When producer Hal Willner needed a music director for tributes to Leonard Cohen and Bill Withers, he called on Bernstein.
When film director Robert Altman needed a music director for Kansas City, which depicts the Midwest jazz scene of the 1930s, he hired Bernstein. He has arranged charts for dozens of artists, including Rufus Wainwright, Marianne Faithfull and Elton John. He spent eight years with Levon Helm’s Midnight Ramble Band and recently toured with Little Feat. Over the years, Bernstein has performed with a million jazz luminaries – pianist Henry Butler, saxophonist Sam Rivers and trombonist Roswell Rudd are three of his favorites, all now passed – but also with Courtney Love, Lou Reed and Aretha Franklin. It’s my job – all our jobs – to be those people, to carry on that intent. But I’m really lucky to have played with all my heroes. One of my things is to just break down the barriers and make good music. “They may not know it at the time, but the next time they accidentally hear Sun Ra or Count Basie, they’re going to have a better understanding of what that music is. Steven Bernstein's Millennial Territory Orchestra plays Sly & The Family Stone's "Stand"īernstein’s assault on musical decorum has taken him to some strange places: Who else could have thought up Spanish Fly, his trio for slide trumpet, tuba and steel guitar? Regardless of the lineup, his signature is to reach back to jazz’s beginnings – Louis Armstrong and Ellington are his favorite musicians – while overhauling pop tunes and putting on a show: “People who pick up a Sex Mob album are going to learn about Count Basie and Sun Ra by listening to an ABBA song,” he once said. “You get ‘em together and you give ‘em some structure and you give ‘em the freedom to be incredible.” A nine-piece band that performs his arrangements of tunes by Prince, Sly Stone, Bennie Moten, Don Redman, Stevie Wonder and the Beatles, the MTO is just one of dozens of projects that he has imagined into being over a career that stretches back nearly 40 years: “I feel that one of my strongest skill sets is for organization – organizing groups and people,” he says. On the third and fourth nights, he will augment Sex Mob with five of his favorite Bay Area musicians to create the West Coast edition of his Millennial Territory Orchestra. With Sex Mob, the quartet he founded 22 years ago, he will devote the first night to tunes from Fellini films (composed by Nino Rota), and the second to compositions by Duke Ellington (Bernstein’s god).
13-16) at the SFJAZZ Center’s Joe Henderson Lab, a club-like room where the trumpeter’s freewheeling energy should carom off the walls.
“Come on kids, let’s put on a show!”īernstein is about to put on eight shows over the course of four nights (Sept. With Bernstein, one never can predict what the next project will be: “It’s like Spanky and Our Gang,” he says. Earlier this year, when U2 performed with members of Sun Ra’s Arkestra at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, who do you think got the call to arrange the charts? Correct. On any given night, he may play “Cry Baby Cry” or the theme from Goldfinger. Steven Bernstein, the slide trumpeter and bandleader, is a musician with a devil-may-care disposition. NO BOUNDARIES: THE MANY SIDES OF STEVEN BERNSTEIN
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