If necessity is the mother of invention, then desperation must be the mother of reinvention, judging from Tim Berne’s story of his introduction to the saxophone. The intrepid alto
saxophonist and composer didn’t touch the instrument until he was in college, and although he was a huge music fan, the only thing he’d played before that, he confesses, was “a little
basketball.”
“I couldn’t imagine being a normal person, having a job, so I was kind of desperate to find
something that wasn’t quite the norm,” he says. “So by accident, I got a saxophone for a
hundred bucks.”
Nice accident. Four decades later, with an immediately recognizable sound on his horn and an impressive body of work to his credit, it’s hard to imagine how Berne could ever have been
anything but the groundbreaking musician he is. This Thursday, he’ll bring his Snakeoil band, featuring Oscar Noriega (clarinets), Matt Mitchell (piano), and Ches Smith (percussion), to GiG and the Outpost, to celebrate the release of their third album on the ECM label, You’ve Been Watching Me.