Tim Berne’s latest band creation Snakeoil is getting long in the tooth but never short of ideas. The alto saxophonist’s bottomless well of creativity puts him near the top of NYC’s rich avant-jazz heap, and with a quintet that by now is so attuned to each other, it’s only getting better.
After four straight Snakeoil albums through the fabled ECM Records, Berne & Co. took their show to Swiss-based Intakt to recently release The Fantastic Mrs. 10. There’s another change since their last album, 2017’s Incidentals: Berne said goodbye guitarist Ryan Ferreira and hello to Marc Ducret, who had previously supplied guitar for various Tim Berne projects stretching back some 30 years earlier in Berne’s Caos Totale, Big Satan and Bloodcount ensembles. Per usual, Ches Smith handles all percussion, Matt Mitchell is on piano and archaic synthesizers, while Oscar Noriega adds another reed with his clarinets.
I’ve written Snakeoil reviews before and while the impact these records make is direct and visceral, it’s often pretty tough to explain the music, because there is a code to Tim Berne’s approach that is only fully understood by him and his band. Even then, they usually only know it when they arrive at that point. The best description I’ve read of Berne’s music comes from Mitchell, who remarked, “Tim’s (designs) provide a context for insanity.” Berne himself doesn’t see his music as being complicated, while allowing that it is “complex.”
Whatever that means, his music is meant to be absorbed with an open mind that despite its math-y rhythmic harmonics relies on split-second decisions by each musician to carry it out with punch.
There is no ‘ramp-up’ period on a Snakeoil album and here again, the band throws down that complex stuff at the start: The titular “The Fantastic Mrs. 10” commences with a Berne sax declaration that’s a bit of a head-fake; you think it’s just a solo until the band joins in and realize this knotted progression of notes is the song. It’s sometimes impossible to tell what parts are composed and what parts are made up as they go along, and probably that’s by design to prevent anyone from overthinking their parts. As Ducret divulges, “(Tim Berne) challenges us to take his ‘proposed’ music and to really play games with it.”
What Berne is really going for is the investment of real emotion into his compositions. “Surface Noise” starts out as a ballad but one with few parameters. In place of that is Smith’s glockenspiel and Mitchell’s restless piano expanding and expanding until it’s safe for Ducret and Berne to come in and perform as a duo, like as if a sax was double-tracked. It’s a slow-developing dramatic buildup that crash lands and Noriega emerges from the rubble to engage with Berne with an outpouring of their souls that lights the fuse for an escalation toward the first, direct expression of the theme. The middle section of “Rolo” is likewise a pure outpouring of passion. The latter part of “The Amazing Mr. 7” draws its fervent mood from pitting Berne against Noriega and Mitchell in a three-way free-for-all that ends in resolution by falling back on Berne’s chart. “Third Option” has another Berne/Noriega improv duel, which continues even for a while after the funky pattern from the other three players emerges.
Within Tim Berne’s familiar style are cool little examples of resourcefulness, such as the old-timey tack piano Mitchell uses on “Rolo” to mesh with Smith’s gongs to create exotic percussion timbres. Later, those gongs and a snare drum are dancing around Berne’s elusive saxophone; a similar tactic is later user with a glockenspiel and piano. Smith is off the drums for most of “The Amazing Mr. 7,” playing other percussive instruments and the glock to counterpoint Mitchell’s piano and Ducret’s caustic guitar.
“Dear Friend” was penned by Berne mentor and late saxophone giant Julius Hemphill (for a fuller Berne tribute to Hemphill, Diminutive Mysteries is worth checking out). Hemphill’s approach to composition doesn’t have Berne’s density but evinces a strange beauty of its own that Berne’s band elucidates in its very personalized way.
“Rose Colored Assive” has a deeper involvement by the record’s producer and mixer, David Torn, as Torn did the electronic arrangements on this short track. But with Torn, nothing is electronic without also being improvisational, and it ends up sounding a lot closer to Sun of Goldfinger than Snakeoil. Not that there’s any problem at all with that.
So, the tl;dr of this whole danged review of The Fantastic Mrs. 10 boils down to Matt Mitchell’s simple words: Tim Berne’s designs provide a context for insanity. Sweet insanity.
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