Trying to Tune Out the Noise

Josh Berman Trio, US vs. the World

The Latest Chapter of Josh Berman’s Trio Might be the Best Yet

The title of Dance! Skip! Hop!—the terrific new album by Tomeka Reid’s long-running quartet—is in part an homage to A Dance and a Hop (Delmark), the excellent 2015 recording by Chicago cornetist Josh Berman’s trio. That recording was something of a breakthrough for the horn player. A couple of years after its release he told me, “The trio sparked a new way of working for me. I really loved working that way—rather than coming up with arrangements, you write pieces that are phrases and gestures, some of which can be quite tune-like. I like tunes. With the trio record, I think I figured out a way to do a lot of things I like. I like tunes and I like free improvisation, and I like it when they happen at once.” He made the record with bassist Jason Roebke—who also plays in Reid’s quartet—and drummer Frank Rosaly, who decamped to Amsterdam soon after its release. When the cornetist organized a European tour Rosaly wasn’t available, so he pivoted, putting aside his sturdy, elliptical tunes in favor of fully improvised performances with free jazz veteran Paul Lytton taking over the drum throne. In 2019 I wrote about the trio’s Astral Spirits release Trio Discrepancies:

[It] maintains that highly reactive, nimble sense of movement, but the performances dispense with composed themes in favor of long-form improvisations where the leader’s innate sense of melody arrives in terse sallies erupting from extended passages of herky-jerk abstraction. Berman’s puckered tone, fatback licks and tart smears—as ever bridging the gap between the garrulous, vocalic excursions of Ellington trumpeters like Bubber Miley and Rex Stewart and modern seekers like Wadada Leo Smith and Nate Wooley--are steadily buffeted by the rhythm section’s shifting gambits. The bassist unfurls deep, woody lines and the drummer peppers his flow with wonderfully jarring, chaotic accents, but despite the turbulence they forge an inexorable sense of forward motion, providing a platform for the cornetist to toggle masterfully between lyric flurries and knotted outbursts. Unlike the airtight miniatures on A Dance and a Hop, these pieces allow the players to re-situate the same language onto a wide-open plane—pushing and pulling in changing directions and allowing spontaneous motifs to play out fully, although each musician never lets any single notion overstay its welcome.

On a subsequent European tour the trio was rounded out by another legendary European musician, the late Sven-Åke Johansson. Unfortunately, a studio session the trio undertook on a day off during the tour hasn’t been released, but the music is wonderful, reverting back to the tune-driven approach captured on A Dance and a Hop. Of course, Johansson had a much different sound than Rosaly, a kind of fractured yet still metronomic feel that the cornetist and bassist deftly pushed and pulled against. Some of the tunes from that unreleased session will appear on the trio’s upcoming album Everybody Else’s Life, Too, which is due in June on Corbett vs. Dempsey. Yet another terrific drummer has entered the fold, both on the recording, and on the group’s current European tour which brings to Berlin for a concert on Tuesday, April 28 at Richten25: Chris Corsano. Together they bring remarkable concision and fervor to the leader’s indelible themes, which continue to rely on terse lyric gestures of profound elasticity. They can embrace a kind of tuneful post-bop, with a rhythmic thrust that occasionally upends the flow for tension-generating counterpoint, or they can be a glue that holds together more chaotic excursions.

Josh Berman, Jason Roebke, and Chris Corsano (photo: Jason Roebke)

There’s a stunning rapport across the recording, with Corsano complementing the imperturbable connection Berman and Roebke have honed over many years of playing together. The music consistently engages in a thrilling push-pull between structure and openness, with the cornetist’s corkscrewing lines sauntering, slashing, and spitting shapes in fluid succession. Within a sound that more or less maintains post-bop shapes there are nifty, rapidly shifting forays into texture-building, where the bassist and drummer unleash striated, strident long tones produced by visceral bowing, or the cornetist smears tones, blows short blasts of unpitched breath, and unleashes gnarly tangles of sound that nonchalantly straddle a century of cornet playing. It’s one of the strongest albums I’ve heard this year and it reinforces the artistic bump Berman got from the original trio’s inception. Below you can check out the opening track of the upcoming album, “Observers.”

