Paraphrase - Pre-emptive Denial

Screwgun Records 70016

This is easily my favorite jazz CD of 2005, even edging out the amazing Hard Cell disc Berne released recently. It's also a perfect example of why Berne is in a category of his own both musically and in terms of the way he manages his career. I can't think of any other leading jazz musician who has more sheer common sense. He played a ridiculously great gig a few months ago; somebody recorded it "to no budget"; now it's available for people to enjoy the world 'round on a superbly mastered compact disc in the company of characteristically bizarre and wonderful artwork from Steve Byram, an eminently sensible object produced by Berne himself under his own no-nonsense imprint. If only the music world would usually follow such clean logic. By the way, the sound quality is perfect to my ears; I feel like I'm at the gig in one of those rare transcendental states I find myself in disproportionately often as a result of Tim Berne's music, and in fact this was recorded at one of the best venues to have a profound and intimate experience with music, The Stone, John Zorn's lower east side oasis of creative music communion, and a place where I had a transcendental experience seeing Tim Berne and Tom Rainey (in trio with Erik Friedlander) only a few weeks before this Paraphrase set took place. Somehow I missed this gig, but I can imagine myself there anyway, gasping in disbelief as Rainey works a sick groove into a percolating frenzy with Drew Gress' bass breath and brawn and Berne's sweet and sour soul riff permutation narrative feeling like it could and should go on forever. That's a great thing about Tim Berne's live performances; the pieces go on for a long time, because it's just too good to stop any earlier. So this disc is two very long tracks adding to up to about 50 minutes and they go by so fast ("time flies...") the only way to compensate for their shortness is just to play the disc often.

When Paraphrase started as an active project in the late 90s, it was a dramatic departure and bold experiment for Berne because it was his first project without any charts or tunes prepared in advance. It was a free improv workshop and totally equal partnership with two very special musicians also accustomed to predetermined material and some jazz-related aesthetic premise. Like Joe McPhee, these guys are just as comfortable playing a highly customized version of jazz as they are abandoning it entirely for non-idiomatic passages of ritualistic sound mystery, and they also have similar knack for merging tenderness and abstraction. But let's be clear about one thing here: Tom Rainey is in this group. The groove explodes early and often. If there's a clear stylistic difference between this and the two older Paraphrase albums, it's that Rainey has gotten even more aggressive and confident with his slippery breakbeat teasing. His grooves are overpowering, and always resist the numbing regularity and predictability of lesser drumkitters. Like Bloodcount at its finest, the groove can be massive yet always on the brink of falling apart. I think that's the special feeling in a lot of Berne's music that really hooks me in, that constant flirtation with thematic disintegration. He also just works some damn great melodies on that horn. The simple point I'd like to make here is that whatever makes Berne's music great when he uses his standard part-chart part-free format is the same as whatever makes Paraphrase great. Paraphrase isn't a bold experiment anymore and it probably wasn't once their very first gig was over; it's a fragment of the same musical cloth all Berne's music is cut from. Take a chunk of this music and it could almost be right out of an extended piece by Hard Cell, Science Friction or Big Satan, with the special twist of Gress' elastic pizzicato and mourning arco. It's the ultimate achievement for creative improvisors: the unification of advance decisions and real-time decisions. This magical stuff just oozes from their pores.

~Michael Anton Parker