“I didn’t choose ‘snake oil’ for self-deprecation, I just liked the sound of it,’’ says Berne, 57, who performs Thursday at Regattabar with the Snakeoil quartet, his first Boston gig as a leader in nearly a decade. “But making music is a strange thing to do for a living, and I like to play down the whole ‘art’ side of things. People promote this music in a way that discourages people from checking it out.’’
Berne has certainly played plenty of aggressive, bare-knuckle free jazz. Snakeoil explores very different sonic terrain. Featuring Oscar Noriega on clarinet and bass clarinet, pianist Matt Mitchell and Ches Smith on drums and percussion, the quartet has honed a slippery, transparent sound over two years and multiple European tours. Known for devising expansive, episodic works, Berne dials back the epic scale in Snakeoil, favoring a book of quietly dramatic, rigorously edited tunes.
“I’m always trying to play less,’’ says Berne, who eschews his brawny baritone sax in Snakeoil, instead favoring his liquid alto. “I wanted Ches to play multiple percussion to open up space, and Oscar’s clarinet has this lovely, light sound. There is still a lot of free-ish improvisation with a lot of implied harmonies and pulses. But if you mine the music with a certain amount of discipline, it sounds structured even though it’s not literally structured.’’
If Berne’s music is insistently idiosyncratic, it’s because his creative path is unlike any other musician on the scene. The Syracuse, N.Y.-native first picked up the horn at the relatively doddering age of 20. Rather than studying formally, he attached himself to established masters, most importantly through an intensive self-styled apprenticeship with the brilliant gutbucket avant-gardist Julius Hemphill, the late saxophonist/composer best known as the intellectual force behind the World Saxophone Quartet’s first incarnation.
