton. This is a "minimal list" for someone who is often described as a minimalist artist.

Let us say that Weber casts a spell and that Berenson has been caught in the net with his What Is This Place, to the extent the closing track on the outing is called "Bryon on a White Horse (for Bryon and Eberhard Weber with all my love and gratitude)." Bryon was Berenson's cat (rest his soul), who had grown accustomed to listening to Weber's "T. On A White Horse," from the bassist's The Following Morning (ECM Records 1977). Weber crafted an ethereal atmosphere with his bass, Rainer Bruninghaus' piano and celli, French horns and an oboe played by members of the Philharmonic Orchestra, Oslo.

The mood on Berenson's effort is an otherworldly, melancholy, trance-inducing panorama that might catch the shamans' ears. Berenson, in the creation of this homage to Bryon and Eberhard Weber uses an array of, keyboard instruments, including a Moog Subsequent 37/Boss Space Echo RE-202, a Sequential Prophet Rev 2, a Sequential Oberheim OB-6...and so on. The music is spacey, and as ambient as Brian Eno's Ambient 1: Music for Airports (Polydor, 1978).

What Is This Place?—had Berenson wanted to pay his homage to Eno instead of Eberhard—could have been called Ambient 437: Music for Space Ports. It sounds like music piped into the cryogenic sleepers' temporary napping cocoons, for the thousands of years it takes to traverse the galaxy.