It all started here. Tim Berne’s Hardcell unit, the sometimes electro-acoustic, sometimes all-acoustic trio the saxophonist led with Craig Taborn and Tom Rainey through most of the aughts. Sensitive documents a gig on December 3, 2000 that marked the first time Berne had played with Taborn, the beginning of a fruitful association that stretched across at least two other bands and paralleled Taborn’s rise to the upper echelon of NYC-based piano and keyboard players.
It’s fascinating, really, to listen to Hardcell at the very beginning in late 2000 after listening to it near the end of its run in 2007 when The Cosmos was taped. Berne and Rainey had established a strong rapport in prior Berne vehicles Bloodcount and Big Satan by the time Hardcell got going, so the wildcard in this trio’s development is obviously Taborn, who brought electronic keyboards to a Berne band for the first time. In the beginning, Taborn added hues that brought a fresh dynamic to Berne’s composition as Taborn largely let Berne and Rainey shred. By the time of The Cosmos, Taborn was often operating in beast mode and doing it on piano. But he was no less important in the beginning.
The initial indication of how quickly Berne’s Hardcell unit came together is the fact that the set list for the band’s maiden concert matches the song lineup of their studio album The Shell Game that came out just a few months later, save for The Shell Game substituting “Hard Cell” for the Bloodcount tune “The Opener.”
This fare starts with what is probably one of the earliest presentations of a Hardcell go-to tune, “Heavy Mental.” Rainey starts funky and gets funkier as Berne gets more aggressive. Taborn’s keyboard is the sound of Miles, circa 1970 and his left hand is effectively filling in for the missing bassist. But after Berne is done with his initial explosions, he latches right onto those left hand lines, as Rainey’s rhythms are in lock step as well. The song ends with perfect synchronization.
Taborn is very quick to recognize where a song is headed and tap into the zeitgeist of the moment. Berne’s opening saxophone remarks on “Twisted” painted a mosaic of complicated moods that are largely implied; Taborn locates the chords that fill in those gaps. Rainey is barely there at the beginning but by midway through he’s become a groove monster and Berne is riding high on it.
What’s cool about “The Opener” is Berne’s bop patterns that bracket this performance isn’t met with the typical bop drumming by Rainey; instead he plays a shuffle on his snare that’s actually even more in sync with the sax. The drummer doesn’t just stop there, he lets his pulse evolve as he moves from snare to toms. Taborn lets his hair down on top of Rainey’s unrelenting tom-toms but those drums remain in the driver’s seat.
The program concludes with a Tim Berne epic, “Thin Ice” running even ten minutes longer than the half-hour studio version. It begins meekly enough, with Taborn’s soft synth colors setting a peaceful mood that soon gets disrupted by Berne’s unnaturally high alto sax tones (which I initially mistook for added electronic sounds). Rainey enters delicately with mallets as Berne brews up a pretty melody. At around the twelve minute mark, the song moves into its next phase, a labyrinthine pattern but played out at a leisurely tempo. Instead of gathering steam when the drums gets itchy, it leads into a Rainey showcase. Rainey settles into a groove that Taborn uses over which he plays a vamp and that’s plenty good stage for Berne’s improvising. During another highlight, the rhythmic telepathy between Berne and Rainey is underscored, and Taborn himself — providing color — finally lets loose a scattered keyboard solo.
Recordings of old gigs not originally intended for release can be a dicey deal; they’re not always going to have super audio quality. That’s not the case with Sensitive, where not only everyone sounds clear and crisp, but the crowd noise has been effectively removed. At least some of the credit for that should go to David Torn, who was put in charge of remastering this souvenir.
Sensitive is being offered by Berne’s Screwgun Records and will be available on April 2, 2021. Get it on the release date, which is also a Bandcamp Friday, when Bandcamp will forward the entire sale proceeds to Tim.
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