Steven Bernstein's "ResoNation Trio/"Ultra Resonance"

Photo by Andrew Blackstein.

It's hard to believe now how controversial Teo Macero's editing on Miles Davis' late '60s-early '70s albums like In A Silent Way, Bitches Brew, and On the Corner was when those records were new. Part of it was the innovation of the funk-and-rock inflected sound Miles was exploring at the time, but Teo's post-production work almost made him a co-composer (although Miles always claimed credit for his Directions In Music). The same kind of resistance met Bill Laswell's remixes of electric Miles on Panthalassa when they appeared in 1998. Times have changed to where an artist like Makaya McCraven -- a drummer and producer whose work involves remixing live improvisations -- has been selected to receive a grant from the Doris Duke Foundation.

On his latest release -- out on double vinyl or CD via Royal Potato Family on June 5 -- the trumpeter-composer Steven Bernstein and his longtime collaborator, producer Scotty Hard, start with a set of new Bernstein compositions played by a brand new ensemble, then deconstruct them into Something Entahrly Other. Bernstein's a longtime fixture on the Lower Manhattan music scene, and the mastermind behind both the genre-bending jazz quartet Sexmob (which just released a 2023 collaboration with NYC avant-garde icon Laurie Anderson on Nonesuch) and Millennial Territory Orchestra, known for its reinventions of a century of American popular music. 

With ResoNation Trio, Bernstein -- best known for his work on the rarely-heard slide trumpet -- takes up the valved trumpet in the company of bassist Scott Colley and drummer Nasheet Waits to improvise conversations around his compositions, which Hard, on Ultra Resonance, then reimagines at the cellular level. It's a bold, bracing listen.

Bernstein first heard Colley and Waits with pianist Andrew Hill. Colley's a busy bandleader and in-demand side musician whose big sound shows the influence of his CalArts instructor Charlie Haden. Waits has become a significant force with his own bands, in Jason Moran's Bandwagon, the collaborative trio Tarbaby, and Dave Holland's New Quartet. Bernstein is a melodic trumpeter in the mold of Don Cherry, Dennis Gonzalez, and Wadada Leo Smith. ResoNation Trio's performances unfold at an unhurried pace, with ample negative space, before building to fulsome grooves, Bernstein's lines swirling around Colley and Waits' sturdy propulsion. The first disc closes with the trio's take on the venerable blues chestnut "Sitting On Top of the World," which establishes continuity with Bernstein's earlier explorations of American songcraft.

The inspiration for Ultra Resonance came from Bernstein's exposure to Garvey's Ghost, the dub version of reggae great Burning Spear's album Marcus Garvey. Bernstein and Hard previously worked as co-composers on Sexmob's 2023 outing The Hard Way, but for the new project, Hard took ResoNation Trio's completed tracks as the basis for his work. While modern pop productions owe a lot to innovations that hip-hop originators borrowed from dub producers like Lee Perry and Scientist, the techniques of dub -- heavy remixing, emphasis on pulse, the addition of audio effects and snippets from other recordings -- haven't yet been widely applied to improvised performances. 

The spareness of ResoNation Trio's instrumentation gave Hard the opportunity to deconstruct the music to its constituent parts and reconfigure them in a form that still has the instruments' organic warmth and humanity. Unlike Macero and McCraven, Hard will lift a phrase from here, a drum fill from there, and recombine them into a completely new piece, slathered with atmospherics and added instrumentation -- including Bernstein's debut on Electronic Valve Instrument (EVI). The pieces he created take their titles from elements on the Periodic Table -- emblematic of the way Hard has transformed ResoNation Trio's music. His musical alchemy rewards attention.