Tim Berne's latest album, Saturation Point, roars out of your loudspeakers, unbalances your picture frames, steps all over your furniture and scares the living daylights out of your cat, yet is intriguing and compelling for all that. It's a reminder that jazz hasn't gone to sleep, isn't walking backwards into the future and hasn't mutated into some sort of easy listening music - all of which you might be forgiven for thinking has happened over the past few years. This is industrial strength improvisation that's not for the squeamish or melodically minded, music in tune with the jagged but endless rhythms of New York City. Asked to describe it, the thirty-something alto saxophonist/composer shrugs, "If you call it jazz, someone will say, `Oh, that's not like Stan Getz' - I mean, what can you say?"
Well, for starters you can say Berne's music is most assuredly jazz. It's just that it can't be pigeonholed into this category or that. What he does is on the edge, twisting mainstream expectations with wit and virtuosity, and if an element of epater le bourgeoisie hovers over what he does, it's not there to shock but to rearrange expectations.
"When I listen to jazz I don't want to know what's going to happen before it happens," Berne explains, "I don't want to know there's going to be a nice little theme, a trumpet solo, a piano solo then a bass solo, and then they all play the same theme at the end. That's not what it's all about today, that's all been done 30, 40 years ago. What we do is take chances when we improvise, you don't know how a piece is going to end because we don't. Now that can be exciting, for us the performers and for the audience. We take them on a trip, and it's going to be different because no two tunes unfold in the same way."
In Europe, touring with his group Big Satan, he plays Whelans, Wexford Street, tomorrow night. Big Satan comprises Berne on alto and baritone saxophones, Marc Ducret on guitar and Tom Rainey on drums. Berne explains: "I call the group Big Satan because it's important people realise we have personalities. The Tim Berne Trio defines you as a jazz group and what does that mean? It can mean anything. What we've been finding is that the audiences we get are young, and there's a fair number of rock fans among them who come because Big Satan sounds like a rock band but then they hear something that is complex, that is not predictable in the way so many other musical forms can be and they end up enjoying it."
Berne argues the time is right for more challenging music to be heard, rather than, as he puts it, "that homogenised crap" he hears on the radio. "I don't think the average person who listens to music is incapable of enjoying what we do. I think people are pretty smart and the more honest you are about what you play, chances are you're going to hook-up with your audience. What we offer is a chance to hear musical dialogue; it's `jazz', but when people check us out it's not like the sort of `jazz' they expect to hear. There's no walking bass, the grooves are not bop grooves, they're grooves of today. There's rhythm there, there's tons of it, yet it's not falling into predictable idioms and people like that, they want to hear something different."
Discarding and reworking the old rules and abandoning bebop's cycle of chords, Berne explores African-derived slants on polyrhythmic interdependence. They are concepts that emerged from the black musicians' co-operatives formed in the 1960s in Chicago and St Louis and introduced to Berne by his mentor, the late Julius Hemphill. "Julius was a wonderful man and a wonderful musician," he reflects. "He had a way of alluding to styles like gospel, the blues, bebop and Charlie Parker - a whole range of styles - but he never copied them, he sounded like himself. It was amazing and this was my inspiration. Never any cliches."
Berne's knotty compositions often emphasise collective improvisation, "Anything can happen and usually does," he smiles. Yet this is no liberal re-investigation of freedom, but a refined take on post-modern jazz, a mixture of elements where there is never one fixed configuration, thus destroying the traditional organic unity of art. Berne harnesses a myriad of ideas, from bebop to film noir, R 'n' B and rock, from Julius Hemphill to Ornette Coleman, as well as his love of soul music.
The resulting musical dialect reflects the leader's wry but hip sense of humour. Yet what is remarkable about Berne's music is that all these influences do not result in a massive collision of opposing genres. Instead, the result is a ferocious groove that is heady with spontaneity. It's devil's music of the highest order, music that depends on intensity and rapport for it's volatile inspiration. "The guys I play with, Rainey and Ducret, they have gone beyond the stuff they have learned and are playing themselves, bringing their own musical personality to the table, and when you have a band that actually has chemistry you don't want to overwhelm yourself with structure, you leave options for things to happen. We have such rapport now that the last thing any of us wants is sounding the same every night, or even approaching sounding the same. That's what makes it interesting for us, and hopefully our audiences."
Big Satan play Whelan's, Wexford Street, Dublin tomorrow. Saturation Point, Tim Berne's latest album with his group, Bloodcount, is is available through Via Distribution UK