The Continued Imbalance of the Transatlantic Jazz Business

The New York jazz publicist and artist manager Matt Merewitz published a lengthy post in his sporadic newsletter The Side People last week, in advance of this past weekend’s Jazzahead conference in Bremen, Germany. For those who are unaware of this massive gathering, it’s a jazz business trade show where booking agents, management firms, labels, festival directors, curators, national jazz export organizations, and musicians all gather to network. There’s also a lot of live showcases where artists pay for the privilege to perform for a lot of disinterested biz types. I can’t say if the investment is worth it for the artists, but in my experience most of the artists I’ve seen aren’t very interesting. I remain steadfast that for music-first artists—that is, those that prioritize art over commerce even if they desire some degree of financial viability or, at least, sustainability—hoping to score at Jazzahead is a terribly wrongheaded choice. I’ve attended the conference a few times and the amount of money spent on promotional bullshit and complimentary drinks is eye-watering. The vibe I always get is that most participants like the music business more than they like music itself. At Jazzahead, jazz and its makers are just a product for the marketplace. The conference exists primarily for those trying to profit from that product. Anyway, for someone in Merewitz’s position it’s a singular opportunity to come face-to-face with the European jazz community, which dominates over American participants.

His post is a follow-up to something he wrote last December after attending Jazzahead in 2025. He’s been grappling with American indifference to jazz produced outside of its country of origin and the ridiculous barriers imposed by exorbitant US visa costs and administrative hurdles foisted upon artists who’d like to perform in the country, coupled with an American tradition of making bank by touring in Europe, where for years artists have made a lot more money and have been treated with greater respect than they did at home. Of course, these are generalization with loads of exceptions and complicated corollaries, but I think these points are essentially accurate. There’s a rich tradition of American musicians spending extended years in Europe—Dexter Gordon, Benny Bailey, Bud Powell, Kenny Drew, Bill Barron, Johnny Griffin, and Steve Lacy, among them. It all takes on greater salience in light of the US administration’s self-enriching policies and utter disregard for the rest of the world.

Johnny Griffin (photo: Francis Wolff)

The post includes a couple of quotes from me, taken from some email exchanges and an interview Merewitz conducted. I have one quibble with that portion of the post, where it states that I moved to Europe to immerse myself in the European scene. The truth is that I moved to Europe because working as a music journalist in the US had become an increasingly difficult way to make a living. I actually was one of the fortunate few that still had a full-time job with benefits to write about music. And thanks much to my editor at the Chicago Reader, Philip Montoro, I was largely able to cover what I wanted to. But when I left the paper in 2018 my position was killed, replaced by much cheaper freelance contributions. My partner had secured a year-long artist residency in Rome and thanks to her generous invitation to join her, I was able to spend a year figuring out what to do without having to live in Donald Trump’s America. She convinced me to move to Berlin once the residency concluded, and that’s what we did, and I will always be grateful for the opportunity she handed me. I miss my family, friends, and food from the US, but I have zero regrets. And while it’s been incredible to get experience a different way of life and to, yes, immerse myself in the scene, but that wasn’t the reason I moved here. The music scene in Chicago was seriously enriching.

Merewitz’s piece is way too long and tackles way too many issues for me to comment on all of them here, but I appreciate that someone with his platform within the jazz community has chosen to raise these issues, even if he often does so in broad strokes that elide many subtleties of the situation. Ideally it will spark some kind of meaningful conversations and reconsiderations. I couldn’t help by wince when he cited British critic Stuart Nicholson, author of 2005 book Is Jazz Dead (or has it moved to a New Address)?. The book was a travesty, a lazy screed that pilloried American jazz as played out, while holding up some of the most tedious and bland sounds from Europe, particularly Scandinavia, as proof that the music had engaged in some serious reverse migration. Nicholson demonstrated a complete lack of understanding of what was happening in the US beyond what was readily available in the European market, either through recordings or jazz festivals. I’m not sure I agree with Merewitz’s assertion that what Nicholson “had been saying all those years ago is now coming true but from within his own country, predominantly.” The British scene has enjoyed some sustained success over the last five or six years thanks to folks like Shabaka, Nubya Garcia, and Ezra Collective, but much of this community is actually producing slick R&B that borrows some ideas from jazz. (Of course, serious British stuff like [Ahmed], Alexander Hawkins, or a syncretist like Laura Jurd are usually omitted from such conversations). There is a ton of great “jazz” across Europe, but thanks to the financial barriers of touring in the US and the infuriating lack of interest from the US music press most listeners don’t realize it. I firmly believe that the American scene remains untouchable. The level of musicianship and insane creativity of the best artists is still nonpareil, but it’s hard not to be exasperated by a comment Hank Shteamer—now one of the most visible American jazz critics thanks to his writing in the New York Times—made on Merewitz’ post, almost bragging of his chauvinism: “I def won’t apologize for my own bias toward American jazz (25+ years in New York will naturally have that effect).” I lived in Chicago for 35 years, and I think outside of New York it probably has the strongest scene in the US, but that didn’t prevent from paying attention to music outside of the US. In fact, as some who was paid to write about music I believe it was a crucial part of my job, to say nothing of it being a natural product of curiosity and love for music. It’s not an either-or proposition. Why would anyone limit their listening according to geographic borders, particularly a professional music journalist? There wasn’t a single non-American artist on Shteamer’s list of his 35 favorite jazz albums from 2025. I’m not finding fault with his choices, but I’m certain that if he had checked out music from beyond the US there would have been at least one or two European records among his selections, given his aesthetic sensibilities. I like Hank’s writing, so I feel a bit uncomfortable piling upon him for this, but gimme a fuckin’ break. We have unprecedented access to music all over the globe, which certainly wasn’t the case for most of jazz’s history, so I find there’s little excuse to plead ignorance now.

