Tim Berne (Four Releases)

By Gary Chapin

Gregg Belisle-Chi - Slow Crawl: Performing the Music of Tim Berne  (Intakt, 2025)*****

Gregg Belisle-Chi has been at this long enough that I should stop being surprised. His first album of Tim-Berne-on-Acoustic (2021’sKoi) was an unexpected gift that provided a late in the game expansion of the contexts within which Berne’s compositions could be expressed. If you accept that the strength of a composer reflects how well their compositions can be adapted to different contexts (and maybe you don’t), then Koi served as a proof-of-concept. Four years later a recording such as this doesn’t depend on the novelty of the concept—we’ve got it! this works!—but Slow Crawl nevertheless lands as a revelation.

The question this recording answers is, “What can Tim Berne’s compositions do if you don’t lean into the spectacle? The loud? The electric? The skronk?” Belisle-Chi brings forward the beautiful and (dare I say it) exquisite nature of the melodies and harmonies. It’s a different, aromantic expression of Berne. Belisle-Chi isn’t whipping us into a frenzy (as he did on Yikes Too) but inviting us into the baroque-ish—fascinating, thinky, knotty, satisfying—tunes. Performances of Berne’s music generally have so much more than pitch going on, but what if, for a little while, the pitch was the thing? Thus, we’re presented with very complex, introverted, emergent experiences. Of necessity, this is quiet stuff, but quiet can be amazing, and that’s what it is, here. 5 stars.

Snakeoil- In Lieu Of (Screwgun 2025) & Snakeoil - Snakeoil OK (Screwgun 2025) 

There have been a bunch of from-the-vault style releases from Screwgun since 2020—if there can be said to be a bright side to the plague, that was it—and 2025 saw the release of these two gems. Snakeoil was (is?) an extraordinarily strong group featuring Berne, Oscar Noriega, Ches Smith, and Matt Mitchell. Of Berne’s groups I find Snakeoil to be the most intriguing, complex, knotty, and, almost, esoteric. It’s as thinky as a grad student and as primal as a rockfall, but bigger than either. These two releases come from what Tim calls “the early period” but which seems more like “mid-season form.” So often the music makes you stop and awe. Noriega, Berne’s only clarinet playing partner (afaik), weaves with spikes, jumps, and gaps—scrapes, squeals, and deep blue. Smith never stops—what a wealth of outre drummers there are!—and Tim leads from the front, a never faltering well of improvisation. The chthonic force on these discs (and it’s true of all Snakeoil recordings) is Matt Mitchell, shifting the Earth on the piano. What a joy this is!

Masayo Koketsu, Nava Dunkelman, Tim Berne - Poiēsis (Relative Pitch, 2025)

In this improvised set of pieces, Tim Berne and Masayo Koketsu bring their altos together, sprawling on the jagged carpet of Nava Dunkelman ‘s percussion. The seven pieces are innocuously titled (“page 1,” “page 2” …) as if they don’t want to give any secrets away or draw untoward associations. Dunkelman’s percussion is cinematic hereon, as in the opening piece, presenting us with a driving free rhythm, whipping us all into a frenzy, but just as often inserting “little instrument” characters that add color to a landscape that the altos can’t avoid interacting with. Honestly, I’m not even sure what she’s playing. Is the deep thooma tympani? What is it that sounds like the lowest of arco bass lines? The notes tell us that Berne acts as the melodic foundation with Koketsu hanging out more with the extended registers, and I can see that. Berne is so strong in the mid-range, but there are plenty of moments where both of these altos are playing stratispherically, and some, even, when the two are genuinely delicate.