E-Mail This Article to a Friend Happy accidents (continued)

What’s also been striking about Berne’s past few albums is that he hasn’t used any bass, except for the bass implied by Taborn or Rainey. "I get a little frustrated sometimes with acoustic bass. You have to kind of dynamically tailor everything toward that or you don’t hear it. And I wanted to liberate Tom a little more and let him be the master orchestrator of the band, and see what happened if he and Craig kind of implied that without it being there all the time."

The small group — and the quality of the players — also allows for more freedom and more spontaneity, and Berne says he doesn’t have to write out transitions or solo passages with the detail required by larger groups. "I don’t have to connect the dots as much as I have in the past. There are a lot more surprises than when you map it out. There’s a lot more room for failure, too, but when we actually pull it off, the magic is so much more exciting. And those guys are so incredible. Every night is totally different. It’s just nice to be surprised playing in your own band." Berne laughs again. "You know what I mean? It almost doesn’t feel like my own band, it’s so much fun."

LAST SPRING AT MIT’S KILLIAN HALL, in one of his final public performances before his death from cancer in June, saxophonist Steve Lacy accompanied his old friend the poet Robert Creeley while the latter read his work. Spoken-word texts with music is tricky — if not done properly, one tends to distract from, or obscure, the other. But Lacy had worked with Creeley’s texts for years, most often setting them to be sung by his wife, the vocalist Irene Aebi. After Aebi sang a few pieces at MIT, the two masters jammed. Even the more tentative moments seemed to work, one man leaving space for the other.

Now MIT (with the help of writing teacher and Phoenix contributor William Corbett, who also organized that first event) is pairing novelist, poet, essayist, and screenwriter/director Paul Auster with clarinettist Don Byron next Friday. Byron has had good success with spoken-word setting, especially on his 1995 Music for Six Musicians (Nonesuch), where he worked with the poet Sadiq. And he and Auster have worked together before.

"We’ve appeared together three times over the years, and each time we’ve done something different, and I don’t know what we’re going to do this time," Auster tells me over the phone from his home in New York. But the author’s Collected Prose is just out in an original paperback from Picador, and one of the pieces included in it, "It Don’t Mean a Thing" is one of the pieces he has performed with Byron. In that text (he describes it as a prose poem), Auster’s then-12-year-old daughter, Sophie, sings Ellington’s "It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got that Swing)." "In October 2003, there was a big event at Cooper Union. I read, Don played separately, and then I read with him playing. I read ‘It Don’t Mean a Thing,’ and when I finished, my daughter, who’s now a few years older and a wonderful singer, got up on stage and sang the song. It was very effective. . . . We’ve rehearsed a couple of times, and other times we’ve just done it cold. But once Don knows the text we’re going to use, he has a pretty good idea about how to do it."

Thus far, Sophie isn’t scheduled to make this gig. But Byron will be backing Auster with his band of guitarist David Gilmore, bassist Lonnie Plaxico, and drummer Ben Wittman. The concert will also feature pieces played by the MIT Festival Jazz Ensemble under the direction of faculty member Fred Harris (Mingus’s "Ecclusiastics," Monk’s "Straight, No Chaser," Strayhorn’s "Chelsea Bridge"), then the band playing with Byron on two new (as in, unrecorded) original compositions and on Ellington’s "Jubilee Stomp." And MIT faculty member and clarinettist Evan Ziporyn — who’s just recorded an album of Byron’s work as a member of the Bang on a Can All Stars — will join Byron and the band.

Tim Berne’s Acoustic Hard Cell play a Boston Creative Music Alliance Concert next Sunday, March 6, at 8 p.m. at the Institute of Contemporary Art, 955 Boylston Street in Boston; call (617) 354-6898. Paul Auster, Don Byron, and the MIT Festival Jazz Ensemble with Evan Ziporyn appear next Friday, March 4, at 8 p.m. at Kresge Auditorium, 48 Massachusetts Avenue on the MIT campus in Cambridge. Admission is $5 at the door; call (617) 253-4006. Paul Auster also reads next Saturday, March 5, at 7:30 p.m. at Newtonville Books, 269 Walnut Street in Newton; call (617) 244-6619.