Tim Berne's Snakeoil at Berkeley Arts Festival

Alto saxophonist and alt-jazz hero Tim Berne has been one of the stalwart – yet never stale – figures on the left-end jazz scene since the mid-‘80s, and yet his engaging presence and creative fertility have bumped up a few notches just in the last couple of years. With Shadow Man, his second album for the ECM label in as many years, Berne, in the context of his masterful and flexible quartet Snakeoil, moves further out of the shadows and into higher profile, with a potent, poetic and sternum-shaking body of music. It’s visceral on impact, but chamber music-like in its intricacy, but also has a feeling of barely controlled freedom. This music rocks and thinks, explores, deconstructs and, yes, it swings in its own identifiably angular, Berne-ian way....

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Alto saxophonist and alt-jazz hero Tim Berne has been one of the stalwart – yet never stale – figures on the left-end jazz scene since the mid-‘80s, and yet his engaging presence and creative fertility have bumped up a few notches just in the last couple of years. With Shadow Man, his second album for the ECM label in as many years, Berne, in the context of his masterful and flexible quartet Snakeoil, moves further out of the shadows and into higher profile, with a potent, poetic and sternum-shaking body of music. It’s visceral on impact, but chamber music-like in its intricacy, but also has a feeling of barely controlled freedom. This music rocks and thinks, explores, deconstructs and, yes, it swings in its own identifiably angular, Berne-ian way.

Berne is emerging or re-emerging, as an important 21st century jazzman, getting ever deeper into the process of connecting the dots of an avant-garde tradition he has helped to shape. - Josef Woodard, Downbeat – January 2014

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