Alto saxophonist and composer Tim Berne has been a vital and ubiquitous figure in “downtown” New York creative music for more than 40 years. He arrived in the city to study with Julius Hemphill, a hero and key influence. Berne’s music, made in solo projects, collaborative bands, and as a side player across all those years, has always reflected a combination of R&B feeling, out-jazz freedoms, and careful compositional detail. Yes, Hemphill’s sound is in there, but in 2025, the music sounds entirely like Tim Berne.
On his new trio recording with guitarist Gregg Belisle-Chi and drummer Tom Rainey, Yikes Too, all those elements are in powerful balance. On first listen, you might not notice that the band seems complete without adding a bass player. As a trio, Berne, Belisle-Chi, and Rainey defy the notion that a “rhythm section” might be supporting a soloist in the standard jazz manner.
Instead, this trio sound like three strong actors playing a series of one-acts on a nearly bare stage. Berne’s alto is precise and buzzy. The guitar speaks with the clarity of jazz, not significantly distorted, but powered with the backbone of an amplifier that means business. The drums create crisscrossing patterns that are part of the dialog, not the set.
The (almost) title track, “Yikes”, starts with guitar and drums toggling through a written pattern that lays out harmonic motion in arpeggiated single notes by Belisle-Chi. Berne’s alto sax enters with a written melody of counterpoint that sounds rubbery and fun against the harder-edged guitar. Some of Ornette Coleman‘s “country music” vibe is here; the band sound engaging the way Coleman’s early 1960s ensemble always focused on melody.
That gives way to a calm guitar solo, filling the sonic space with a bit of chorus effect but using an economy of notes. Berne eventually enters to make it a gentle collective improvisation that sounds like layers of shimmering paper that finally reveal the composed design again.
“Sorry Variations” is one of the swingiest things Tim Berne has ever recorded; a set of bouncing melodic lines first played by saxophone and guitar in twin-like unison that moves into playful counterpoint. While the leader and Belisle-Chi bob up and down pleasantly, Rainey pops like he has the recently passed drummer Roy Haynes on his mind, all joy and groove. The written theme inspires a charming, minimal, and boppy guitar solo tinged with overdrive. Berne’s improvisation is boosted by the overdriven guitar playing the written line on the bottom, building back the ideas of the original theme.
The gentle side of this group is powerful. A favorite track is “Julius Hemphill”, a dancing theme with Rainey using brushes and the guitar and alto voicing delicate harmonies that ring rather than jabber. Even here, the three voices are balanced within the composition and the recording. Rainey starts it off and never seems less than a lead voice. The care with which the conventionally melodic voices work in parallel makes this song sound inevitable at every turn. The long written melody is essential in every note, after which the improvisations are equally balanced and compelling.
All those performances are from the first, studio-recorded disc of a double set. The second half is live, with three compositions appearing in both formats. In the studio, “Bat Channel” is an elliptical theme but one that follows a harmonic form with the written lines for alto and guitar framing beautiful, slant harmonies over a conversation of brushes against snares and toms. In front of an audience, the song gets an aural makeover with Rainey using sticks, Belisle-Chi pushing his amp more to the edge, and the composed lines coming together only after several minutes, followed by much more urgent extemporaneous shouts and cries.
Similarly, “Trauma” in the studio spends much more time working as a gentle collage of sounds than its live cousin. That doesn’t mean that the grungier, more rhythmically insistent version is less in control or more “free”. It just uses fewer pastels to tell its story.
Tim Berne’s music tempts you to hear it as wide open, particularly without a bass line to keep your ears locked into a vamp or a chord sequence. However, the truth is that Berne, the composer, is quite an architect. He draws up specific forms and pieces that lock together to make his music solid, to let it stand up to interpretations by other players and to reinterpretations as his band get playful.
A tune like “Curls” starts out sounding like a solo alto saxophone improvisation, but Berne begins by playing a precise line that is the theme, just one hidden by its lack of context. Drums roll in, rough and tumble, Berne plays some “free” figures over a pedal point, and the guitar becomes a bed of thorns on the bottom. However, when that melody locks in as a guitar/alto unison, things snap into place. You realize the design was in place at the start.
A live recording of “Clandestine” provides another example of what makes Berne’s music so delightful, even though it is not anyone’s idea of “easy listening”. The opening theme is a looping bit of Barnum & Bailey-ish melody, all three players leaping from tree branches and crisscrossing in mid-air. They play this theme in double-time, then straight, then double again, before Rainey sets up an aggressive but old-fashioned groove on his snare. Belisle-Chi then digs into his axe as if he were the blues master Johnny Copeland on acid (which, perhaps, just means Sony Sharrock).
Blues metal on a downer is then interrupted by the theme again, which puts Berne in the spotlight to spin in pirouettes that are not screeching “free jazz” but swirling arpeggios outlining chords that move in and out of key with the guitar’s fuzz-toned lines. It is a bravura performance: comedy, adventure, drama.
I suspect this is why other creative improvisers are so fond of recording Tim Berne’s compositions. They set up fun challenges for the musicians to grapple with, curious problems for them to solve. The songs are rarely defined by a set of chord changes like a jazz standard, but they are not a-harmonic. Berne’s music contains well-defined themes that lend themselves to being moved about, broken into pieces, or transformed in musical ways.
This trio, together for quite a while and capable of all manner of play, does precisely these kinds of things with Berne’s material. Yikes Too is 18 tracks of adventure; three imaginative musicians in a sandbox, building and molding, occasionally smashing a bit, but most typically creating magic.