Karl Berger


Karl Hans Berger was a German-American jazz pianist, vibraphonist, composer, and educator. He was a leading figure in jazz improvisation from the 1960s when he settled in the United States for life. He founded the educational Creative Music Studio in Woodstock, New York, in 1972 with his wife and Ornette Coleman, to encourage international students to pursue their own ideas about music.

Life and career

Berger was born on March 30, 1935, in Heidelberg. He started playing classical piano when he was ten and worked in his early twenties at a club in his hometown. He learned modern jazz from visiting American musicians, such as Don Ellis and Leo Wright. During the 1960s, he started playing vibraphone. He studied musicology and sociology at the Free University of Berlin, achieving a doctoral degree in 1963 with a dissertation on music in Soviet ideology. He worked as a member of Don Cherry's band in Paris. When the band went to New York City to record Symphony for Improvisers, he recorded his debut album as a leader.
Berger worked with drummers Ed Blackwell and Jack DeJohnette, bassist Dave Holland, and saxophonists Ornette Coleman, Lee Konitz and Ivo Perelman. He worked further with Michael Bisio, Anthony Braxton and Baba Olatunji, as well as with Carla Bley, Bill Laswell John McLaughlin and Roswell Rudd, and with the Mingus Epitaph Orchestra, As musical arranger and conductor, he contributed to albums by Better Than Ezra, Buckethead, Jeff Buckley, Angélique Kidjo, Natalie Merchant and Rich Robinson, among others.
With Coleman and Ingrid Sertso, Berger's wife, he founded the Creative Music Studio in Woodstock, New York, in 1972, to encourage students to pursue their own ideas about music. Berger considered Coleman his friend and mentor, and like Coleman he was drawn to avant-garde jazz, free jazz, and free improvisation. The focus of CMS was "teaching improvising musicians to develop their own aesthetics, and to draw and mesh ideas from across genres, traditions, and international borders". Among the teachers were John Cage, Steve Lacy, George Russell and Richard Teitelbaum. They closed the facility in 1984, but held masterclasses internationally, called World Jazz. Berger and Sertso founded Sertso Recording Studio in Woodstock in 2004.
Berger also taught at the New School, and at the Frankfurt University of Music and Performing Arts from 1994 to 2003. He then led the department of music of the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth to 2005. He and his wife revived CMS in 2013, and retired in 2017. He remained active in music for the rest of his life, releasing his final album in the fall of 2022.
Berger died at a hospital in Albany, New York, on April 9, 2023, at age 88, from complications after surgery.

Discography

Berger's recordings include:

As leader

  • From Now On
  • Tune In
  • We Are You
  • With Silence
  • All Kinds of Time
  • Interludes
  • Changing the Time
  • Just Play
  • New Moon
  • Live at the Donaueschingen Music Festival
  • Transit
  • Karl Berger + Paul Shigihara
  • Around
  • Sudpool Jazz Project II: Moon Dance
  • Crystal Fire
  • Conversations
  • No Man Is an Island
  • Stillpoint
  • Strangely Familiar
  • Synchronicity
  • After the Storm
  • Gently Unfamiliar
  • Moon
  • Live at the Classical Joint
  • In a Moment
  • Conjure
  • Sketches
  • ''Heart is a Melody''

    As sideman

With Don Cherry
  • Togetherness
  • Live at Cafe Montmartre 1966 Vols. 1–3
  • Symphony for Improvisers
  • Eternal Rhythm
  • Multikulti
With Bill Laswell
  • Jazzonia
  • Filmtracks 2000
  • Points of Order
With Ivo Perelman
  • Reverie
  • The Art of the Improv Trio Vol. 1
  • The Hitchhiker
With others