Walking on the sunny slide of the jazz street

As the gent in question is a jazz trumpeter, arranger, bandleader and composer, that’s not a bad epithet to attract.

By BARRY DAVIS
Updated: NOVEMBER 22, 2017 18:18
Keren Ann: ‘I love taking different sounds and new ideas, and kind of listening and trying to find a new way around it.’ (photo credit: XI SINSONG)
Keren Ann: ‘I love taking different sounds and new ideas, and kind of listening and trying to find a new way around it.’
(photo credit: XI SINSONG)
Steven Bernstein has been described as an artist “who lives outside musical convention.” As the gent in question is a jazz trumpeter, arranger, bandleader and composer, that’s not a bad epithet to attract.
The 56-year-old Jewish American musician will be in town next week, when he flies over with the rest of the Sex Mob quartet, to take part in this year’s Jerusalem Jazz Festival. Over the last three-plus decades, Bernstein, who predominantly plays the rarely used slide trumpet, has not only made creative strides, he has also garnered critical acclaim and even some pretty impressive awards and nominations. Sex Mob’s Sexotica release, which came out last year, was a candidate for a Grammy and his many and diverse projects have found him working alongside the likes of jazz titans Roswell Rudd, Sam Rivers and Don Byron, as well as stellar acts from more commercial fields, such as Aretha Franklin, Lou Reed, Digable Planets, Sting and Courtney Love.
Bernstein’s other vehicles for left-field musical expression include the nine-piece Millennial Territory Orchestra, The Lounge Lizards and Spanish Fly. When you consider that the trumpeter has also written for jazz guitarist Bill Frisell and pop giants Rufus Wainwright, Marianne Faithfull and Elton John, among others, you get some idea of the breadth of his work and vision.
If that weren’t enough, he has composed for dance, theater, film and television, and arranged scores for numerous feature films, including Get Shorty. His discography includes seven albums with the Sex Mob foursome – with saxophonist Briggan Krauss, drummer Kenny Wollenson, bassist Tony Scherr – and another seven under his own name, with four of those on John Zorn’s Tzadik Records.
The aforementioned nonet (nine-piece group) has also put out three records so, by anyone’s standards, Bernstein has not exactly been twiddling his thumbs for the last 35 or so years.
Bernstein hails from Berkeley, California but together with his family did some East-West Coast flitting as a kid.
By the time he was in fifth grade he was firmly ensconced back in the Bay Area and, after starting on trumpet the year before, soon became involved in his school’s jazz band. He describes his entry to the world of jazz as “very natural,” and quickly got into the improvisational groove.
The youngster’s musical die was cast and he set about wrapping his young ears around every musical sound he could handle. “In order to play good music you have to hear good music,” he said in a recent interview. That wasn’t just a matter of buying as many vinyls as he could carry home and listening to them intently in the comfort of his own bedroom. As an on-the-fly art form, jazz is best caught in the act, live and spontaneous. Bernstein got some of that from a local venue.
“We had Keystone Korner,” he recalls, noting the important jazz music club in the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco, which ran from 1972 to 1983 and hosted many of the jazz pantheon members, with trumpeter Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, Art Blakey, Bill Evans, Betty Carter and Stan Getz among the stars that delighted West Coast jazz fans in the 1970s.
Bernstein was barely into his teens when he found himself backstage, at Korner, staring goggle-eyed at such freewheeling artists as trumpeters Lester Bowie, Don Cherry and Freddie Hubbard “hanging out.” The latter was probably a euphemism for the intake of certain illegal substances, and the budding jazz musicians got some insight into what makes his professional peers tick. “It kind of broke down the idea of styles,” notes Bernstein. “All these [jazz] guys had the same job. They had different specialities, but it was the same business.”
After graduating from high school, Bernstein knew he had to get himself over to where the real jazz action was happening – New York City. He enrolled at Columbia University and began to find his way into the Big Apple scene.
He naturally gravitated towards the freer side of the jazz tracks, and became involved in the emerging Downtown and Loft scenes of the mid-1970s.
At the time he was forging his craft with, among others, the Spanish Fly trio, which had an atypical instrumental lineup of trumpet, tuba and guitar. Bernstein came across the work of saxophonist John Lurie and eventually joined the Lounge Lizards ensemble, which Lurie had established along with his pianist brother Evan, guitarist Arto Lindsay, bassist Steve Piccolo, and percussionist Anton Fier. The band regularly toured the world, drawing large audiences despite playing music that was nowhere near the mainstream.
Bernstein describes himself as “a voracious listener and collector [of music]” and has always taken in a broad sweep of styles and sounds, but if he had to name one jazz genre as his musical beacon, it would be the big band layout.
“I love big bands and I love it when it sounds like the musicians are in a room playing together,” he says. “I like to hear what they sounded like on a particular date.”
His penchant for culling ideas from every which way constantly led Bernstein into new musical directions, and also in the sound-track section of the industry. James Bond movie charts also came under his keen gaze and, before long, he experienced the rapturous applause of a Sex Mob gig audience when his trumpet solo segued into the iconic Bond opening melody. From then on, the quartet began to incorporate its own versions of a bunch of popular numbers such as “Fernando” by Swedish pop phenomenon Abba, the Rolling Stones’ “Ruby Tuesday” and “About A Girl” by Nirvana.
But don’t get the wrong idea. Sex Mob ain’t no cover band.
“I just take songs that I feel have a great melody and do them in my style,” he states. Sounds like a basic definition of what jazz playing is all about. Almost every jazz musician in the history of the art form has played “standards” or, like Bernstein et al., takes a more contemporary commercial number and sculpts it to suit their personal and musical sensibilities. As the trumpeter pointed out, Louis Armstrong or Billie Holiday, two of the most iconic figures in the history of jazz, didn’t write much of their own music, but no one called them cover acts.
Connecting with pop and rock material presented Bernstein and Sex Mob with a deep wellspring of music to work with. The band has been doing that, to good and much appreciated effect, all over the world for over 20 years now. Naturally, the source charts have always been filtered through Bernstein’s and his cohorts’ vast individual and collective experience and skills, and are generally proffered with a generous dosage of groove and the odd sound effects.
Playing such a rarely seen, or heard, instrument has its advantages in terms of allowing its operator carte blanche just to do his thing.
“I own this instrument,” he notes. “When you play the [conventional] trumpet, how do you get away from Miles [Davis] and Clifford [Brown] and Louis Armstrong? It’s just there. But when you play the slide trumpet, it’s just me.”
It’s not just Bernstein’s choice of instrument that gives him, and Sex Mob, such a singular musical character. The Jerusalem Jazz Festival devotees are in for a rare treat.
For tickets and more information about the Jerusalem Jazz Festival: www.jerusalemjazzfestival.org.il