Chuck Bernstein: Rhythms beyond borders
One of the great things about the blues is its refusal to have its origins nailed down. It’s easy enough to identify the Mississippi Delta as a spawning ground. But as Joe the Ethnomusicologist can attest, it’s difficult to say definitively what the blues did or didn’t take from Africa or what parts of Sarah Palin’s favorite continent they did or didn’t derive from. Ultimately, it’s the mystery of the blues that avails it to so many different interpretations.
Which is where Chuck Bernstein comes in. Bernstein is a 68-year-old jazz drummer living and working in San Francisco who has always had a thing for bottleneck blues guitar. Before he dedicated himself to jazz his Monk’s Music Trio, which is celebrating its tenth birthday, is one of the best groups devoted to the songs of Thelonious Monk Bernstein played in rock and blues bands in the Bay Area. He can talk Bukka White and Ry Cooder at you as handily as he can talk Charlie Christian and Wes Montgomery.
In the mid-’70s, Bernstein’s friend Shelly Manne, the great west coast jazz drummer, introduced him to the berimbau, a single-string gourd instrument he had brought back from Brazil. Instantly hooked by its exotic, wah-wah-ready sound, Bernstein devoted himself to learning everything he could about it and its ties to the diddley bow, a one-string instrument prominent in the south in the 1800s that itself has ties to the African umakweyana. His goal was not to plug into berimbau tradition, or to become the next Sergio Mendes (whose Brasil ’66 he once saw feature the instrument on TV), but to create a personal, American-roots style of a sort that had never been heard before.
The lessons Bernstein took from berimbau masters helped him build his vocabulary: He learned more than 30 rhythms specific to the tradition. But it wasn’t until after he told a friend that he couldn’t get his wooden bow to slide the right way across the berimbau string, and the friend advised him to apply fiberglass to the wood, that Bernstein was able to get the bluesy sound he was after. Loosening the string to facilitate bent notes, finding the right combination of bow and gourd, and finding suitable material to play were other important steps.
“It was a process,” he said. “I sang the blues against those rhythms. Some worked and some didn’t. But in the end, I had my new blues, and new soul, and new funk.”
Bernstein introduced his invention on record with his otherworldly solo introduction to “Friday The 13th” on Monk’s Bones, the 2005 album by Monk’s Music Trio (with guests). The two-minute intro sets up one of the most striking Monk covers you’ll hear a pianoless, two-trombone experiment that wouldn’t be out of place on a Hal Willner tribute.
Now Bernstein’s CMB label is releasing Delta Berimbau Blues, a quilt-like collection of performances featuring Brazilian, blues, jazz and folk players based in San Francisco and, on “Plunger In The Funk”, the irrepressible veteran jazz trombonist Roswell Rudd, who played on the aforementioned Monk’s Bones and is no stranger to world beat, having recently led bands with musicians from Mali and Mongolia.
When I first listened to Delta Berimbau Blues, it sounded like Bernstein was spreading his concept too thin. The overly eclectic album ranges from straight-up blues-rock featuring guitarist Greg Douglass (whose psychedelic credits include Quicksilver’s John Cippolina, Steve Miller, Country Joe MacDonald and onetime San Franciscan Van Morrison) to a Pete Seeger cover (“One Grain Of Sand”, featuring singer Lisa Kindred) to a Stan Getzian jazz tune featuring tenor saxophonist Robert Kyle. The album would make a stronger statement with more intensely focused tunes such as “Delta Spirit Dance”, one of his solo features, and “Bahia Trance Blues”, a berimbau duet with one of his teachers, Bira Almeida.
Ultimately, Delta Berimbau Blues doesn’t transcend its status as a kind of hobby album: “Look, ma, I got the coolest new toy!” But the more you listen to it, the more you hear the stylistic divisions yielding to the intensity and devotion at the heart of the recording. And the more fun you have with it.
Whether or not Bernstein attains his dream of making the berimbau “a new voice in American music,” you have to root for a musician who, approaching 70, is still exploring his craft, still trying to find new meaning and expression in music, and still looking to turn people’s heads. His next berimbau recording may enter an entirely new dimension: His friend Ziggy Modeliste, the great New Orleans drummer, has expressed interest in becoming part of the movement. (Modeliste moved to San Francisco following Hurricane Katrina, moved back home and, unhappy with conditions there, moved back to California.)
Leave it to Bernstein, a grandson of Orthodox Jews, to make a connection between Jews rocking back and forth in prayer in synagogue (it’s called davening) and gospel expression. “Ultimately, we all come from Africa,” he said. “Soul is soul.”
And then he was off talking about the blues, if they did in fact originate in Africa, making a return trip there via the music of modern artists including two Malinese heroes of his, the late Ali Farka Toure and Toumani Diabate. This is one family tree you can keep climbing and climbing without ever knowing where you’re going to end up, or knowing what historical sound you’ll hear.