Swing Time: Steven Bernstein

Trumpeter, composer, arranger and bandleader Steven Bernstein testifies that listening to “Angels”—the soulful, Levon Helm-inspired centerpiece of Tinctures in Time, his first volume of original music with the two-decades old Millennial Territory Orchestra—brings him to tears. “‘Angels’ is fucking heavy,” he says, calling from his suburban home in Nyack, N.Y. “It wasn’t meant to be a sad song; I just feel it.”

With its late-summer honeysuckle vibe, Bernstein’s poignant instrumental eulogy to the dearly departed, in this and all future metaverses, is a brassy translation of languid Helm-style front-porch string music by a horn player whose lineage extends back to Louis Armstrong.

Bernstein, who turned 60 on Oct. 8, has been reflecting upon grief since 2015, when his son, Rex, died suddenly and unexpectedly while away at college. Bernstein has since lost his mother as well as a virtual pantheon of mentors and intimate musical friends. In addition to Helm, in whose Midnight Ramble band he played for eight years, he’s had to say goodbye to Lou Reed, producer Hal Willner, pianist Henry Butler, trombonist Roswell Rudd, tuba legend Howard Johnson, keyboardist Bernie Worrell and woodwindist Sam Rivers.

“I’ve come to accept that if you stay on the planet, you lose people, and then, one day, you’re not on the planet either,” Bernstein says. “That’s basically the whole story: You’re here and then you’re not.”

In January 2020, Bernstein and the Millennial Territory Orchestra recorded four albums over four days in Andy Taub’s  Brooklyn Recording studio. A Shifting Foundation grant enabled Bernstein to document dozens of his unrecorded and unperformed arrangements. In addition to Tinctures in Time, Bernstein and company recorded Good Time Music, an album of R&B, blues and New Orleans tunes featuring vocalist Catherine Russell; Manifesto of Henry-isms, a tribute to his long association with New Orleans piano genius Henry Butler; and Popular Culture, a mini-jukebox of inventive Bernstein-ian arrangements of some of his favorite artists, from Duke Ellington and Charles Mingus to The Beatles and Grateful Dead.

The sessions were all about “focus and food,” Bernstein says. Fueled by endless bagels and whitefish—Bernstein once worked at a Jewish deli after all—the MTO powered through tune after tune, rehearsing once before cutting twice and moving on to the next one.

Beginning with Tinctures in Time, which came out in September, the Royal Potato Family label will release all four volumes over the course of a year as Community Music, representing the breadth of Bernstein’s MTO work and his longest musical relationships— he goes back nearly 50 years with MTO tenor saxophonist Peter Apfelbaum, for example and jokes that “[guitarist] Matt Munisteri’s the new guy because he’s only been with me for 18 years.”

Bernstein continues: “This is some deep community. I turned 22 on the road with [clarinetist] Doug Wieselman, and I’ve known [drummer] Ben Perowsky since he was in high school and [bassist] Ben Allison since he was in college. I replaced [trombonist] Curtis Fowlkes in the Lounge Lizards and, between Levon and Little Feat, I can’t tell you how many bus and car rides I’ve shared with [baritone saxophonist] Erik Lawrence.”

The MTO, which also includes the great Charles Burnham on violin, is augmented on Henry-isms by John Medeski and pianist Arturo O’Farrill—keyboardists flexible enough to reflect Butler’s ancient melodies and virtuosic experimentalism. Fresh out of New York University, Bernstein met Butler in 1984 while playing with the Kamikaze Ground Crew, a musical adjunct of vaudeville-hippie troupe the Flying Karamazov Brothers. Fourteen years later, at Willner’s suggestion, Bernstein hired Butler to perform in the touring band for Robert Altman’s film Kansas City and, still later, formed Butler, Bernstein and the Hot 9 with the blind pianist. “Like almost everything in my life that’s been a gift, Henry came through Hal,” Bernstein says.

Bernstein’s business card promises “Music for all Occasions,” and the tireless musician has truly lived a Zelig-worthy double life as both bandleader and side/ session man. When Warren Haynes needed arrangements for his Jerry Garcia Symphonic Celebration, he hired Bernstein, who remained curiously oblivious to the Dead’s music while growing up in the Bay Area. And yet it was the arrangement of “Ripple” for the MTO’s 2006 debut album that convinced Bernstein that nothing was too modern for a group inspired originally by the traveling jazz-pop “territory” dance bands of the 1920s and ‘30s.

“We started off playing early territory music,” Bernstein says, “but, about four months into it, I did ‘Ripple,’ and realized I could play any kind of music once I learned how to do that sort of orchestration.” Although very little ‘20s music remains in the MTO repertoire, the band still kicks off each set with W. C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues.”

In his current role as a Little Feat sideman, Bernstein is also something of a historical subversive. “I love playing the trumpet, which I’ve done since I was a little kid. I was trained by the guys who were trained by Louis Armstrong, so when I play that big note, I’m thinking that the audience is getting some Louis right now, and they don’t even know it.”

And it works the other way too: Bernstein sat in with Los Lobos during Little Feat’s 2019 Ramble on the Island in Jamaica. Inspired by Lobos’ lead guitarist, David Hidalgo, Bernstein later coaxed a wiry first-time electric solo from Matt Munisteri for the Moondog-ish Tinctures opener, “Planet B.” That added another hue to the album’s unique sound, a heady casserole of hot playing and minimalism[1]tinged grooves that evokes, in his estimation, Duke Ellington, to whom he listened religiously for years; The Band, whose drummer strongly affected “the way I play, phrase, and even think about music;” and the ancient-to-futuristic Art Ensemble of Chicago, whose own trumpeter, Lester Bowie, prefigured Bernstein’s charismatic onstage exuberance.

All three influences have, of course, come and gone, leaving beautiful music behind. Bernstein’s feeling his own mortality, too, if only artistically. “I understand my music’s not the culture anymore,” he says. “And nobody really even cares about music like this now. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to stop making it. It’s what I do. Hal used to say, ‘Now, it’s up to us. We need to create with the same intent as our heroes. That’s our job now.’”

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