Naturally, the Merewitz post and its various replies are focused primarily on the business end of the story, and when the music is actually mentioned it’s too often reduced to lists of cherry-picked artists people suggest checking out rather than substantive explorations of scenes or larger aesthetic practices. But I think it you want the greatest argument about the value of European jazz, look to the actual musicians. Americans have worked with and in many cases formed fruitful, sustained partnerships with European artists for decades. These days there’s Tyshawn Sorey’s partnership with British pianist Pat Thomas, cellist Tomeka Reid’s strong trio with Cologne-based Polish saxophonist Angelika Niescier, or Val Jeanty and Savannah Harris collaborating with Swedish bassist Petter Eldh and Trondheim-based Danish saxophonist Mette Rasmussen in the powerful hip-hop-infused ØKSE—who play a show at Kantine am Berghain on Monday, May 4—to name just three examples, but even this list misses the point. The best musicians, no matter where they hail from, are curious and blind to nationality. I’m not denying the long, dark history of exploitation and ignorance of Black American ownership, and I still routinely observe European musicians organizing groups that rely on a token American ringer to score festival gigs, a revolting practice that almost never yields worthwhile music, but for me nobody provides more convincing proof of border irrelevance more than the actual practitioners of the artform.

ØKSE (photo: Žiga Koritnik_

As I’ve gotten older I’ve come to care about music as an artform, not a series of genres. I’m less and less concerned about defining styles or nationalities, because music is about sound, tradition, ideas, community, and creativity—not all of this other bullshit. Most of that stuff is imposed by the industry to make things marketable, and it explains why drawing outside of stylistic lines isn’t a good business decision. Of course, working musicians don’t have the luxury of ignoring some of these real-world concerns and that’s a major drag. But things can be truly utopian and beautiful when we just use our ears to live in the sounds.

Recommended Shows in Berlin This Week

April 28: Josh Berman, cornet, Chris Corsano, drums, and Jason Roebke, double bass; The Field Recording Duo (Peter Cusack and JD Zazie, field recordings), 8 PM, Richten25, Gerichtstraße 25, 13347 Berlin

April 29: Reinier van Houdt, piano, plays Claudio F. Baroni and Giuseppe Chiari, 8:30 PM, KM28, Karl Marx Straße 28, 12043 Berlin

April 30: Tinariwen; Sulafa Elyas, 8 PM, Huxley’s Neue Welt, Hasenheide 107 – 113, 10967 Berlin (sold out)

April 30: DaughterDaughter (Amalie Dahl, alto saxophone, Camila Nebbia, tenor saxophone, Elisabeth Coudoux, cello, and Sun-Mi Hong, drums), 8:30 PM, KM28, Karl Marx Straße 28, 12043 Berlin

April 30: Zinc & Copper (Elena Kakaliagou, French horn, Hilary Jeffery, trumpet, trombone, and Robin Hayward, tuba); Jasmine Guffond, 9 PM, Kantine am Berghain, Am Wriezener Bahnhof, 10243 Berlin

May 2: Soko Steidle + Alexander von Schlippenbach (Rudi Mahall, bass clarinet, Henrik Walsdorff, alto saxophone, Jan Roder, double bass, and Oli Steidle, drums), with Alexander von Schlippenbach, piano, 8:30 PM, Sowieso, Weisestraße 24, 12049 Berlin

May 3: Sofía Salvo, baritone saxophone; Li-Chin Li, sheng; Judith Hamann, cello, voice; Bryan Eubanks and Chris Heenan, electronics, woodwinds; Niloofar Asghary and Romain C. Bertheau, organ, no-input mixer, 6 PM, Taborkirche, Taborstraße 17, 10997 Berlin

May 3: Jessika Kenney, voice, Biliana Voutchkova, violin, and Maurice Louca, guitar, 8:30 PM, Morphine Raum, Köpenicker Straße 147, 10997 Berlin (Hinterhof 1. Etage)

May 4: ØKSE (Mette Rasmussen, alto saxophone, Val Jeanty, turntables, electronics, Savannah Harris, drums, and Petter Eldh, bass), 8 PM, Kantine am Berghain, Am Wriezener Bahnhof, 10243 Berlin